Both the previous fake door test and the LinkedIn poll told us a lot about the market. Where to go from here? Easy—it was time to start working with real clients and collect more tangible feedback.
This is however impossible to achieve if you don’t have the actual product. And we were not yet quite prepared to invest too many resources in its development. This is where a low-cost MVP (Minimum Viable Product) came into play. We focused solely on the Czech market, and the goal was to onboard 5-10 snack bars in the first four months and collect user feedback.
An MVP is the bare minimum for a solution to work and add value to people’s lives. A common objective is to test the viability of an idea and gain valuable information from the users. It is not a tool for profit (though in rare cases, it can be), but it allows you to quickly and inexpensively enter the market and immediately see if you’re on the right track.
The biggest hurdle here for us to jump over was agreeing on a minimum increment we could put together rapidly, ideally during a weekend hackathon. It was clear to us that we had to choose just one business use case to cover. But it also had to be accompanied by some enabling processes (like creating a new snack bar, user onboarding, etc.). In other words, the solution needed to encompass end-to-end user experience.
This is what we came up with:
- The main business use case was the creation and reporting of user purchases. The users would use their phones to scan barcodes, enter a quantity, and submit the transaction. At the end of the month, the snack bar administrator would get a report of all the transactions and a summary of how much money each user has spent.
- As for the enabling processes, the idea was to support only the creation of a snack bar via the app. Everything else would be done manually by us. The administrator would just receive an email with XLSX templates attached, fill in the users’ email addresses and product details, and send them back to info@getsnack.cz. We would then upload them into the system. This meant we could operate without the web admin part of the app.
