Idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: how we did it

February 16, 2011 32 comments Tweet Buffer

This is the first of an ongoing series of posts called Building Buffer where we share our methods and learnings with the aim to help people and learn from others who have had similar experiences. We’d love your comments.

Rewind…

I’ve learned more in the two and a half month period since I launched Buffer than ever before. I am very excited to let you know we now have over 500 users, many of whom are active, and we are generating revenue through our paid monthly plans at a conversion rate of around 4% of people upgrading. Let’s go back to the very beginning.

A twinkle of an idea

It was a tiny idea. I wanted to take the scheduling feature of many Twitter clients and apps and make that single feature awesome. I believed that single feature was worthy of its own application. The aim was to create something genuinely useful with a delightful experience. The fundamental idea was to create a way to queue up tweets without scheduling each tweet individually. This is an idea I had after using other Twitter scheduling applications for the purpose of ensuring I didn’t flood people with 5 tweets at once whilst reading my tech & startup news in the morning. I couldn’t get it out of my head, and I’d suggested it to existing apps and they hadn’t implemented it. It was time to build it myself

Keeping version 1 minimal. No, more minimal than that.

I’m an advocate of the lean startup principles which Eric Ries proposes. With my first startup, I learned a huge amount about the principles and I tried to implement them as much as I could. I found that practice is much harder than theory. I even started coding Buffer before I’d tested the viability of the business. As soon as I realised that, I stopped, took a deep breath and told myself: do it the right way this time. It was time to test whether people wanted this product.

In Ries’ guide to Minimum Viable Products, one of the key things he answers is “how minimal should your Minimum Viable Product be?”. Here’s his answer:

Probably much more minimum than you think

I had read that line so many times. I’d even told others. It was time to do it myself.

The smallest test

Here’s what we launched with:

The aim of this two-page MVP was to check whether people would even consider using the app. I simply tweeted the link and asked people what they thought of the idea. After a few people used it to give me their email and I got some useful feedback via email and Twitter, I considered it “validated”. In the words of Eric Ries, I had my first “validated learning” about customers. It was time to gain a little more validated learning.

Learning more

So we had validated that people probably wanted the product. The next thing to validate was whether people were comfortable with paying for such a product. This was as simple as adding a page in between the two which showed pricing. One extra click before they gave me their email for a notification when we launch. The extra step tests the pricing (by detecting which plan they click on) and also tests further the demand for the product (one extra click, so they must be keen). Here’s what we did:

The result of this experiment was that people were still clicking through and giving me their email and a small number of people were clicking on paid plans. After this result, I didn’t hesitate to start building the first minimal version of the real, functioning product.

The launch

I was lucky enough that coincidentally there was a little buzz on Hacker News about a “November Startup Sprint” where lots of people agreed to try and get something launched by the end of November. After initially grossly underestimating how long it would take to build the first working version of Buffer (I told people 1 week!), I decided to give myself a cut off point of the end of November, to tie in with the Startup Sprint. This resulted in building the first version in evenings and weekends over a period of 7 weeks. There were a number of features which I felt were quite vital, such as a guided step by step signup process, which I had to leave out because the end of November came round rather fast. I had committed to launch and I stuck with that commitment. Buffer went live on the 30th November and I got some great feedback from the Hacker News community.

Being prepared for a long journey with lots of course-correction

When I started building Buffer, I had already experienced building a previous product where things did not go quite according to plan. Luckily, this prepared me to be patient with uptake of the service, and to be willing to change things quite a lot until I reached something that would be truly valuable for people. It also taught be the value of customer development: to take advantage of those emails coming in by asking people questions. With my previous product, I did not reach out to enough people and say “is this a problem for you?” in order to validate whether the product was something people may want. After launching a version of Buffer I was quite embarrassed about, I was fully expecting for it to have a fairly poor uptake and to have to work a lot to adjust the product in order to gain active users and paying customers. Whether or not the goal is reached sooner or later than expected, there are always times in the ups and downs of the journey where this patience is required, so I value it as an overall mindset for Buffer.

Taking advantage when things go well

Despite being prepared for a long journey, and some things later on requiring that patient mindset, I was lucky with Buffer. It was evident that I had hit a chord with users and I am solving a problem which many people have. I also received a strong signal that the solution provided enough value to build a viable business – I had my first paying customer within 4 days of launching the “rough around the edges” product.

After the first paying customer, I took a step back, acknowledged that as a major milestone and decided a slight shift in focus was required. As a developer, it is easy to pile in more features at that point. I knew it was time to focus on marketing and further customer development. It was time to keep the balance of development, marketing and customer development with a product which had proved it was “good enough”. This has been a valuable lesson I want to take forward: when the signal is there that the product is good enough, shout about it!

What next?

