Running a Concierge MVP Live (feat. the four-step Concierge MVP framework)

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Why This Episode Exists + Nerdy Stuff Not In The Pod 💡

We’ve had a bunch of people listen to the original episode on Concierge MVPs (20ish Minutes Skill: The Concierge MVP) and then reach out for more examples for inspiration. And that was the thinking with this episode - context and examples that’ll spur confidence and Concierge MVP ideas.

Lots of founders think Concierge MVPs aren’t an option because their customers require something unique, like polished design or a fully-featured product. But, we’ve found that’s almost never the case. Customers will respond to a Concierge MVP if you nail messaging around a specific problem they’ve got that no one else can solve.

Today’s episode walks through a concierge MVP for a financial services product - one that would be like an “inbox for financial transactions.” This MVP requires zero coding, zero professional design work, and zero marketing budget. Yet, it tests assumptions and creates a ton of momentum for the entrepreneur.

Concierge MVPs are a forcing function. They require you to zoom in on customer, problem, and wild success, then they force you to be creative to build a service.

Try one before you feel ready. Discomfort = progress.

Enjoy!

Pod References

• Tacklebox

• Idea to Startup Newsletter

• The Luge

• Tackle the Monkey First

• Miro

Pod Timestamps:

00:30 The Concierge MVP
02:05 The Grant Concierge MVP Example
04:56 Pushback
06:30 Smooth Jazz
07:00 David’s Idea
09:23 Concierge MVP Step One: The Three Components of Wild Success
10:43 Monkey and the Pedestal
14:08 Concierge MVP Step Two: Acquiring Customers
18:22 Concierge MVP Step Three: The Test
21:03 Concierge MVP Step Four: The Feedback Loop
22:52 The End - 85% of the Way There

Transcript - Feel Free to Read it Like a Long-form Article:

Today, we’re going to build a concierge MVP live on the show. There’s no better way to bridge the gap from “having a customer you think might want their problem solved” to “having a customer who’s paid you to solve a problem and now you know what you need to do next” than a concierge mvp. It’s a big jump that most entrepreneurs think is way further away than it has to be. So, we’ll do it.

And, because it’s a beautiful spring day and I’m feeling loose, we’ll try to build a concierge MVP for an idea that a listener wrote in with by specifically saying “there’s no possible way to build a concierge MVP for this idea.”

Well I guess we’ll see about that, David. David was the name of the.. person who emailed.

A concierge MVP is exactly what it sounds like. We’ve done a 20 min skills episode on the nuts and bolts of concierge MVPs that I’ll put in the show notes.

Basically, you help your customers solve a problem in the way your product eventually will, but instead of a functional product, there’s just you, the white-gloved concierge, guiding your first customers through the process and jumping in to solve problems whenever you can. It reminds me of jerry seinfelds joke describing the luge, where he says it’s done on the bob sled run, but there’s not even a sled. It’s just bob. That’s the concierge MVP.

The huge value is that it allows you to get close enough to your customer to identify the most painful part of their process. Then, you take that painful part off their plate. You own it. You figure out how to productize and scale it. And that becomes your business.

Sometimes this is hard to visualize, so we’ll kick it off with a quick example:

A few years ago a founder went through Tacklebox who’d worked for big non-profit organizations for years. One of her main roles was awarding grants to promising startups. Her organization would give 50, 100, 500 thousand dollar grants, often to startups hoping to solve massively important societal problems that required lots of r and d. Companies figuring out ways to regrow a coral reef or using algae to help combat fertilizer runoff.

The founder came to Tacklebox to build a tool to help the startups find the grants. She was always blown away by how few applications they’d get for each grant- to the point that she’d gotten a pretty big marketing budget to spread the word. This seemed wild, since most of these companies survived by winning grants, but visibility seemed to be a problem.

She ran some interviews and landed on a concierge MVP that would deliver a list of all available grants to the customer, along with the questions on the applications, a schedule of due dates, and any connections the founder had to each grant - done through a linkedin connection search.

