The Exciting Part - Building a Product and The Test

Part 4 of Starting a Startup Live

Author

Brian Scordato
September 20, 2024

The Exciting Part - Building a Product and The Test (Part 4 of Starting a Startup Live)

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

Today’s episode is part 4 of our series where we start a startup live on the show, and it is, by far, my favorite of the series. We launch the Concierge MVP, get paying customers, and it goes… well? And horribly? Sort of both.

Hopefully the episode makes building a Concierge MVP more approachable and something you’re ready to do sooner rather than later.

Here’s some nerdy stuff that didn’t make it into the pod:

  1. The "Jobs To Be Done" framework heavily influences our approach - it’s so critical to figure out the “job,” so understanding JTBD is a huge deal. Clayton Christensen is obviously the godfather, and his book Competing Against Luck is the bible. A briefer, but still fantastic, synopsis is in a First Round Capital article titled Build Products That Solve Real Problems With This Lightweight JTBD Framework. I also like practicing a bit - try to think of the real “job” your favorite products do for you, then see if the company matched the marketing.

  2. Our doctor's productivity system was inspired not just by GTD, but also incorporated elements from Cal Newport's Deep Work and all of our “productivity” stuff is driven by Four Thousand Weeks.

  3. The customer journey mapping exercise was based on the "Service Blueprint" method, popular in service design circles.

  4. We considered discussing the potential application of this Concierge MVP approach to other high-stress professions like lawyers or bankers but figured it’s best in it’s own episode. Maybe a few. I found myself redesigning investment banking at like 4am and figured it was time to stop.

  5. Behind the scenes, we used Airtable to track all customer interactions and feedback, creating a rudimentary but effective CRM system. Really fun tool to play with for this sort of thing, and there are a tun of tutorials to use as inspiration.

Pod References

Timestamps:

00:30 Intro - Email [email protected] your concierge MVP ideas
02:30 - Recap of Episodes 1-3 in the series
05:15 - Part 1: What Do You Need, and What Do You Not Need?
06:25 - Remember Scooby Doo
09:10 - Byldd
10:18 Part 2: Your Product Should Be Tailored, Not New
12:45 Part 3: Customer Journey and Tell the Story
16:30 Part 4: How Many Customers and Should You Discount?
18:00 The Superpower: Optimism
20:08 Part 5: How It Went
23:25 The End: What’s Next?

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

Today, we’re going to report back on the concierge MVP our doctor friend slash podcast guinea pig ran over the past month. The goal was to teach other doctors a productivity system aimed at helping them feel less overwhelmed and, hopefully, a bit happier at work.

It was awesome and it was a disaster. We’ll get into it.

One note before we do. Last week, I ended the episode by asking you to email me with any concierge MVP ideas you had. Honestly, I just threw that request in there because I didn’t think the point break joke was funny enough to end on.

But, I got a handful of emails from people describing their concierge MVP ideas and asking me to poke holes in them, which was a blast. I also realized it’ll probably be helpful to folks who have never run a concierge MVPs to see a bunch get run.

So, I’m going to work with a few of these founders, and a few Tacklebox members, to get some more concierge MVP episodes out. Email team at gettacklebox dot com if you’re working on an idea and considering a concierge MVP - or trying to figure out what one might look like. I’ll do a few live and I’ll even pick one person who emails at random to get six months of the new self-paced tacklebox program free. A cool 745 dollar value.

Ok - enough of that. I’m sure you’re dying to hear what part of the concierge mvp was a disaster and frankly I’m excited to tell you about it.

On last week’s episode, the third in the series, we helped our doctor friend zoom in on a concierge MVP - a white glove, no tech way to test out his hypothesis with his initial customer.

If you didn’t listen to the first few episodes in this series, feel free to go back and check them out, but, as always, this episode will stand on it’s own. Maybe you don’t have time to listen to the last few episodes because, like my wife and I, you’ve been glued to the perfect couple on Netflix. I won’t judge you. But Greer probably would. She’s hiding something, right?

Anyway, a brief recap on how we got to this point.

A doctor reached out because he was frustrated - he increasingly spent more time answering emails and questions in the portal than, in his words, doctoring.

