Our founders told Starterstory how they launched a $1M/Month video games boosting services marketplace, shared their experience and gave some pieces of advice. Alex Karetin, Dmitriy Beseda, Tony Doronin recap the story of Overgear and the way they passed. MVP, first clients, feedback.
About MVP
@Tony Doronin:
We launched MVP with a small team of eleven, and seven of us were on the product development team. In retrospect, it was very… ambitious, to say the least.I don’t know what made it possible in the end: the fact we had no idea how complicated the service will be, the pure enthusiasm of our team, or the amphetamines our designer consumed. But we managed to launch our MVP in 4 months. Did we think it was perfect? Hell no. But it was something new and different, in a good way.
Invest in your team and your HR brand early, or you’ll end up working overtime trying to fix other people’s mistakes.
Launching the business
@Tony Doronin
It was the most challenging launch for all of us. We were super motivated and super hyped. And like it usually happens, overly motivated humans tend to make mistakes! I think our biggest one was that we failed to sync our vision into a single MVP.We ended up doing everything at once, every big feature each of us wanted. We were really stressed and really pushed ourselves to pick speed over quality. How to avoid this? Plan really-really-really ahead, calculate everything, don’t rely on optimistic estimates, and be ready to cut something out.
@Alex Karetin
One of the difficulties with our launching and preparing an MVP was that we did not have real competitors. We had no one to look at to assess whether our results were good or not, to analyze how others were working. We had to create new rules of the game and experiment.
One of our first steps was testing in the CIS region because for us it is an understandable audience. We knew that we could find the minimum number of performers who could work, and we wanted to understand better the needs of our clients. Know your customer (KYC) theory in action.
After a while, we realized that everything was fine, but we weren’t satisfied with a quite small average check. The answer came on its own with entering the foreign market. We realized that it was worth focusing on the Latin American market for finding performers, on Europe and the US for attracting clients. Then our LTV performance increased more than fivefold, but starting in the CIS region also paid off — we saved money at the start.
@Dmitriy Beseda
An important point, which few people think about at the start of a business, is the contacts of your first customers. Sometimes they are more important than sales. We all know about MVP principles, about possible problems at this stage. Your product may be reluctant to buy, and that’s okay. It’s more important to understand the reason, that’s why you should collect contacts, literally in any way — landings, chatbots, or answer the mail yourself. The key point is not to miss the opportunity to get feedback and use it.The first acquaintance with Overgear is always the landing page + context and/or target. Next, we analyze the feedback of leads, read comments, and chats. In general, it’s a good rule that works not only for launches.
You can read the whole story on StarterStory .
