Founders Guide: MVPs and Pivots
How to build your MVP, test it, and pivot when it fails
Q: “I’ve been working on a startup for over a year and haven’t seen any progress. What’s going wrong?”
I frequently imagine that an entrepreneur’s startup journey looks like a ladder. Every time you reach a major milestone, learn a new skill, or survive a crisis, you rise up another rung of the ladder. Persistent founders will continuously climb to reach bigger and better milestones, while others will inevitably stagnate.
Climbing this ladder can be difficult because eventually, you’ll run into a problem you don’t know how to solve. Startup founders are constantly tackling new and exciting challenges, and when the solutions to these problems aren’t obvious, it feels as if you can’t climb any higher. Whether it’s after a week, 3 months, or a year, everyone inevitably hits a ceiling.
For many first-time founders like those I mentor at the Syracuse University Blackstone LaunchPad, these roadblocks can appear quite quickly. The initial excitement of your idea has worn off, you’re not sure what to do next, and you immediately start to suffer from a great deal of stress and confusion.
These initial rungs of the ladder can often feel insurmountable, so I wanted to write a blog post that guides first-time founders in the right direction and teaches how to overcome these challenges.
Table of contents
🗣 Start by asking questions
❓ WTF is an MVP
🔄 Pivots
Want to chat with me about something you read in this blog post? Connect with me on LinkedIn! Always happy to chat.
1. 🗣 Start by asking questions
The first thing you should do when considering a new business idea is to ask questions to potential customers. By speaking with your target market, you’ll get a good idea of where to start your journey.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say that after struggling to grow your own clothing brand, you decide to start an online marketplace for student-owned brands. You’re likely quite passionate about this idea, feel that it solves a serious problem, and start brainstorming what to do first.
Naturally, your first thought will be “I need to build my platform and see if people will want to use it” This is a common mistake. At this point, since you haven’t spoken to anyone about your idea yet, you’d be building what YOU want. Before you start building anything, you should see if anyone else wants it too.
Start by asking this question: why are my customers suffering from their problems?
You can likely come up with several different hypotheses for why this is. Even though you’re likely going to be wrong at first, it’s important to write down your assumptions so you can look back later and see if you were right.
To continue our example, maybe the problem we’re solving is that popular online clothing marketplaces are oversaturated and make it difficult for young bands to get exposure.
Now go out and talk to some potential customers and see if what you’re saying resonates. If your assumptions are correct, they should respond strongly to your ideas.
Important note: When doing customer research, most people will lie to you. They will overestimate the value of your product, exxagerate about how much they love it, and try to make you feel good. Take everything they say with a grain of salt. The only thing that matters is whether or not they actually use it, and the only way to know if they will is to give it to them.
Key takeaways:
Talk to customers before you build anything.
Take early market research with a grain of salt.
Write down your hypotheses so you can test them later.
Talked to customers and have an idea about what you need to build? Time to build your MVP and put it to the test.
2.❓ WTF is an MVP
An MVP, or a “minimum viable product,” is a way to test if your product is actually solving a problem in the market. Just as the name suggests, an MVP is the smallest possible version of your product that can still achieve results. Your MVP should do nothing but solve a problem. No more, no less.
A good rule of thumb: if your product will still “work” after removing a feature, remove it from your MVP. Only build what you believe is “mission critical.” This means removing flashy UI, cutting most of the features you love, and feeling uncomfortable with releasing what you’ve built.
If you’re a technical founder, this should be easy to envision. Simply take your ideal finished product, remove 90% of the features, and build whatever’s left.
If you don’t know how to code, the idea of building an MVP can feel daunting. But if you get creative and think outside of the box, you’ll likely find ways to test your hypotheses without ever writing a line of code.
Building your MVP
Here’s a list of some awesome no-code/low-code tools that you can use to get started.
Bubble (for general web app platforms)
Webflow (for creating beautiful websites)
Shopify (for creating great e-commerce stores)
Airtable / Zapier (versatile tools for creating automated workflows)
Framer (another low-code website builder)
Or, just Google “no-code tools for X” and you can find plenty of alternatives that work best for you.
Another option is to not even build a “real platform” at all. Using free tools like surveys, forms, and simple webpages, you can manually simulate working marketplaces/platforms just to test the market. Build something that “kind of works” and give it to potential customers quickly. This will give you plenty of information to go off. Work smarter, not harder.
