Molding Your MVP To Solve the Cold Start Problem
When facebook pulled together a simple app for dating, it was immediately valuable. This is the power of network effects. Not the most popular dating app in the world, but a viable, useful, and profitable tool. When you launch your dating app, while more innovative, it suffers from the cold start problem. You have zero users, so who am I going to match with? There are two main solutions to the cold start problem, and your MVP must keep these in mind while building to be successful.
The first is called single user utility. What value can you provide to the first user to sign up? This is generally something related to the core product, but valuable since you have deep insight into the market. It might be resources for the two sides of your marketplace. Ways to network and connect outside of your app, articles to build successful connections, how to improve yourself in what you’re bringing to the marketplace, tools to be better at your craft (for marketplaces between two specific types of professions). This last category can span a lot of things. For a marketplace between podcast hosts and interesting speakers, maybe you provide a list of hardware for hosts to buy, and software to connect it all for seamless streaming. This helps the first podcaster improve their process before one guest speaker signs up. You might share story telling tips, anecdote choice secrets, and similar articles.
A second important concept here is leveraging existing networks. Even if your concept is brand new, get creative, and think where your target market is currently hanging out. Are they following a specific hashtag on twitter or insta, or are they primarily on tinder? You can reach out on this network to recruit new users. Better still may be to display these users in your network, but not DM-able, link out to their public profile on the other network. Do provide additional insight, filtering, or discoverability to the profile. Users have to have a reason to be on your site in the first place. But this is a great way to increase the reach of your network by leaning on networks that have been built by others. Do be careful of terms of service (if you’re signing up for this other network) and boundaries of users — you don’t want to violate trust of others and damage your brand. But creating an innovative network for marketers that links out to influential marketer’s linkedin with expanded profiles and insight is largely a win for everyone involved.
The cold start problem is exceedingly difficult, and something most marketplace and network startups are unable to overcome. Reach out if you want some help designing your MVP features to specifically address these issues, and see the exponential growth you want.
Original article posted at https://mvpengineer.com/molding-your-mvp-to-solve-the-cold-start-problem/
