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Hey there - it's Brian 👋

Imagine you discover an amazing business idea.

You build it, only to realize:

“Where are the people?”

Nothing hurts more than building a business to find out later your customers don’t want it.

So last week we covered the first step to the Micro-MVP: how to quickly test what hurts customers so much they’ll pay you to solve their problem.

This week we’ll go talk about how to read your test results.

The feedback on this Micro-MVP series has been incredible. I’m excited for this one!

Stay to the end to vote on what you want to learn next Thursday.

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

Scan the beach for treasure, then dig

Imagine you’re looking for gold on a beach.

You hear waves crash to your right. Kids laugh as they throw a frisbee to your left.

Sand feels amazing between your toes. Sun warms your skin.

Life is great.

You’re holding this clunky metal detector. Big over-the-ear headphones on your head as you listen in suspense for every “beep!”

You swing the detector in a sweeping motion along the coast.

What’s your plan to find beach treasures?

Scan the beach until the detector clicks. Then, dig down.

If you don’t find anything: swap your shovel back for the metal detector, and stroll the coast again sweeping the sand until you hear another beep!

This cheesy, overused metaphor is exactly how you need to approach the Micro-MVP.

Except in this case, your beach treasure is the business design that solves a painful customer problem better than anyone.

This scan + dig combination is the Micro-MVP.

Let’s show you how to scan and dig to find the business design that customers actually want.

Whether you’re:
• Testing a new business idea
• Re-framing your current business
• Or finding the words that get customers to buy

This issue is for you.

Quickly find out what customers want (and don’t waste time building something they won’t buy).

Let’s dive in:

Overview: Post broad, then post narrow

So just like scanning the beach for gold, we’re scanning customers for the business design that resonates with them.

Scan the beach, then dig.

1. Scan the beach: Post broad, look for differences
• Come up with 3 - 5 core ideas that you think your customers want.
• Test those ideas (post idea to socials).
• Look for difference: find which gets more engagement than the others.

2. Dig for gold: Post narrow, look for sameness
• Post 3 - 5 versions of the core idea that got the most engagement
• Look for sameness: see if that core idea consistently gets higher engagement than other posts

If your core idea doesn’t consistently have higher engagement, go back to scanning the beach.

Repeat until you’re seeing consistently higher engagement.

At that point, you’ve found the treasure.

Let’s get into how you run tests to give you the confidence that customers want your business: 👇

Step 1 - Scan the beach: post broad, look for difference

“Post broad” means we’ll post about the 3 - 5 core ideas we want to test. We’re looking across the ideas to get a hint at which gets customers most excited.

In this issue, we’re only looking at “likes” to determine engagement. We’ll cover how to use comments in a future issue.

Reminder: a “core idea” is any combination of which customer you’re targeting, which pain you’re targeting, and how customers value a solution.

We covered this last week, when we talked about how to use Facebook groups to come up with customer pain (core idea).

So here’s an example:

Imagine your business helps customers make dieting more sustainable.

“Success” means customers keep a healthy diet their whole life (vs a fad diet that only lasts a few months).

So let’s figure out what frustrates customers the most about fad diets.

I’ll make up a few core ideas:
1. Friends push you to do the diet and when they stop pushing you, you don’t have the motivation to keep going
2. Fad diets are too expensive
3. You can’t break the urge to eat junk food when you come back from a long day and it’s sitting on the counter
etc…

Post about each core idea, then watch the “likes” across each post. Look for spikes:
• Post 1: 3 likes
• Post 2: 4 likes
• Post 3: 9 likes (?!)
• Post 4: 3 likes
• Post 5: 5 likes

Woah so what happened with post 3?! Something created more engagement.

We’re not sure what caused the spike yet. The sample size is too small. It could be:
• The core idea
• Word choice
• Algo change
• Distribution
• The format
• Others

But good news: we posted broad (a bunch of core ideas) and we found a difference (post 3).

Our goal is to become post enough versions of the same core idea that we become more confident that your core idea is what caused the excitement.

Step 2 - Dig for gold: post narrow, look for sameness

Now, we move to the next testing stage:
Post narrow (post the same core idea in different ways), and look for sameness (increased engagement).

Take that one core idea, and post it in a bunch of different formats!

We’re more confident it’s the core idea if we see something like this:
• Post 1: 7 likes
• Post 2: 8 likes
• Post 3: 8 likes
• Post 4: 5 likes
• Post 5: 8 likes

In this example, so far the tests remain higher overall.

If we don’t see that increased engagement, go back to posting broad.

Repeat until we see higher engagement.

Summary

Great! You’re ready to read the results to help you figure out which direction to take your business:

• Test your core idea (which customer, which pain, what they value in a solution).
• Post test on socials
• Watch for spikes in engagement
• Then, focus tests on the core idea that spiked
• Iterate until you find a core idea with high engagement

This beats the old way of doing it.

Imagine spending a few months building an MVP to realize this business isn’t working to re-group and try again for another few months.

No wonder it’s so hard to find your customer!

Now you can get customer feedback on your business in hours instead of months.

Boom! That’s it.

Reply to this email to tell me how you’re thinking about using the Micro-MVP. I read every email.

Also, don’t forget to vote below on which topic you want to learn next week.

See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
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