How to Bootstrap a Minimum Lovable Product with Contractors

Not all startups begin with an illustrious team. Some begin as an idea of a single founder or two non technical founders. Turning ideas into a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) usually follows two routes: hiring one or more employees to build it or hiring contractors. For bootstrap founders, I advocate you can and should build your MLP with contractors. Here’s a few pieces of learning about how to find good ones.

Know Your Why

The first thing you have to know is why your product or service exists. If you can’t explain your why, you will struggle to convince contractors to work for you. You may be able to buy their time, but you will never be able to buy their real interest and loyalty without a clear “why.”?

Your why has to have three things:

• Resilience: It has be able to withstand cultural, technological or economic change.
• Inclusive: Anyone who works for you has to be able to see how they are contributing to why your product or service exists.
• Service-oriented: The beneficiary of your product or service has to be clear and someone other than yourself (for example, getting rich is only in service of yourself).?

Simon Sinek gives lots of great talks about finding your why. His 4 minute video on “3 Things That Make a Meaningful Vision” is a good primer to help you find your why.?

Find “CCE” Contractors

The best contractors have three characteristics. They are:

• Curious: They ask questions about what the purpose of the work is. They want to understand how their work fits into the broad product/service picture. They ask questions you don’t have the immediate answers to.?
• Creative: They take your ideas and specifications and often come up with more than one way to accomplish the task. They present tradeoffs and pitfalls to their approaches before starting work. You don’t want a robot to help you, you want someone who thinks critically about what they are being asked to do.?
• Efficient: They spend minimal time learning how to do the job. They tell you when they don’t know how to do something and they do not charge you to “learn on the job.”

Any time you interview a contractor, you should evaluate them on these criteria. When interviewing them, gauge their level of detail in questions they ask you, ask them how they handle (and charge) for situations when they don’t know how to do something. And in case of uncertainty, start small with a new contractor. Give them a small scope of work and see how they approach the work. Gauge whether they spend long periods of time getting the work done, whether they have questions about any scope or statements of work that you create.?

Make It Pretty

Almost by definition, MLPs need to be pretty. Good design is co equal and part of testing your MLP. And just as there are technical contractors for hire to help you build your MLP, there are design contractors. Sites like Toptal, Fiverr, Upwork, or 99 Designs are all great places to find design talent. A couple of suggestions when looking for a design professional:

• Always ask for work samples in a zone similar to your vertical industry: Anyone you work with should, at a minimum, have at least 2-3 core designs in the your specific vertical (education, entertainment apps, etc.) and at least 5-10 designs in overall vertical (B2C, B2B, etc.)
• Always ask for fixed price contracts: Most design professionals want to work on an hourly basis. However, this often leads to outsized hourly invoices and does not train you to be efficient. Instead, find a contractor who is willing to work on a fixed price and limit yourself to one to two design revisions in order to help them feel comfortable that you won’t over-edit their work. Additionally, limit the scope of their first engagement by finding the smallest unit of design (a landing page, onboarding screens, etc.) that you want them to produce. If they can’t produce something that you like for that small scope of work, end the engagement and find someone who can.?

And remember, it’s not about finding the perfect design, it’s about finding one that looks good enough. Bootstrap entrepreneurs often spend too much time trying to find A list design talent for B level prices. Instead, move forward with talent you can afford and stop wasting time finding or haggling down A list design talent because it won’t work.?

Benchmark Contractors’ Success

You need to know how to measure your contractors’ success. This means you need to know whether what they build makes a dent in your users’ perceptions of your product. Contractors build what you think is important to your users, but you’re the only one that can measure whether what they build matters. Tools like Google Analytics for Firebase or Pendo are a great way to start measuring whether your MLP is hitting the marks you set.?

But…before you pick the tool, you need to know what you want to measure. I recommend picking a combination of “user levels” and Love Percent. This allows you to create a baseline of user activity and measure whether your changes to your MLP create users who use more of and love your product. In our app, TicketJam, we divide our users into 5 levels:

• Level 1: Search- User attempts to find an event they're looking for.
• Level 2: Price History- User finds an event & wants to know how much prices have changed.
• Level 3: Set Price Alert- User sets a price alert for a particular event.
• Level 4: Get Price Alert- User gets an in app alert for that event.
• Level 5: Buy Ticket- User buys a ticket to that event.

However, these levels are not a self-contained measure of success. Some users may complete all your “levels” but not be particularly happy about it.? Combining “levels” with a measure of engagement such as a “Love Percent” is a better holistic view on whether your users are engaging and love your app. According Apptentive’s Mobile Customer Engagement Benchmark Report 2022 report, 64% of consumers report they love a brand. You can and should set some kind of benchmark for your Love Percent. You’ll need tools to collect this and be aware that some segments, such as food & drink or education brands, tend to rank lower on the Love Percent than other segments. As you establish your benchmarks, you can aim your contractors to build MLP features that move that needle. And over time, you’ll establish your baseline for engaged users and can run experiments to see if your MLP changes move that needle.?