And in case you’re wondering, yes, of course I suggested she name her company “don’t take this for granted” and no, she didn’t even consider it. But I’m a professional, so I didn’t take it too hard.

Anyway, startups seemed surprisingly luke-warm on the idea once she actually asked them to sign up, but one, a close connection to the founder, finally agreed. A week in, our founder delivered a list of 15 grants to which the customer responded - “How the heck am I supposed to apply to all of these? I’m a scientist, not a full-time marketer. And, I’m not good at telling our story, so we won’t get them anyway.”

The most painful part of the process had bubbled up to the surface and the founder had an epiphany.

Awareness wasn’t the problem. Writing was. Creating a persuasive argument.

Our founder moved away from finding grants and shifted to take the grant writing problem off her customer’s plate entirely. She hired a freelance copywriter who interviewed the scientist founder for an hour then built a core argument that could easily be adapted for most applications. Our founder then handled those applications and submitted them.

She is now building a company that owns and productizes that moment - helping scientists translate their big ideas into persuasive grant applications.

And that’s what concierge MVPs do. They get you deep insight into what the actual bottlenecks are for your customer. They’ll help you find a wedge, nail messaging, build testimonials and social proof, and, most importantly, pick the right first customer. A concierge MVP is a forcing function for you as an entrepreneur. You need to deliver value. you’re on the hook. It toughens up your skin.

I do get a lot of pushback on the concierge mvp - founders say they love the concept, but, their specific idea isn’t concierage-able, they need to build an actual, full featured, well designed product to show their customers to test it so they need to pay a dev shop $50k to get their thing built. This is their one shot, they say, and their customer won’t buy that isn’t perfect.

But that’s just the fear talking. Your strongest instinct is always to avoid discomfort, and being faced with the actual value of this idea you’re so excited bout is scary because that value might be … nothing. And wouldn’t that be uncomfortable.

But, you want to find that out immediately. And you want to thrash around and get to something that’ll work.

In 10 years of doing this with thousands of startups, I’m yet to find the idea that can’t be concierged. B2B Saas products, coffee shops, high end soap, digital SAT tutoring - we’ve done them all.

Today is meant for you to get more confident with this method. There’s nothing here you can’t do.

We’ll run a concierge mvp for David’s idea - the unconcierageable one. And along the way we’ll nail down the four-step framework that you can follow.

1. Defining Wild Success

2. Acquiring Customers

3. The Actual Test

4. The Feedback Loop

If you do end up building a concierge MVP after this episode, email team at gettacklebox dot com and tell us about it.

So, let’s get into it. After… a little smooth jazz.

David’s Idea

The idea we’ll mess around with today came from our friend David, a guy who emailed after listening to the original concierge MVP pod a few months back.

Here’s his email, used with permission, of course.

“Hey!

First time writer long-time listener.

Editors note - I must’ve made a joke about this at some point because LOTS of people email in with variations of this joke and I’ll tell you what - I’ll take it. Get’s a chuckle from me every time. It continued.

I just listened to the concierge mvp episode which I loved. But, I’ve got a problem. My idea cannot be tested with a concierge MVP (that part was in all caps and bold. Dave means business). Here it is:

I’ve recently moved in with my girlfriend and gotten engaged. We’re starting to combine everything, including finances. We’ve decided to get one credit card and dice up the charges at the end of the month, but it’s gotten really complicated. We have things like rent and car payments, streaming services, and, to make it all more complicated, we’re each freelancers so we have our own business expenses, too.

For the first four or five months, we’d get together on Sunday with a printed out credit card bill and dice it up. This took forever and when tax season came it was a mess.

Eventually, I built a little internal tracker with notion, zapier and quickbooks. Basically, now, when either of us have a new charge, it pops up in notion and has a bunch of tag options. So, I can assign it to me for work or personal, tag it for tax purposes, comment on it if I want, and mark as complete. I think of it like gmail, except every email is a transaction.

So, the first thing I want to build is that finance inbox. I want to help people get to finance inbox zero. I did a bunch of interviews with new couples and asked questions like “how much money do you all have right now” and “how much money do you owe” and “how expensive of a car can you afford?” and basically no one I spoke with had answers for any, but this terrified them.

