The Mobile Spoon

A minimum viable product (MVP) is often perceived as a subset of the real product: a minimized version, lacking some features or missing some UI fine-tunes, but in fact, an MVP is more of a tool to test the core idea of what’s intended to be a product someday. While the name MVP suggests that it has to be both a product and a viable thing - the software industry has proven it doesn’t have to be the case.  In fact, an MVP doesn’t have to be a product at all: it can be an email, a Facebook group, a service, or a bunch of processes performed manually. An MVP is there to help you test your business riskiest assumptions, see if your product can provide enough value to attract customers, and collect some feedback that can guide you through the product development. And last, people should be willing to pay for it (with real money or some level of commitment) - otherwise, it’s just theoretical exercise that cannot prove that the idea is...

Please note that this guide now has a second part: 84 cognitive biases to help you design better products - part II - - - This one is probably my longest post in my 15 years of blogging, and the result of occasional writing I've been doing in the past few months. Cognitive biases are systematic errors in our thinking process that affect our decisions making. As humans, we don’t always see things as they really are, or remember things as they really were. As a result, we create our own subjective social reality that affects our judgment. As product people , we can take advantage of these cognitive biases to better convey our message and create better converting products, without being evil . Not in a bad way of course, but in a way that will allow us to get a fair chance to prove that our products are worthy. Products can exploit common cognitive biases to establish trust with the users, improve conversion rates, increase their users’ engagement level, and as a...

I’m not a marketing guy, but I love building machines. As our startup Missbeez continued to grow, we looked for ways to automate our marketing campaigns.  The goal was to create an end to end experience that begins with a promotional message (a drip campaign based on email, push or whatever we decide) and continues inside our product with in-app promotions (popups, badges, deep-links). Pretty basic stuff, but since our product depends heavily on location and usage habits - each marketing campaign had to be targeted to a relevant segment based on location and customer behavior. Oh, and it also needed to be fully automated so we can all go to the beach. Building our Marketing Machine We combined our existing in-app promotions system (special offers, coupons, featured products) with our internal analytics engine to create personalized campaigns - tailored for our customer segments . Once we were able to create personalized drip campaigns...