The core idea behind the MVP: If people love your product when it’s only 10% done, you’re definitely onto something big. If your product can’t solve your problem without being 100% perfect, then the problem might not be as large as you thought.
Got your MVP ready? Get it into the hands of some customers. If you’ve already spoken with potential customers, ask them to participate in “beta testing.” At the end of the day, you just need people using what you’ve built so you can gauge their reactions.
At Patchwork, we intentionally went from idea to MVP in less than 2 weeks (albeit we did have a skilled technical co-founder that made this possible). Our product barely worked, and we manually installed it on our friend’s computers using a zip file. Regardless of these roadblocks, we still got amazing feedback from those we showed it to. These early signs of product-market-fit are what you’re looking for.
Have some early users? Now it’s time to iterate.
“Move fast and break things”
This famous mantra popularized by Facebook is a great framework for gathering early information from the market. Build new features quickly, ship them before you feel they're ready, and closely measure what happens.
Think about it like this: imagine a new feature that could make a huge impact on your product. Now build a feature that only does 10% of that. Oftentimes you can find a way to bootstrap this 10% feature without coding anything at all.
At Patchwork, we often refer to these features as “10 percent experiments.”
If you release an unwanted feature, the market (i.e your customers/users/etc) will tell you. They either won’t use it, or worse, they’ll actively tell you how much they hate it. If this happens, it’s not the end of the world to just remove a failed feature and continue to iterate.
But, if the 10% experiment you release is on the right track (i.e getting closer to product-market-fit), then you’ll see unmissable results in your metrics pretty quickly. You can then take this knowledge and slowly build out the feature until it’s 100% done.
Don’t be a perfectionist, and don’t be prideful.
Nobody wants to release an ugly version of something they made, nobody wants their work to be criticized, and nobody wants to fail. Out of fear, founders will build and build and build, endlessly, without ever showing anyone what they’re working on until it’s too late. The result? Months of wasted time, a product nobody wants, and a whole lot of burnout.
Don’t fall into this trap.
It will be uncomfortable at first, but releasing features as fast as possible helps keep your momentum going. Keep building 10% experiments and hopefully, one of them will be a hit. Your growth will start to accelerate, and you’ll see the direction you need to continue moving.
But what if this doesn’t happen? What if you’ve been building for a long time but nothing is working?
Knowing when to pursue a venture idea is almost as important as knowing when not to. Sometimes, what you thought was a great idea just doesn't connect with the market like you thought it would, and you’ll have to pivot to serve a new purpose.
Key takeaways:
Build an MVP that does nothing but solve a problem. Nothing more.
Iterate by building small “10% experiments.”
Don’t be a perfectionist. Build faster than you’re comfortable with.
3.🔄 Pivots
Every entrepreneur will likely pivot once or twice in their startup journey. It’s only natural that after testing your assumptions and gaining new information from the market, you may decide your idea needs to change.
Many founders (especially first-time founders) become so attached to their ideas that they are unable to see obvious flaws. They’ll ignore negative feedback, refuse to acknoledge signs of failure, and continue to build without listening to the market. I mean who can blame them? Realizing your whole business needs to change can be a daunting and sometimes depressing thought.
“When you pivot you only lose distance, not speed”
-Paul Hultgren, Co-founder and CTO at Patchwork
Despite how it may feel at the time, pivoting is where some of the most explosive progress can be made. Simple market testing can uncover key pieces of information that drive product iterations you never expected. Learning how to gather this information quickly and use it to iterate on your product is a skill, and it can be trained with practice.
There’s no science or frameworks to ensure your pivot will be successful, but there’s one thing for sure: listen to the market. After distributing your MVP to enough people, you’ll start to notice trends. Some unexpected groups may be using it far more than others, or maybe an unexpected use-case arises that accounts for most of your usage.
These cohorts are commonly referred to as your “power users.”
Whatever the case may be, these are the users you want to build for. Get on the phone with your power users and discuss why they’re using it the way they are. If you get enough consistent feedback, you’ll start to get an idea of where to take your idea next. Now it’s time to pivot, build a new MVP (or just build it out further), and test again.
Ideally, each iteration you make will move you closer to product-market-fit. Keep building, keep talking to power users, and always be challenging your assumptions.
Key takeaways:
Pivots are scary, but they can spur explosive growth if embraced.
Listen to your power users.
“When you pivot you only lose distance, not speed”
Thank you for reading this blog post, I hope you found it helpful!
If you’d like to chat further about anything I wrote, connect with me on LinkedIn!
-Jackson Ensley