The problem is, how can I possibly do a concierge MVP? I need people’s credit card info. And, if I’m getting that, I can’t look like some fly by night business with a squarespace account and gmail address. No one will trust me unless it’s super legit. Right?”

We’ll see, David. We’ll see.

—

Concierge MVP Step One: The Three Components of Wild Success

People tend to get really excited about Concierge MVPs because it feels like your first chance to build a product. And it is. So, founders start throwing out feature ideas.

I reached out to David shortly after getting his email and asked a question - if you were going to make a Concierge MVP, what would it look like?

He started listing features. It’d need to pull in bank accounts somehow, he said, and we’d need a weekly email with a dashboard, and so on.

This is natural, but the complete wrong way to go about starting a Concierge MVP. The centerpiece of the test needs to be what we call “wild success.” The moment you create where your customer’s problem is solved.

There’s a good chance that the problem you’re trying to solve doesn’t have an immediately clear moment for wild success - maybe you’re helping someone lose weight or speak Romanian, and there isn’t a natural “wild success” moment in the first hour or day or week.

This just means you’ve got to find a smaller feedback loop separate from the longer one.

There needs to be something - we often call it a wedge - that provides immediate value. A way to build trust and push the customer to the next point.

This part of the process always reminds me of a saying I’ve referenced before about the monkey and the pedestal. It goes like this. Let’s say someone told you that you had one month to get a monkey to stand on a pedestal in the middle of your town square and recite Shakespeare. How much time would you spend on the pedestal? The saying is meant to remind you to spend every ounce of effort on the thing that matters. And, it often reminds people that they are spending enormous amounts of time on the pedestal tasks, the things that are straightforward and easy and make us feel like we’re making progress because, hey, the pedestal needs to get made. But they’re a waste.

Once you think you’ve found a first customer, anything that isn’t figuring out what wild success would be for that customer and how you could deliver it to them is a waste.

So, every concierge MVP starts with that question - what’s wild success look like?

When I asked David, he struggled. “Well, success is tricky, because for our customers with debt, that might be getting a plan in place so they feel less stressed. For the couples splitting a card, maybe that’s dicing up a credit card easier or creating budgets. People can do a lot of things with the inbox and the tags, that’s why it’s so exciting.”

This is a textbook response for founders that have come up with a solution they really like. They focus on capabilities, what people could do with this tool you’ll build. But, that’s the pedestal. The monkey is specifics - what customer, with what problem, will you help reach wild success, and what, exactly, does that moment look like?

So, wild Success has three components:

1. Customer

2. Problem

3. Detailed description of the moment that problem is solved

These form your hypothesis for the test:

1. X customer has Y problem that they desperately want solved, and if we solve it, they’ll end up at Z moment of obvious success.

When I sent this to David, he responded with a clear customer and problem.

During his interviews, he spoke with couples that were thinking about moving out of a city and into the suburbs. They’d rented apartments their whole lives and didn’t really understand what a life in the burbs looked like financially -how much could they spend on a house? How much would a house cost? What new expenses popped up and what went away?

“I could preload these in,” he said, “almost like a financial model. I could help them get a full-scale view of their financial lives and make recommendations. I heard people over and over say that they were terrified of being, quote, house poor - where they bought a house that was too expensive and crippled the family’s finances. Lots didn’t know if they could afford one at all. I could help.”

OK - kind of cool. Here was his top level hypothesis:

“Couples moving from the city to the suburbs don’t know what they’re likely to spend in their new life so they aren’t sure what they can comfortably spend on a house - or if they can afford one at all. They’d love to get financial clarity as to where they are at this moment.”

There’s still a ton of ambiguity around customer - “couples” isn’t nearly as specific as I’d like, but it’s a start.

And the wild success moment - being confident in the amount you can spend on a home - seems… good? Maybe?

The test will be the judge.

On to step two, young David.

