The Minimum Viable Product from our lean, bootstrapped startup - comments? | Hacker News Reader

The Minimum Viable Product from our lean, bootstrapped startup - comments?

powergrabber.com

22 pointsandrewstuart31 comments

I felt bad for my observation of your title, so felt I should leave some feedback as well, I apologize.

Your primary message: "PowerGrabber is an invitation manager. It captures the addresses from your inbound and outbound emails, so you can invite the people you email to join your LinkedIn™ network."

I don't know what an invitation manager is, captures sounds non-friendly. How about: PowerGrabber ensures the people you email are connected to you via LinkedIn. No more lost connections.

I'd also drop all the trademark symbols, whilst probably more legal it looks very corporate and almost scammy as it breaks the line flow.

I'd put the benefits above the "What is PowerGrabber" (you duplicate your appropriate primary marketing message, only with more detail)

In reality your benefits are that the people you email are your linkedin contacts. I'd spell this out by a short scenario about losing a contact that would be really valuable in the future. The benefits you list are complex and scary and marketing speak. "Systematically".

From the application point of view - the most useful data is who do I email the most that I'm not connected to? do you offer that? A video would help. The "how it works" image isn't clear as to how it works. Your best bet is to make a few screens in PowerPoint and record them as a video.

Your privacy policy is a pdf, i'd put that as html.

I'd also consider changing the logo as when I see that logo I think of the soviet union which is uhm, probably not appropriate :)

It's a neat idea and I'd use it if it worked with GMail and Mac. It solves a problem and is of clear value to the user, I'd make sure your marketing messages were similarly clear.

Just my $0.02

Just to back this point up with my upvote, I don't like the 'invitation manager' terminology. I basically read that first paragraph, didn't get why it was useful to me, then closed the page, no offense!

The first sentence already describes what PowerGRabber is. Below that, SHOW me why it's useful, whether it be a flowchart, a screenshot, or whatever :)

also I just scrolled down to your diagram at the bottom and still didn't get it :X

Great feedback thanks.

I had the same reaction. For a moment, I thought 'Invitation Manager' was some kind of automated RSVP system.

Feel the same way about the trademark symbols for linkedin - really breaks up the flow for me. While getting rid of (or reducing) the trademark symbols would help, I would also suggest trying to mention Linkedin less. For example, under benefits, your mention of Linkedin in the first line is sufficient - it doesn't need to be repeated in the bullet points.

Will take this into account and adjust thanks. Using the LinkedIn API however requires us to include their TM symbol.

I'm sure you can just put LinkedIn is a trade mark of LinkedIn Corp or something at the footer. IANAL. I am a designer and can tell you the TM looks ugly :)

That's a big help thankyou.

Benefits sell software, not features. Don't tell us what it does, tell us the concrete improvement in our lives we'll experience from using it. (Hint: the things you have listed under benefits are not actually benefits. Nothing that starts with "Systematically" is a benefit. To normal people, systematically says "sounds a whole lot like work.")

Your button does not look like a button to me (CrazyEgg will tell you if I'm nuts or not) and is off to the side. If your customers are like my customers, I'd suggest supplementing that with a button in the main content.

Too much writing and pictures in landing page.

Also what is your future value proposition? Is it only the ability to link emails to linked in?

Agree with too much writing. For example, "PowerGrabber is an invitation manager. It captures the addresses from your inbound and outbound emails, so you can invite the people you email to join your LinkedIn network." is too long for a headline.

Shorter version could be: "Easily invite more people you know to Linkedin", or something like that (you surely know the value proposition better than me ;)

And then but the most important things in bullets: the price, the fact that it's a Windows download, etc. Edit down that text, shorter is better :)

I agree as well on the too much writing. People don't like to read that much. I think you should reduce your copy on this page to a few (in my experience people tend to like groups of 3) of the highest priority issues and then link off to another page for each section should the prospect want more information.

Thanks for the feedback. Yes PowerGrabber is intended only to do one thing - allow you to expand your LinkedIn network. I'm thinking that focus and a minimal feature set might be a good thing.

MVP, Lean, Boostrapped. You certainly win at buzzwords.

This is rather more snarky than usual for the top comment on a Rate My Startup post. I would rather not see that become a trend, since they're some of the most enjoyable (and useful) posts this community has, and -- of all people -- we should understand that getting something out and ready to show takes both courage and hard work.

I agree. I think I probably should leave some feedback (aww, can't edit..) as well, but at the same time felt the amount of buzzwords thrown around by startups these days is getting alarming.

And these are buzzwords. Lean, Boostrapped, MVP - tell me nothing of the product.

Snarky? Probably. Valuable? Definitely. pclark's feedback is excellent. And it probably should be first because OP's buzzwordia is a roadblock to everything else. I had trouble proceeding because my buzzword filter was up in full force, quite possbly giving false negatives.

OP needs to speak English, now.

You're right. It does take a lot of courage and hard work to have something to show. But it also takes thick skin. Better to get ripped here than by your prospects. If something's not right, they won't tell you. They'll just go away.

I agree with you that Lean & Bootstrapped are just buzzwords that say nothing about the product.

But I think MVP does. He's saying the product is simple. It's useful when giving feedback to know the author considers this a minimal product.

Lean is a topic that seems of interest to the community. I thought tangible outcomes might also be of interest. I do take the point though. Thanks for the feedback :-)

You will have tough competition from i.e. Xobni. They are free to use, well integrated with Outlook and let you display LinkedIn info about every email address that you are dealing with. http://www.xobni.com/social-outlook

Great! Someone else has done something similar! That means there's a market.

You have a good point. But the next thing you need to think of is: - is Xobni really serving the market in an optimal way? - Is there something we can do better?

To be honest I don't see answers for those two questions on their landing page. My first feeling was that it was like more complicated version of the "connect" button in Xobni.

Well, that's why you should release early and pivot - to learn and explore.

I just don't want them to get frozen by the First Mover Paranoia: http://blog.opportunitycloud.com/2009/12/21/stealth-disease-...

A good point although I don't use outlook so we built it for those not using outlook.

How about a platform independent version (i.e. web)? There are a lot of people that either don't use Windows, or don't use an email client ON Windows.

Sounds like you have a startup idea there. Good luck!

We wondered if people might feel nervous about email addresses being captured on their machine and then sent to a database somewhere on the Internet. But perhaps not?

I think the MVP here would be a comma separated list of email addresses harvested by sniffing in/out going emails.

That product appears to be probably more useful too. The linkedin stuff moves to a particular use whilst simple CSV email list doesn't - linkedin allows you to invite by pasting a CSV list of email addresses, but here's the clincher, so do many other sites.

Fair enough, have a button to open up the browser and paste in the list (rather than use the linkedin API this seems most adaptable to other sites, indeed the config could probably be a page address and div ID pair per site and users would most likely adapt and upstream their configs).

Yes I expect this is badly flawed.

Does "Viable" mean you have sales data to share? ;)

MVPs do not necessarily need to demonstrate economic viability. Some of the best ones I've seen can't be sold at all -- for example, Dropbox's MVP was a video of someone using the prototype of the product. The thing they're Viable at is that they're just good enough to start giving you actionable information about those big freaking questions about the market you have.

"Will people pay money for this? In numbers sufficient to pay for my rent? In numbers sufficient to compensate me for my risk?" are all big freaking questions, but for some startups they are logically after questions such as "Does anybody actually want a website which tracks when their baby has an excretory event?" (+)

+ : Yep.

Seriously, Xobni is awesome and already popular. Plus, they sent me two T-shirts. So I love them.

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