Lessons Learned from Creating a GovTech Startup
One day, I came home from work and told my husband, exasperated, “I’m going to create a product to solve the parent-school communication problem we’ve seen in the preschools and schools our kids have attended.” It was 2016, and I had over 15 years of experience in UX design. I was tired of working on other people’s ideas, serving missions I didn’t believe in, and following nonsensical orders. I was angry and wanted to work on my own ideas.
Within a year, I pivoted my idea to another industry, acquired my first customer, and launched Lupn. However, I was so overwhelmed learning about C-Corps, tech stacks, and financial projections that I overlooked some fundamental startup principles.
This post is for visionaries, entrepreneurs, product managers, or anyone dreaming of working on their own ideas. The time is NOW! Here are the three most valuable lessons I learned while building my startup and why they are crucial.
Why You Should Learn From My Failure
We all fail or will fail at some point in life. The lessons I learned from my failure were personal and unique to my experience. I can either keep what I learned to myself or share it with you. I believe the world would be a better place if we all shared more, gave more, and connected more.
I hope the lessons listed here will positively impact your startup, project, or business. They can help you save money and time with MVP iterations and achieve product-market fit faster.
Validate Your Hypothesis
There are many ways to validate your hypothesis—surveys, pre-launch sites, smoke tests, ads, prototypes. I will focus on Customer Development, as it can have the most significant impact, and it was one of my biggest mistakes.
My startup was a B2B2C business, with customers being local governments and consumers being citizens. Once the first city agreed to run the pilot, I prototyped a consumer app and validated the idea. I received great feedback, learned the most popular features, and improved the UI. But I made a crucial mistake—I forgot about customer validation. When you're in the eye of a hurricane, it's hard to see the obvious. After getting good feedback from consumers, I was laser-focused on development until the launch.
“Customer Development” involves interviewing potential or existing customers to validate your ideas. This is a simple conversation without any prompts or prototypes. Steve Blank, the father of customer development, defines it in four steps in his book, The Startup Owner’s Manual:
Customer Discovery
Customer Validation
Customer Creation
Company Building
Blank’s first rule of customer development is, “There are no facts inside your building, get outside.” This is the most important step when building a new product. However, based on my experience, I would add a few more ideas.
First, spend time on this first rule about “getting outside.” This is not a simple checkmark on a list. Don’t rush to Blank’s second rule, which is to “pair customer development with agile development,” as it can cause confusion and lead to development too soon.
I also recommend reading “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick. This short, straightforward book teaches how to interview without asking biased questions. Start by asking broad questions like, “What are your top problems with ...?” and “What are your big goals and focus right now?” Then, narrow down to more in-depth questions like, “How are you dealing with this problem right now?” I applied this technique to another startup, and it worked wonderfully.
So, have an idea? Ready to start? Test your hypotheses with customer development, but ask the right questions.
Don’t Build an MVP, Build an MDP
MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, is a well-known concept created by Eric Ries in his book, “Lean Startup.” It’s the first product that a startup puts in users’ hands. Finding the right balance between which features to include or not is challenging. If the features are too basic, your product will be boring, with low user engagement and a high churn rate. That’s what happened with my MVP.
We had no search capabilities, no images, and no personalization, which was part of the core promise. Our analytics were also weak. We had many metrics but very little data on individual users; we never had quantitative data on who our power users were, for example.
I wish I had learned about the concept of Minimum Delightful Product earlier, but I was too full of myself at the time.
When building an MVP, consider:
Prioritize your MVP features appropriately. Discuss them with your team and advisors. Consider not only the technical difficulty but also the KPIs. (For more on feature prioritization, check out “Hacking Growth” by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown).
Take analytics seriously early on and hire a consultant. This will help you track important numbers, which are fundamental to your business and investors.
If you are not a developer, hire offshore to get started. You’ll save a lot of money.
Have a Strong Sales and Marketing Strategy
I will focus on B2B here, but if you’re building a B2C product, make sure you have a strong marketing strategy and a budget for it. Very few products go viral like Facebook did; don’t fool yourself.
Early on, many people told me how difficult selling to the government was. My innate bravery and ego meant that I couldn’t hear that advice. I had what I call the “product-market fit illusion,” and no one alerted me to that.
Let me explain: When building our own startup, we are blind. Sometimes being stubborn is helpful, but not always. Knowing when to set your ego aside and listen to someone else, and when to trust your gut, is the hardest part.
After launching Lupn, I attended three Smart City conferences, put up my banner, and smiled. The feedback was okay; people liked the concept, but there were no follow-ups. For the rest of the year, I split my time between product development and sales (and everything else a founder of a bootstrapped startup does). I couldn’t sell the product to any other city, and the hardest part was that I didn’t know why. I tried referrals, cold emails, and cold calls, but nothing worked.
After struggling with sales for a while, I deconstructed a common belief—“if you’re the founder, you should be the one closing the first deals”—and concluded that it was okay to seek help. I found potential co-founders, but it didn’t work out, and I was already too burned out.
So, here you go:
If you’re not into sales, hire a proven salesperson or find a partner who can sell. Know your weaknesses and don’t be afraid to ask for help. Know your strengths and delegate when needed.
Know which sales process works best in your industry.
Allocate a budget for sales.
Hire an advisor in your startup industry, especially if you are unfamiliar with it (like I wasn’t familiar with selling to governments).
To Sum it Up: Don’t be Afraid to Get Started
The most important lesson I learned was that I could do it. Yes, I had a lot of help, but I did it all by myself. I hired, I fired, I managed, I created, I sold, I signed, I designed, I cried, I laughed, I made it, I launched an awesome product to 200,000 people.
After having kids, it was the second most exciting thing I did in life. Do it, and don’t be afraid to fail. After all, that’s the best way to learn.
“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over.” — Richard Branson, Virgin Group Founder
Please feel free to share this story if it had any impact on you. To connect and receive my upcoming posts, visit www.adrianatt.com.
Stay home, stay healthy!
Watch more insights from my journey on Lessons From My Startup Failure @ Virtual Tech on Tap by the City of Glendale.
If you have any questions or want to discuss reaching product-market fit, building exceptional product teams, and creating outstanding products, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to get in touch!