Step Two: Acquiring Customers - Problem Language and The Indiana Jones Swap

Your concierge MVP will look like a big funnel.

You’ll try a bunch of stuff to get cold customers in the top of it, then you’ll try to help them in the middle of the funnel, and, hopefully, some come out the bottom with a bit of wild success they hopefully share with other potential customers.

The big test of your Wild Success hypothesis is to see if it’s compelling enough to get cold customers in the top of the funnel. This has everything to do with momentum - specifically, seeing how motivated your customers are to solve this problem. You can’t create momentum to solve a problem, you can only latch on to existing momentum. As I’ve said a million times before, you can’t convince someone to go and buy an iced coffee, BUT, if they’re already out on their way to buy one, you can convince them to try yours.

The concierge mvp tests this momentum, and here are the logistice

Logistics of acquiring customers - What to say and where to say it.

This is the time for problem language. Our brains speak problem, not solution, so specific language about the problem you’re solving will convert best.

This is also the time for our wild success language, which follows problem language and is a reaction to it. This is your problem, here’s where you’ll be once it’s solved.

And finally, there’s one more type of language that’s helpful here. I call it the Indiana Jones Swap, based off that scene in raiders where he swaps the bag of sand for the idol, which might age me but that movie rules.

You describe the horrible, painful struggle the customer has now, then show what that turns into once they work with you. Here’s the most painful part of your process, and now we take it off your plate.

As for where you put this messaging, the best place is, obviously, where your potential customers have the highest likelihood of seeing it.

This starts with warm connections. Customers you’ve interviewed, friends who know potential customers and can pass this along, social channels. It moves to colder connections - cold emails, linkedin messages, or - a personal favorite of mine - physical places.

Finally, what assets do you need for this?

First, you need copy for a cold email or social ads or wherever you’re putting that problem and success language. And second, you likely need a landing page, which will have all three messages - problem, success, and swap.

I explained all this to David and, after he gave me some vague messaging about couples moving to the burbs, we got him to a specific customer. And that’s the best way to build these - to pick a perfect representation of your customer segment - a real person you’ve spoken to who’s got a name and goals and thoughts and feelings - and build for them.

David picked a couple he was friends with who were hoping to move from a studio apartment in Brooklyn to a town in the hudson valley in upstate New York. He knew they’d considered renting their apartment for another year because they weren’t sure how much they could spend on a house. They had loans and were thinking about a kid and were stressed about the commitment. After a conversation with them, he realized they were dragging their feet because they were scared to know exactly where they stood financially. They even used the example of not getting a test at the doctor because they were scared of the result.

So, his problem language became:

“You haven’t bought a house because you’re getting married and you’ve got loans and choppy freelancer income and you might have a kid soon. You have no idea how much money you can spend on a house and it’s all a bit embarrassing.”

His wild success language became:

“We help you know exactly what you have, owe, and can spend on a house in less than a week.”

His swap became

“You’ve tried everything from quickbooks to mint to you need a budget, but none of them help you get any financial clarity. We’ll take that off your plate entirely.”

He pushed this messaging to people over email, he built a landing page with it, and he designed a postcard with that on it and went to Prospect Park in Brooklyn and handed it out to couples walking on Saturday morning.

His call to action read “We work with freelancers and self-employed people with choppy, unpredictable finances - sign up here and we’ll send you a quick and dirty excel calculator that’ll get you started.”

Step Three: The Test and our old friend, the SOP

There are a bunch of ways to build the actual test - the value you deliver - but they’re pretty startup specific so I won’t go deep on them.

The big thing to know is that your Test needs three components:

1. A way to get information from your customer

2. A way to share information with your customer

3. Away to get feedback

The Call to Action should kickstart the information getting - a typeform survey or a few questions in an email or whatever you need to keep momentum going. To give a bit of value.

Once you have that value, you want to package it and deliver it in a way that helps the customer make a decision or solve a problem. It shouldn’t be overwhelming - it should be obvious.

And finally, you need to get feedback. This is usually best through a call at the end or during the process.

