How to build and validate an MVP in two weeks

Context

"Helping professionals take care of their clients, without worrying about appointments.": this is the mission of Incalendar, a small Milanese startup that contacted us to follow them in the validation phase of their idea.

They didn't want to build yet another product that was not useful to its users.

The idea was born from the analysis of the significant problems that professionals face:

• answering the phone to make appointments interrupts the workflow

• last-minute cancellations are wasted money

• marketing to your customers is challenging

An ambitious idea to be validated with a Design Sprint

The concept behind InCalendar is ambitious: an AI-driven chatbot to make and manage appointments, with a built-in chat and reminders to maintain a good relationship with customers and the ability to create a broadcast marketing channel. Integrated into the app for promotions and upsells.

A sprint design is a perfect tool to validate innovative product ideas where there is high market risk.

Working closely with the two founders, we started by framing the idea using the Lean Canvas to create the first business hypothesis to be validated.

Later, given the breadth of the solution, we chose the creation of appointments, which is the fundamental part of the app, as the first part to validate.

We were interested in understanding professionals' reactions in front of such an innovative approach compared to the usual paper plan, so we decided to approach the validation with guerrilla user testing sessions.

The idea was simple: let potential customers experience a realistic experience of using the app at the lowest possible cost.

The tools decided for these user testing sessions were

• a landing page explaining the benefits of the product

• an interactive prototype to simulate the app experience

A landing page for SaaS: benefits, not features.

The landing page of a SaaS product must be considered integral to the product experience: the promises made on this page must then be kept by the application.

We then brainstormed the various messages on the landing page. At the same time, part of our team took care of the wireframing and the design proposal.

Once the brainstorming was done, through dot-voting, we chose the messages that looked most promising.

And we then integrated them into the final landing page, which also incorporated branding and logo created ad hoc to make it as realistic as possible.

An advanced interactive prototype

The second tool for our user testing sessions was a realistic interactive prototype.

It was crucial to the experiment's success that the experience is as immersive as possible to seem real.

Together with the founders, we defined the boundaries of testing. We created the first navigable prototype that could be installed on a smartphone to look like a real app.

The interviews

Having prepared the landing page and the prototype, we accompanied the founders for the first interviews. We had previously designed a script to follow.

The interview was divided into two parts: the first involved navigating the landing page to retrieve the message that was being transmitted.

This allowed us to iterate on the page copy and focus on some benefits of the app rather than others.

The second part of the interview instead was completing a task (the only one possible on the prototype): adding an appointment for the following Tuesday.

All accepted the conversational interface, but the excellent work was confirmed by the purchase / pre-order request of two out of 10 respondents and the attempt of 90% of the interviewees to go outside the perimeter of the prototype and experiment with other features of the app.

Towards fundraising

To support the team of founders, we have collected all the results of the interviews and analyzes them in an interactive report that can be easily consulted and summarized all the fundamental messages in a pitch deck that the team will then use to raise funds necessary for the development of the already validated product.