Stop Launching Shitty MVPs in Competitive Markets

I use Assistly for one of our CS portals and due to sporadic downtime was interested to see what Groove had to offer after reading this post. In terms of marketing, this is exactly what you want to have happen. And after all the talk of meeting the feature set of your competition, I expected to see just that - feature for feature parity or better.

Instead what I saw was an emphasis on the social media SCRM features at the expense of having a functioning Knowledge Base, which really surprised. KBes (done well) are the real win for support since they are self serve. Moreover, this is a key feature of Assistly which they can't match.

I'd say Groove hasn't yet met the bar, which is slightly ironic given the tone of the article.

Fascinating article. The difference between a minimum viable product and a minimum product is a complex one. I've been involved in many software companies that thought that they couldn't launch until things are pixel perfect and suffer from the exact opposite problem though.

Balance is clearly the key.

The key is competitive markets. In competitive markets, such as another email tools like ConsntantContact, you already know there is significant demand. The game is played on finding your niche and/or building at least a marginally better product to get your feet in.

I think the author makes some important points. So I visited Groove and tried to sign-up. This is what I got on Chrome in Mac OS X.

http://i.imgur.com/fBnYl.png

Dang. Preach!