Sunday, April 1, 2012

So, I Built The MVP, Now What?

In my previous post, Where Ideas Come From, I talked about an idea that came to me.  Without re-hatching the post, I was left with this idea that every social complaint is should be an actionable customer-service ticket, and making it public could put some social pressure on brands to pay attention.

So, I built it.  You can check out failrecovery.com and let me know what you think in the comments below.  The MVP is truly simple.  We have a small number companies to choose from and a list of top, most complained about companies.  I posted it on HN, sent out a few tweets and posted on my social networks.  So far, traffic is pretty abysmal.  Don't people care which companies ignore their social media complaints?  Don't companies care about knowing how many people are pissed off at them on Twitter?  I think they do.  So, now what?  Why isn't the traffic coming hands over fist?

Obviously, we have made ourselves relevant.  It's that age old question, "How are you going to get users?"  The way I see it, we only have a few options that really make sense.  One, we can increase the number of companies we are collecting information on, or two, we can directly create some way to motivate the customer or the company to engage with the site.  But, only one of those options has any chance of getting us users.

One thing that previous projects have taught me is NOT to work on creating a pretty website or extensive backend stuff / re-writes...when you don't have something people want to use, don't polish the turd; find a way to make them care.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, go with the option that has a chance at making your product more relevant to your users.