There’s a nursing shortage, depression among doctors is rising and there’s been an exodus to Concierge MD models as private equity shops have rolled up hospitals like rugs and increased patient loads. It’s a mess, or, more kindly, a changing landscape.

Our doctor initially wanted to help these doctors find jobs at startups or join those concierge MDs, but after a bunch of customer tests he realized this wasn’t a real problem. The actual problem, the one doctors were actively trying to solve, was productivity.

In the words of one of his interviews - “I learned an insane amount in med school about diseases and medicines and procedures but I learned nothing - absolutely nothing - about how to balance my day between inbound requests and patients and research. So I’m trying to learn on my own, and it’s been tough.”

We found doctors doing things like reading atomic habits and watching productivity videos on youtube.

Our doctor, coincidentally a lover of the intersection of productivity and doctoring, had a hypothesis that teaching productivity could free up 5-10 hours a week, minimum, for his doctor colleagues. And, maybe more importantly, it’d make them feel like they weren’t constantly missing things and behind the 8 ball. They’d be clear-minded and thoughtful with patients again.

So, we mapped out a concierge mvp - a test of this hypothesis before we built a product for it.

Our founder emailed a bunch of the doctors he’d interviewed, as well as other doctors in his network, and pitched a 3 day seminar over three weeks - one day a week - that’d help them learn productivity basics.

The goal of the seminar was to start building your productivity system. They’d begin with a full audit to understand every input and output of their current system. Next, they’d implement a new system and run it for a week to find the cracks. Finally, they’d recalibrate based on how the week went and build a plan moving forward.

The cost the founder grudgingly advertised was $1,000, the program started a few weeks from when the sales emails were sent, and the seminar - the product - wasn’t built.

What could go wrong?

Time to see.

And we’ll start, with an email I got from the founder at 1:24am a few days after he sent the sales email out to doctors. The title of the email was, “What do I need and what do I not need?”

I couldn’t have written a better segment title. So let’s go with it.

—

Part 1: What do you need, and what do you not need?

Our founder had sent out that initial sales email and hadn’t yet heard back from anyone, but, while he waited, he started to build out the presentations. The, quote, product. When he sat down to map it out, he said that the whole thing started to feel real and a million questions popped up.

Which led to this email. At 124 in the morning.

Quote

“Hey!

So, I’m starting to build the actual product part of this and I realized I don’t have a lot of things. I don’t have a name, a company email, I put a price in the sales email and said to respond if interested, but I don’t have a way to take money if anyone wants to pay. I don’t have a company profile on linkedin, I’m not listed as the founder on my linkedin, I’m not incorporated, I don’t have a way to pay sales tax, and, most importantly, I don’t know how to make a good product. How do I make sure these sessions deliver what I’m promising?

I feel like this isn’t buttoned up enough. Should I postpone or cancel?”

This is a common email in my line of work and, if you start working on a concierge MVP, you’ll have this moment, too.

When it happens, my biggest piece of advice is to think of Scooby Doo. Because what happens in like 80% of scooby doo episodes - where the monster or ghost is just three kids standing on each others shoulders with a costume on - is what’s happening with all these questions. When all these things you haven’t done before are stacked on each others shoulders, they look scary. But breaking them down reveals small, solvable problems that people far dumber than you have navigated thousands of times.

Don’t be fooled by the kids on each others shoulders with a sheet over their head.

I helped our founder go down the list.

Do you need a name? Sure. But, you’ll likely change the name at some point, so this first name isn’t worth stopping momentum. He asked if I’d thought of a name and, of course I had - Doctors Orders. He ran with it.

Next - Do you need a company email? Definitely not for warm connections. For cold connections it might build some trust - so you can buy a domain on namecheap for $10 in 5 minutes and then set up a google account so you could have doctor at doctorsordersproducticity dot com for a few bucks a month and it’ll also take 5 minutes. But, your personal address is probably fine for now. I ran Tacklebox for a year from my personal gmail.

How will people pay? Paypal is fine for now. Or venmo. You’ll have built enough trust through interviews or existing relationships that customers won’t bat an eye at this. You can formalize this later.

