Page 59 - The 7 Day Startup: You Don’t Learn Until You Launch - PDFDrive.com

The WP Curve MVP

I didn’t make the same mistake twice with WP Curve because I had no choice
but to make it happen in a week. If I had longer, I may have started looking at
support systems or built one that suited our style of small jobs.

I might have started building out models for how developers would complete
tasks or a WordPress plugin for requesting fixes. I probably would have hired
developers around the world to make sure I could staff the business 24/7.

I didn’t need to do any of that because there are manual replacements for all of
it. This allowed me to give the exact service to the customer that I planned to
give once we were established.

Here’s how it looked:

1. I had a subscription to some live chat software left over from Informly, so I
put that up on the site as the way to request jobs. It was available to
everyone, not just customers, but I wasn’t worried about that. If it wasted a
bit of time, that was okay.

2. I only had one developer, which meant someone else had to be online the
other 16 hours in the day. That was me. I found a free mobile app that
integrated with the Olark software and I had my phone on live every night.
Anyone who jumped on chat in those early days was waking me up, but
they didn’t know it! Again, short-term pain was not a problem.

3. There was no time for a support desk so we used the live chat and a support
email address. Customers didn’t care; they prefer email.

This looks ugly as hell from a business owner’s end. The customer, however,
saw a developer on call 24/7, and they were validating the value of it by paying
me.

An MVP in a service business isn’t too hard, but with software or physical
products it becomes a bit trickier. The same principles apply, though. You need