The Inspiring Origin Story of OC's Cirrus Insight - Part 2

A thought leader guest post from local serial entrepreneur Ryan Huff:

Cirrus Insight Origin Story - Part 2

The previous post describes the “inception” of the idea behind Cirrus Insight and how I developed the problem thesis.

In this post, I’ll describe the first steps I took to validate the idea, arrived at our first MVP, began coding, and finally gave this thing a name.

Idea Validation and MVP Definition

I had an idea and could articulate the problem I was trying to solve. But I knew that I might be bringing in my own unconscious biases, and I needed to see if other people thought it was a good idea as well. I knew many Salesforce consultants (Scott, David, and Jon, to name a few, not to mention Brandon, who was at that time, just my BFF from college), and I put some rough Photoshop mockups together to illustrate what I had in mind.

Initially, this trusted group of consultants (let’s call it an advisory group) was small — perhaps only six people. And while I gradually expanded the group during this stage and up to our eventual beta release, this small group of advisors was sufficient to understand the needs of 80% of the users we would initially target.

As long as it’s representative of your target audience, a small group of users allows you to iterate quickly without facing diminishing amounts of unique feedback.

I spent weeks showing the Photoshop mockups to the advisory group and listening to their feedback. They suggested features I hadn’t thought of, gotchas I needed to be aware of, and go-to-market channels I hadn’t considered. As I iterated on the mockups, a vague product roadmap began to take shape.

I made a risky mistake here. While I collected feedback from Salesforce consultants that represented a lot of Salesforce customers — I didn’t ever try to speak directly to the expected customer and get first-hand feedback. Obviously it worked out, but it was an unintentional missed step that could have had costly consequences.

Minimum Viable/Sellable Product

As feedback started rolling in and I started to understand the pattern and theme of that feedback, I began to understand the priorities of our advisory group. All the ideas coming in validated my idea and proved that there were a lot of possibilities, but it was important to get started (and launch) ASAP — after all, I was still paranoid that someone else was working on this idea.

Defining the scope of the MVP was critical. One important factor was that this needed to make money; I was funding this on my own. So not only did this initial launch have to be viable, it needed to be...

Read the rest of this article at fractionalfounders.tech...

Thanks for this guest post to Ryan Huff.

Ryan Huff is a startup founder with over 15 years in B2B SaaS, with experience building and delivering products in CRM, Sales Enablement, Sales Readiness, Natural Language Processing, and e-commerce. Ryan's started and exited 3 companies, including Cirrus Insight which grew to over $12M ARR and over 70 employees. Today, Ryan is a Partner at Fractional Founders, a management consulting firm specializing in helping tech startups and small businesses overcome growth-related challenges.

Photo by Medienstürmer on Unsplash

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