How will you pay tax and do you need to be incorporated? You can do all of this at the end of the year, if and when you’ve accepted the amount of money that meets the threshold for taxing. It’s simple to set up and relatively inexpensive through something like stripe atlas. It’s not an immediate blocker. Just track transactions and move on.

In general, the answer to basically all of the “do I need to do X to my business to make it look buttoned up and professional before my Concierge MVP” questions is no. Your first customers aren’t going to be cold - you’ll likely have an existing relationship with them or have, at the very least, have interviewed them a few times. These are handpicked people. They’ll know this is new and will expect it to operate that way. Don’t let polish slow you down - polish isn’t important now. The important thing is the value you create, which was our founders last question.

The fun one.

How the heck do I build this product?

That’s got a longer answer.

And we’ll get to it, after a words from our good friends at Byldd.

Part 2: Your Product Should Be Tailored, Not New

When you run a concierge MVP, you’ll eventually need to build something. It’s rarely a technical product—instead, you're building a flow. A structured journey that guides your customer through solving their problem, with your help.

The key is to avoid creating this flow from scratch. We’ll lean on proven systems whenever possible.

But first, we need to do think about the test itself - what are we hiring this concierge MVP to do for us?

The answer, is insight. We need to get close to our customer and watch them struggle with the problem. It’s about understanding their behavior, tools, and pain points so that we can, eventually, build a product that’s a direct reaction to these behaviors, tools and pain points.

So, for the concierge mvp, the goal is feedback and visibility into that struggle. To get the insight that’ll lead to a product.

That’s where our doctors initial idea about the 3 days of workshops spread over 3 weeks came from. He’d engage with doctors, give them tasks, then pull them back in to see how it all went.

But it sill leaves us with a bunch of… work. What the heck do we build?

That’s where the idea of a Tailored, not New product comes in. You don’t need something brand new; you need something simple and proven. You need to take an existing, effective solution and tailor it to your specific audience. You don’t rebuild the wheel, you customize it for a specific road.

Our Doctor had a ton of experience with David Allen’s getting things done methodology and had adapted it to a doctors reality for himself in the past, so that’s what he decided to do for the concierge MVP. He’ll act as a guide, tailoring a tried and true method to a new space .

This approach helps you build what I call a “2% product”—98% of it is something that already works, but you tweak that final 2% to make it 10x more effective for your audience.

This is, by far, my favorite type of product. When you take a practice or tool or method that’s table stakes, that’s part of the electricity of one industry, and apply it to an industry that - for whatever reason - hasn’t encountered it.

And, regardless of what you’re building and for who, we’ve always been able to find a product or idea or theory we can piggy back off for a concierge MVP.

Great.

Now that he’s got a guide, how does he practically build the product and what did it look like?

Part 3: Customer Journey and Tell the Story

The best way to build a product when you haven’t built a product before - especially a concierge MVP that’ll be so much about process - is to get two giant pieces of paper.

On the first piece of paper, you’re going to write a story, in long-form, during a - minimum- 30 minute block of time. This story is the story of your wildly successful concierge MVP. It takes place, for our doctor, in 3 weeks - after the MVP is complete. The story just tells what happened. Why it was so successful. How people reacted. What it sets you up to do next.

This is best case scenario, and you’re completely making it up.

Telling the story of wild success is one of my favorite practices. I can’t recommend it enough. After an awkward five or ten minutes where you don’t know what to write, a story will start to spill out of you. You’ll fill the paper with a thousand words that’ll describe exactly what you need to built. If you don’t believe me, try it.

The second piece of paper, though, is where you make it real. You build a customer journey. All the touchpoints you’ll have with your customer, and the emotion you’re trying to create with each.

This stars with a line you draw that breaks the page in two. On that line are all the moments you’ll interact with your customer.

So, for our doctor friend, this starts with the sales email. That’s a dot on the line. The next dot might be a second sales email, perhaps with a discount. Then, a final email reminder. Next, for people who buy, an email with payment details and a schedule. Then, an invite for the dates, and on and on.

