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’ behavior 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 launched last year and is currently 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
Happy to share some of the latest updates and a completely new design of ‘Mypoolin – Your one place to plan and pay with friends’ 🙂
Some of our earlier discussions on TRH are here! Share how you like it and tweet your love @mypoolin
asha chaudhry
niiiice!
observation 2 is very common!!! our school mates are planning a re-union and i can see the mess on whatsapp (which is why i keep my gps on mute :)))))
keep sharing your little little hacks and tips rohit! really helps 🙂
Rohit Taneja
True that! 🙂
Hence, a much smarter way for decision making was on the cards.
Will be sharing some more awesome stuff as we go along.
Abhik Prasad
I came to find out how you built an MVP with ZERO expenditure !! Do you value your time and effort at zero (leave aside the fact that you already had a working prototype and were testing various hypotheses that came to you at low cost )
Or was the title of the post just meant to be click bait 🙁
Rohit Taneja
@Abhik
It is fascinating to see how you let your prejudices come in the way of actual observation.
1. Nobody values their time and effort at zero. The fact that the product is one of its kind in India and is witnessing 1000s of transactions daily speaks volumes about the ultimate value
2. We didn’t have a working prototype before we tested the hypotheses. We only had a web platform (which is so very different and limited as compared to the mobile app that was rolled out). And that is where those observations helped in the app prototype.
I guess you haven’t tried out the product yet. Best to try it our next time before commenting 🙂
Mike drop.
Cheers
Abhik Prasad
Am not sure what you found prejudicial ? I saw the title “How we built an MVP with zero expenditure ?” and failed to find that explanation in the content.
Joginder Tanikella
Agreed. Title is misleading.
Harkirat Billoo
Fascinating read Rohit!
Really appreciate the frank and direct way in which you share your appreach.
Looking forward to read more from you.
P.S. Mypoolin is already one of my favorite apps for collecting and sharing money.
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
I’m missing the point here – what WOULD have costed money to do what you did?
I mean consumers are people we know – they don’t live on Mars, so they would be free anyways.
The rest of the implementation did happen… (like code for ‘recommendation engine baked into the app’)
So how did you actually save money?
Rohit Taneja
Let us say that you are building your first mobile app without taking customer feedback first (or even without iterating) on the hypotheses that you have in mind.
What would happen? You would be spending money (salaries and some external third party services depending on the type of app) to develop a version and then later realize that the work needs to be done from scratch again! That is the first saving
Second, instead of letting time on the native app (which takes more time to build and be perfected as compared to website / web app) teach us what is important and what is not, we let the customer behavior (on the web app) guide us as to what to include in the mobile and what not. Again, a saving of money (salaries and third party services) and time
I guess that makes it more clear