I spoke with David and asked what he needed to know to help this customer and he said three quarters of account activity on the main credit card would be the minimum, as well as salary over that same time.

Great. But if you’re asking for that much, you’ve got to be promising something really valuable. This goes for any concierge MVP - if you’re going to white glove this, you’ll need their help, which means you’ll need a serious promise.

David reached out and asked for this information and he promised a lot in return - details on how much they could spend on a house, what their financial life would look like with various mortgages, what their monthly bills would look like with the city expenses gone and estimated suburb expenses added, and then scenarios with kids.

They wound up needing a phone call with David to ensure this was safe, but, they did it.

And on the back end, David pulled together his airtable document and then pulled in a favor from a friend who was a financial advisor to get more insight into the whole thing. He built the financial inbox he’d talked about and started by tagging every expense himself so he could show the impact. Then, he made a loom video walking through a new expense page he made that showed how their finances could change. Finally, he gave housing ranges and even included some listings off Zillow in the town they were looking at.

That’s white glove service.

And, as he went, he built an SOP -a standard operating procedure - for how he built the airtable doc and implemented what the financial advisor said. The goal was to standardize and productize the financial intake.

It went great. And, most importantly, he learned the sticky parts of the process and learned the real value.

The lumpy freelance income was a huge barrier. Some months were 2x more profitable than others. And even pulling financial data was tough.

And, the value of knowing that if they kept monthly income stable at a certain number a house with a specific mortgage and down payment was well within their means was massive. It helped them make the decision to move.

There were a bunch of other micro problems David latched onto - things he said would make much better wedges on the next pass.

Which leads us to the last part - the feedback loop.

Step Four: Closing the Feedback Loop

Every test you ever run with customers should be 1 part product, 3 parts feedback. The whole point of all of this is clarity into your customers process.

The more you know about the process the better product you can build the bigger moat you’ll have against competitors.

At the end of the test, get on a call with the customer - this is often easy early on before you start charging, because you can say that in lieu of payment a 45 minute call is expected - and walk through every step.

Show them the landing page and ask what part is most compelling, what’s confusing, what they think you should highlight.

Ask how they describe the service to a friend and see if they already have spoken to anyone about your product.

Ask what moment jumps out and ask if they were running your business, what they’d do first.

Speak with them about wedges and test out any new ones you’ve found.

Quote them a price that feels 3x higher than you think you should charge and ask their immediate reaction.

Ask them about the risks they felt and what helped them move forward anyway.

The idea with each test is to take what you learn from the bottom of the funnel and plug it into the top. To come up with a new or tweaked hypothesis - customer, problem, success - to try a new channel, to lead with a new call to action.

A Concierge MVP needs to feel uncomfortable. That’s how you know you’re separating yourself. You should be nervous and anxious and worried about delivering what you promise. You should put yourself on the hook. You should build up your pain tolerance.

I recommend mapping each of these out on a giant whiteboard or on Miro, whiteboard software I love which I’ll link in the show notes. Then, compare them. Build SOPs. Create asset libraries. Get good at it.

This becomes your business.

The End - 85% of the way there

The problem most entrepreneurs have with concierge mvps is they get 85% of the way to something really interesting, and… they quit.

They get a landing page out and get some customers and maybe the survey doesn’t get a ton of responses and so… they quit and tell themselves it didn’t work.

Or they get one concierge mvp done and it goes… fine… and they learn a lot and have plans for a second but it feels…daunting… and, they don’t.

This sort of thing happens all the time and it breaks my heart because you get so close - so much further than nearly every other person with a startup idea. Concierge MVPs are uncomfortable, which is a feature, not a bug. It means it’ll push most people away but not us. Discomfort equals growth. It means we’re on to something.

So, try a concierge mvp. Make it easy on yourself - pick one person and build it specifically for them. Stack the deck so they’re successful. Then, get another person like them and do it again. And again. Make them cheap and easy to run. Get enough context to choose a customer that can anchor a serious business.

You can do this. Don’t take the process for…. granted.

Still think she should’ve named it that. But again, I’m not upset. I’m a professional. It’s fine.