There are always more challenges. Since launching I have got someone else on board to help manage the community and marketing, and I have developed a number of interfaces to the existing data in order to make sense of patterns and validate decisions. We’ve gained a huge amount of press coverage, we’ve worked closely with users on a personal level, we’ve rolled out more features, we’ve changed pricing plans and we’ve implemented an admin activity feed and done cohort analysis. I’m excited to share some of the lessons we’ve learned by doing this in another post on Building Buffer.

Have you had an experience of getting an idea off the ground, or have you had an idea and thought it would take longer to validate it? Are there things you would have done differently? I’d love to hear from you.

@joelgascoigne Tags: Leanstartup, Lessons Learnt, Startups, State of Buffer

http://www.quora.com/Lean-Startups/Whats-a-good-use-case-scenario-of-a-company-or-product-that-utilized-the-lean-startup-model#ans490268 Quora

What’s a good use case scenario of a company or product that utilized the lean startup model?…

I am certainly biased here, since I am putting forward my own startup. I started my first real venture after graduating and discovered Eric Ries and the ideas around Lean Startups during the period I was working on the startup. I spent 1.5 years on the…
Good_hands

Great read!
http://www.liink.it Ben Carlson

I love it! Thanks for this, it has me re-inspired to keep working on my site!
http://joel.is Joel Gascoigne

That’s great to hear Ben! Let me know if you want to bounce any questions off me when you’re trying to build your minimum viable product and get things off the ground, I know it can be a very challenging part of the process!
http://www.liink.it Ben Carlson

Thanks Joel, my site is already up, in a pretty minimal format: http://liink.it

I’ve been working on getting the delicious import working, but am thinking that based on delicious being purchased I’ll likely pivot the direction of the site somewhat. I have a number of users, a handful that are very active, but I’ve experienced zero growth for over a month, and I had lost inspiration until now!
http://joel.is Joel Gascoigne

Looks interesting Ben! Couple of questions for you:

Why do people use liink.it instead of something like Delicious or Zootool?

Also, do people want their email address in the URL?
http://www.liink.it Ben Carlson

The first question is exactly why I’m considering pivoting… the whole reason I built liink.it in the first place was because of the news (which we now know is invalid) that delicious was closing its doors. I was an avid delicious user since 2005/2006, and have thousands of links on there that I was angry about potentially losing.

The second question is a common one, people aren’t interested in their email being available to anyone (despite that it isn’t… it still doesn’t look good). Okay, so that being said, my thought was to monetize on that, free account->email in the URL; paid account->userid/acct number, etc. in the URL.

So, the question I am trying to find an answer for is: what can I change liink.it in to?
http://twitter.com/Clark_Jill Jill Clark

Gotta love Twitter for traffic generation!

Great post, very inspiring and so happy to hear how much success you guys have had!! *high-five*
http://twitter.com/iapprovethismsg Ben Donahower

404 error with icon set link :(
http://joel.is Joel Gascoigne

Oh, try now Ben :)
http://twitter.com/jordan_price Jordan

I’m going to tweak this method a bit and apply it to an ebook idea I want to launch. Thank you for this super useful post!
http://twitter.com/azodi Adrian Azodi

Helping others develop MVP and execute that test method alone would be a viable business in my opinion, particularly now, with all the action in the startup world these days.

Just signed up for the Pro version, excited to see where you both take this!
Michele

thanks for this share here – myself it was the other way around – am primary a ‘visual’ person/designer and learned code along the way – today [after many years] it’s 50/50 for me.
But it also has pitfalls: when you ‘have’ to delegate finally, the aspect of ‘knowing exactly not only what you want but also need – makes it often hard to work with your counter part, may it be a designer/programmer friend or employee. What a developer actually would need – too bad we are using such a small percentage of our brain as of yet – is an instant snapshot of the visual in your head – lol.
http://twitter.com/Ajibz Ajibz

Reading this post has made me rethink the marketing / launch strategy for my idea. I have been toiling with potential models for some time, but i think i have finally gotten it. A great many thanks for this post. Will let you know of the outcome.
http://twitter.com/buzzdan Dan

Thanks for the post. Great quote in there from Eric. We always want to build more but we should always just release and test assumptions. Difficult urge to fight sometimes.

We had a similar breakthrough realisation lately that if we don’t have traffic (and people clicking plans & pricing like your example) nothing else even matters. So that’s now our focus.

Great work and being seeing buffer everywhere lately.
Matt

Hey Joel. This is an awesome post. Have you had any experience with in-person customer development, i.e. “getting out of the buildng?” What we are trying to develop is a webapp and mobile tool for a well established industry that may not necessarily be searching for our product on the web. It complicates things even more that I work in the industry that we are trying to innovate and I do not want to compromise my current “day job” by interviewing colleagues and clients about my start up project. This is the first start up I have been involved with and I want to make sure I validate properly. I have the industry contacts, credibility and experience to schedule interviews and understand the feedback, but the best approach now seems to be setting up the meetings disguised as validating an idea for a “friend,” who is actually working on the project with me. I want to be scrappy and get things done, but at the same time want to be smart about not misleading potential clients. Any thoughts? Thanks alot for all your awesome start up knowledge.
http://byderekj.com Derek Jensen

Truly think more startups and people either releasing products or launching a project needs to gather more data from the user instead of just their email. By testing to see if people would be interested in paying for something right away is good to adjust the marketing approach if need be.

