Getting A New Product Off The Ground: Part Two | Hacker News Reader

Getting A New Product Off The Ground: Part Two

kalzumeus.com

93 pointstimf18 comments

Things are looking fairly slick thanks to jQuery UI and a lot of AJAX, but it has been a bit of a handful to test. If you have suggestions for doing so, I’d love to hear about them in the comments. Mostly I have been doing unit testing for models which are likely to have failures, and then doing manual testing to verify that the UI works how I expect it to.

I have suggestions. Use Capybara with Selenium, driven by either Cucumber or Steak (Steak is just rspec + some extra syntactic sugar; I prefer it, myself).

You won't be able to test everything, especially complex user interactions. However, you should be able to test about 80-90% of the site functionality, and, importantly, you should be able to test the purchasing functionality (the balls of your app, so to speak) since that should always be simple.

One of the decisions we've ended up leaning towards on Woobius is that we think twice about implementing UIs that can't be tested. If it can't be tested as designed, we spend some more time trying to figure out whether it can be redesigned in a way that can be tested but is still clear to the user. It's just one more design constraint, basically - can it be tested. If it really cannot be done in a testable way, at least we provide an alternative method that doesn't use fancy javascript and/or flash. For example, for the flash uploader, we also have a basic uploader. This means everything else can be tested, just not the multiple upload.

If you don't have time to read the whole post, at least read the "Speaking To Customers" section. It has great illustrations of the eye-opening ideas you get from listening.

I appreciate the simplification of a lot of lingo from lean/custdev down to something closer to "you make fewer mistakes when you talk to customers." Much less intimidating and great to see some tangible results already.

Will be interested to see how you keep utilizing the virtual assistant. I have a terrible habit of hiring them with a particular task in mind, getting all excited, and then letting them idle for months.

The single best thing I've gotten from Lean Startup is the concept of doing an MVP. I released AR's (a functional demo of the core interaction -- it rings your phone and talks to you, then echoes your input onto your browser, that is it) about six months ago, after about two weeks or so of hacking on Twilio. That is close to my best spent two weeks ever from a learning perspective, since people have spent six months telling me "Yes, THIS, I want THIS." I thought AR was a good idea, and the people I talked to certainly had a raft of appointment/scheduling problems, but even a one-screen crystallization of my vision for the solution helped me move it from "something people might theoretically be interested in" to "something I have a high degree of confidence will sell."

If I had spent the last six months getting no emails about it, no signups in the post-demo form, and whatnot, I would probably have reevaluated whether AR was really what I wanted to be doing next, prior to spending a month writing real code for it.

Talk to customers, though -- if you need to call it Lean or not call it Lean to talk to customers, whatever, just do it.

Having a similar product (well somewhat) in the market it is great to see that there is quite a bit of interest in the market. I particularly liked the use of outsourcing part of your post. It is very obvious that the dream of one-man-shop is over.

One suggestion though, I think focusing on a single type of customer (mobile services that travel to the customer) might be more effective for the obvious financial loss they face for a customer who is not home at that time.

I'm building a product now that focuses on "services that travel to the customer" (house cleaning), but for some services it might not be as big an issue as for others. For example, a house cleaning service might actually expect them to not be home regularly. Kind of depends on whether interaction with the client is required.

In our client conversations so far, missed appointments (not home) hasn't been brought up, so it will be interesting to see if that continues to hold true.

Patrick, thanks for sharing your process!

This is actually very interesting. Because you can just turn this around make sure that the person at home leaves their house at that time because someone is coming :) Out of curiosity are you also working on an appointment specific service?

Yes, appointments are part of it, but also simple timekeeping for hourly employees, managing schedules, etc. So, a cleaning might be scheduled for 3 hours, but it may take 5 hours--this needs to be accounted for. We may also integrate scheduling based on spatial analysis of available employees.

We're still early in the process (much earlier than Patrick is w/ AR), but we've also explored the idea of integrating Twilio. It's nice to see how it's being used.

Edit: it's not a general purpose appointment manager and reminders are not central to my product. More of a basecamp-like app for cleaning services, of which appointments are a part. What are you working on?

I cannot stress enough how much value customers will perceive from a few days of work with Twilio. You can have remote crews punch in and punch out on their cell phones. This reduces paperwork and saves labor costs.

This is great. Hits several things in completely different areas that I've been dealing with too. (Namely setting up Rails in production and talking to customers on the phone.)

I think the best thing about these kinds of posts is how down-to-earth they are.

I mean, I do love the posts about the successful startups that are now running with 5-man teams, scaling their production environment to handle millions of visitors, etc. But those posts are a glimpse-of-the-future to me and probably to most others here.

This post on the other hand is basically about the exact situation I find myself in right now with my product.

Thanks for posting!

I'm really curious to know how you found the people to do your phone interviews with. AdWords? FoFs?

Ranking for a small batch of organic search terms gets me prospects, though I have also done friends, acquaintances, and the old "Hey you have a sign outside that says a buck buys a minute of your time, here is twenty, let's chat."

This was partially reinforcing my preconceptions, though. Talking to too many beauticians and massage therapists because when I asked for referrals they never seem to know HVAC repairmen as well as they know other beauticians and massage therapists.

I love reading these kinds of posts, and Patrick always does a particularly great job at explaining why he makes the decisions he does. It's like usesthis.com for startups.

When I clicked through to your Wufoo form to sign up for launch notification, the visual change was quite jarring--from soothing green to washed-out grey. It felt very alien. Maybe if you carried over the same green background over it wouldn't have had the same effect.

I know what Wufoo is, and that it'll be safe to give them my email. But your less-savvy customers might wonder where the heck they've bounced to.

Patrick, Thanks for sharing so much about your new service and what it takes to get off the ground. I'm curious if you plan to use a true merchant account for handling credit card payments since AppointmentReminder orders are probably going to be larger in value than Bingo cards.

Also, do you plan to form some kind of business/formal entity? I see reference to Kalzumeus but is this just a placeholder? I'd love to hear thoughts on those aspects when launching a new service.

I'm going to be using Paypal and Spreedly. I have received e.g. consulting paychecks through Paypal before, without incident. They were rather bigger than any of the subscription plans I am currently contemplating.

Kalzumeus is formally organized as a yago -- basically, it is the Japanese version of a DBA. People paying me money for things are really paying me money for things at the moment. I will probably formally incorporate some time next year.

Glad to see Patrick's aiming for a November launch. Patrick, have you considered adding Appointment Reminder to the startups at http://www.startupmonth.org/ or joining the facebook group?

Remember, code will always be 70% complete.

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