How we built an MVP with zero spend in no time

As entrepreneurs, we get excited quickly at the prospect of designing something new, whether in the middle of the night or while driving the car, when an idea hits, we are quick to jot it down and juices start flowing in the brain.

The idea of bringing something new into the world, charting an unknown territory is as challenging as it is exciting. Ideas are plentiful and what differentiates an entrepreneur from an ideator is that entrepreneurs execute.

Executing an idea now, especially a tech idea is a lot cheaper than it used to be just few years back and as ideas of ‘lean movement’ propagated, entrepreneurs now build fast with as little resources as possible to get validation.

So while we observed our users’ behaviour while they interacted with the MyPoolin web app, we had a tsunami of ideas coming our way and we had to pick few from the lot and then test those ideas before we bake them into our MyPoolin mobile app which we were about to launch in May and is now live on Playstore. We had to test these out with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

Observation 1 : Prior to money collection, users discuss and decide what they would want to do / gift etc.

Hypothesis : Users need a good recommendation engine that would recommend movies, events etc. to pool money for, with friends

Lean Test : E-mail newsletter with manually curated top events and movies sent to our web app users

Result : Many users who opened the newsletter went on to create pools for the suggested events

Execution : Recommendations engine baked into the app

Observation 2 : Users carried out the discussion mostly on Whatsapp while pooling and had a state of confusion regarding who is in or out of a plan and who has paid and who hasn’t

Hypothesis : Users need organised/customised group chatting and a quick glance for pooling use-case that will enable faster and seamless pooling

Lean Test : WhatsApp groups with screenshot?—?updates of who has pooled and who hasn’t obtained from web app and direct payment links to the users

Result : Pooling of money accelerated?—?5x

Execution : We added group chat with toggling features in our app, a never seen before experience for our users.

We were able to carry out these experiments without incurring any cost, using existing resources like WhatsApp, email etc. and got the validation we needed to move forward fast to bring out the app

— https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.mypoolin&hl=en