Beneath each touchpoint, you want to put an emoji or a few words that describe the emotion you want your customer to have when they engage with that touchpoint. You might be trying to build trust or focused on logistics. This single emotion will keep your interaction tight.

The customer journey should be as simple as you can make it, and, I’d constantly check it against chatgpt or whatever AI you like to ask if it meets the standard for quality user experience. Ask the AI what emails they’d add or remove, where a customer might get confused, and on and on. AI is great for this sort of thing.

For the workshops, our doctor used a few guides.

First, the David Allen getting things framework, as we mentioned. Specifically, a workbook Allen sells. He’ll have everyone buy a copy for his workshop, too.

Second, he used Rob Fitzpatrick’s How to Design and Teach Workshops that Work Every Time.

This led to a first session that had three main parts:

  1. Time audit - a tracking framework - a simple google sheet, that encouraged participants to track every minute of their workday for a week - categorizing activities and noting interruptions

  2. Task Inventory - Doctors listed all their regular tasks, from patient consultations to administrative work, and rated them on importance and urgency. And finally,

  3. Pain Point Identification: Through a guided discussion, participants pinpointed their biggest productivity struggles.

This was delivered through a keynote presentation that had around 30 slides, with an overview of GTD and specific examples of how he’d implemented the GTD framework.

The homework for participants was the daily audit, so, he had emails each morning as a reminder to track. At lunch, there was another prompt to make sure they were caught up.

Once the content for workshop one was built, our founder sent me a note:

“Finished the workshop, but… still no buyers.”

Uh oh

On to part 4.

Part 4: How many customers are necessary and should you discount?

Our founder had priced his product at $1,000, and, while he was pretty sure he’d be able to help people get reimbursed by their company for it, a week before the first workshop, he had no bites.

—

So, what should he do? Should he postpone it? Quit altogether?

My first suggestion was to email the champion directly - the person who was so excited about this but hadn’t yet bought. We wanted to learn the risk - what was the thing that stuck out that kept them from buying? Was it Price? Timing? Structure?

Our founder emailed and within minutes had a response - “I’m so sorry - I forgot to buy. Just did it. See you next week.” A moment later, PayPal dinged with a $1,000 purchase.

Our friend had a business.

As David foster wallace said,

“You'll stop worrying what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do”

We, as founders, are sitting and waiting for a customer to buy the thing we sent to them, or open the email or respond to it or give us some indication that they care. They, as the customer, are worried about their kids soccer practice, or the Italian restaurant shutting down, or getting their dog to the vet. They don’t think of us, and that’s fine. You’ll need to push on people, even the excited ones.

As for the other customers, our doctor had another question:

“I can’t run this with, like, one person? Can I?”

I had an old boss who used to talk about the hidden superpower for all the best entrepreneurs he’d met - optimism.

I remember one scenario where a founder we’d invested in had released a new product and gotten 5 customers. He told us about it like it was the greatest thing in the world. But more, he talked about it like five customers had been the goal the whole time. He talked about how great it was that he had these five customers, what he could learn from them because there were so few and it’d be so intimate, how this would get him to his next step.

At the end of the meeting, I was talking to my boss about how smart it was that he’d limited the release to five customers, and my boss laughed. Well, he tried to get 100. But someone like him doesn’t get bad news. Everything to him is usable. So, he got five customers and now he’ll mold that into something that can have serious impact. That’s an entrepreneurs job. To take 1 plus 1 and make it 3. You’ve gotta be endlessly optimistic for that.

So, I talked about the optimism approach for our doctor. One customer, if that’s all we got, was plenty. I asked a version of the question my boss used to ask - why is one customer better than a bunch? What can you do with just one customer you couldn’t have done with 10 that’ll move the business forward faster?

Our founder started rattling them off - they could do a midweek checkin call, he could research the specific tech stack at that customer’s hospital, he could tailor each week’s content. It was more likely he’d be able to make one customer wildly successful than 10.

But, he said, three or four might be good, too, if I’m going through all this work. Should I send out a coupon code?

The approach I like here is to offer discounts to see if price is the blocker, but to make sure you get some other type of value. Maybe offering 50% off for the workshop in exchange for an hour-long feedback session after the process is over, and a testimonial in white paper form if all goes well.