On a live stream of Daniel Burka he talked about how when creating the Oink app launch page they chose to go with “Connect with Twitter” rather than email address because they were able to retrieve more data.

He also talked about how you can get more data out of people if you first give them a glimpse of the experience. If it is good they will please you with more data. If they don’t then you’ve got some more work to do.

What are your thoughts on having people feel a part of something like a Kickstarter project?
Anonymous

Yes, that’s a pretty darn clever way to do it: though I guess it also might anger a small percentage of people that expect the product to be ready. I agree with the whole notion of creating a minimally viable product and being able to launch something that gets paying customers from nothing in just 7 weeks is impressive. I don’t care how experienced you are, actually launching a product and shipping it is a ton of work. Even minimalist products take a ton of work. Building up a product, writing all of the copy, and then promoting it is a ton of work. Yes there are numerous ways (see http://www.buyfacebookfansreviews.com for example) to promote your site but the thing is that you’re always so busy coding that its hard to focus on the other stuff.

PS: Joel I had the idea for something similar to BufferApp a long time ago and wish you all the best and am excited to see how it works out for you and what features you add.
Anonymous

I have to admit this is the first time someone saying “good enough” has
made sense. Previously, it sounded slacker-esque and more about cutting
corners than cutting back and staying focused. Now I’m curious. Are you using it incorrectly, or was everyone else not interpreting it correctly? :)
Ben

Very interesting post, also made me read the rest of your blog which I totally liked.

Lets say I have 2-3 ideas I would like to test this way, how can I do it with minimal investment? (one dilemma for example is whether to buy different domains names and hosting for each of those ideas? or is there a simpler more efficient solution…)
Chastity_girl22

i’m late coming in and i didn’t read ALL the posts but i was wondering, do you think this method would work for any type of startup, like selling ebooks for instance?
http://twitter.com/bownty bownty!

I recently wrote how the boys at a Danish daily deal aggregator (bownty.com) kick-started their startup (see here: http://blog.bownty.com/2011/08/15/how-to-start-a-business-the-bownty-story/ , and from an outsiders point of view (I joined later to do social media), who merely recorded the process in black and white, I find it very interesting how many similarities there are between success stories. Something along the lines of.. keep your headknob straight on your shoulders, think/test before you “do” and the rest will follow.

Also – I bloody LOVE your product!
Anonymous

This is great. Exactly the right way to build a business today. In fact, I was going to write up a very similar post of my business back early last year before we launched our product, took us 6 weeks from idea to product. Unfortunately, my business partners got cold feet at the last minute and refused to ship our MVP. Ah well, live and learn. Glad you guys are doing well. I am one of those paying customers ;)
Anonymous

This is great advice. Wish I had come across this post sooner.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=664106996 Whei Wong

did you actually spend on marketing when you were at the beginning stage to validate if it was a viable business? as in, how did the people find your site?
http://twitter.com/SSayzzz Simon Sayz

Absolutely love the “The smallest test” method to validate your idea. I have been reading The Lean Startup and this article have shown a very good way to clearly and rapidly see if an idea have any futur. Most of the time entrepreneurs waste valuable time trying to figure out which ideas they should work on and your method is a great way to ease the choice.

I have been working on one of my idea and when I read your blog post, I realized that I had it all wrong. Before investing too much time in it, I should make sure there is demand for it just like you did. Thanks for sharing your experience Joel and helping others just like you helped me!
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Billy Han

Joel,

Thanks for this gem of a post. This mirrors, well, actually, it clarifies and reinforces much of what I saw at your presentation. So again, thank you for the inspiration!
http://twitter.com/keithrozario Keith Rozario

this is inspiring man…Thanks. I love buffer and continue to use it for promoting stuff on twitter, but I really loved the story behind it . Amazing!
http://twitter.com/ediblelandesign Edible Landscaping

Incredible article … so many great launch ideas! … and I ADORE Buffer, I tell all my webmaster buddies about it. You are saving my binge-tweeting life (not to mention that it makes weekends a breeze!). I’m seeing all sorts of benefits from tweetin’ round the clock. Keep up the good work!
http://twitter.com/igorsyl Igor Sylvester

Joel, would you mind sharing the html for this landing page? Or, explain what tools you used to build it?
Jay

Brilliant!
Thanks for sharing, and inspiring:)

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Meet the Buffer guys

Joel Founder, developer, designer

Leo Co-founder, blogger, community