Our doctor liked this idea and emailed the group with the offer. A few days later, he got a second participant. There’d be two customers for the concierge MVP.

Part 5: How it Went

And now… we reach our disaster.

For the first session, our doctors … internet went out. He couldn’t get on Zoom on his computer, so he ended up going on his phone. But, he couldn’t share slides from there. And he couldn’t record.

So, he hastily emailed the slides to his customers and talked through them as best he could. It went, in his words, horribly.

So, after the session, he recorded a series of 5 minute loom videos hitting on the key points. He also recorded a 5 minute loom on the daily tasks - how the doctors should track their time.

As he explained the tracking, he realized it didn’t make sense and made a brand new excel time tracking sheet on the fly. He told them to disregard the other he’d sent.

He also realized during the session that his customers weren’t anywhere near as familiar with general productivity terms as he’d assumed, so he started making a library for them - productivity terms and how they apply to doctors.

The short loom follow ups were a huge hit. Optimism, baby.

The doctors tracked every action they took for a full week. They were blown away with what they found.

For the second workshop, he focused the presentation on setting up the GTD systems with the hospital setting in mind. He had five pillars:

  • Capture: Using digital tools compatible with hospital systems for collecting all tasks and ideas.

  • Clarify: Techniques for quickly deciding next actions on patient cases and administrative tasks.

  • Organize: Creating a system that respects patient confidentiality while keeping doctors on top of their workload.

  • Reflect: Daily and weekly review processes designed to fit into a doctor's hectic schedule.

  • Engage: Strategies for maintaining focus during patient interactions while managing the constant influx of new information.

Both customers were emailing him questions consistently, so after the second session he opened up a slack channel. He continued making short, clarifying loom videos and posting them there.

The final workshop started as content he delivered, but evolved into a massive sharing session. When this worked and when it didn’t for each customer. They shared tactics they’d tried and had a blast talking through challenges and wins. The call went on for three hours as our founder took frantic notes.

The final step was formal feedback.

On a call with each, he asked questions about whether the course was worth the money, whether they felt they’d implement the system permanently, and what else they needed. He asked how they’d describe it to other doctors, and, finally, gave each a 50% discount code they could pass along to colleagues.

One customer said the workshops had been “game changing” and the other said “life altering.” Both said the content was rough around the edges and that the product had been a bit unpolished, but each said that the reflection journal alone - tracking how they spent their days - was well worth the total cost.

As for how they’d describe it to other doctors, they said, quote

“You know you need a better system for the admin stuff - this is the accountability you need. It’s actually all common sense, but this forces you to do it.”

and

“You’ll do the audit and be shocked by how much time you’re wasting. Then, you’ll build a system to not waste it any more. It’s easy to put off this stuff, but the program forces you to do it.”

The audit and accountability stood out.

Within a few days, our doctor friend got three emails from new doctors who wanted to pay $1,000 to get their productivity lesson. Doctors Orders was growing.

Part 6: The End, and What’s Next

The concierge MVP our doctor built isn’t a product. I mean, it could be - he could scale these sessions. But the important part of a concierge mvp is the next step. That step isn’t to just try to scale what you built. It’s to study the actions of your customer. To think about the pockets of extreme, disproportionate value you created. To understand the stuff that customer was excited to talk to other customers about - the moments that mattered that created growth.

To see where you can zoom in.

The job to be done of your customer will be revealed by their actions. Then, you build for it.

I love concierge MVPs because they get you going. In a lot of ways it’s day one of your startup, and the faster you get to that the faster you get to day 2.

For our doctor, he was blown away with the response to the audit. He thinks that alone can be a product - a tracker of how doctors act to make it clear and obvious to them how haphazard their time management is.

He’s working on it.

And for you - hopefully this is inspirational. This guy who’d never built a business before has now made around 5 thousand bucks teaching doctors how to manage their time. It seems like there’s a lot more there, and we only found it through this process.

Just like how the police officers on the perfect couple only found the murderer through a process. I’m not sure if that makes any sense here, but while writing this episode I finished the show and I’ll tell you what - I did not see that coming. Greer, man. What a trip.