Managing The Release And Marketing Of A Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
“Anuja’s Product Management skills were instrumental in getting a Minimum Viable Product released. Forest Street has been a great partner to have on board”
Uday Naik Founder, CEO (Mahitix)
ABOUT MAHITIX
Mahitix is a big-data startup focused on providing usable, high-quality datasets for AI/ML projects. The product is an online curated repository of data-sets that gives students and researchers a head-start on their AI/ML project. Mahitix partnered with Forest Street at an early stage when the product was a prototype.
PROJECT GOALS
The project had three main goals driving to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP):
- Release an MVP by steering the product team with market requirements
- Build a strong repository of datasets focused on US market (500+ datasets)
- Run a digital marketing campaign to assess market fit of the MVP
OVER 70% OF THE TIME IN AI/ML PROJECTS IS SPENT ON DATA CLEANSING
Algorithms and solutions make the most buzz when it comes to big data, but an AI/ML algorithm is only as good as the data used to train the algorithm. One of the biggest challenges is to get the right dataset to train your algorithm. Mahitix aims to ease the pain of finding the right dataset. The founders envision following specific benefits for AI/ML practitioners:
- Ready to use high-quality datasets
- Ability to upload your own datasets with supporting certification & license
- Community to share and validate high-quality datasets
Mahitix team engaged with Forest Street primarily because of their product management and marketing skill set.
SOLUTION
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT & MARKETING AUTOMATION FOR MVP
Forest Street conducted this project in three phases
1. Assessing market landscape, buyer persona, and MVP requirements
- Secondary research for a quick turnaround on MVP requirements
- Active collaboration with product development team
- Driving the collection and curation of 500+ datasets in 10 categories
2. Planning and execution of digital marketing campaigns
- Alignment on campaign goals, and channel strategy
- Set up HubSpot tools, Google Analytics, and MailChimp
- Execute digital marketing campaigns
3. Analyzing results & delivering a final report
- Collect and analyze campaign results
- Recommend changes to promotion strategy
- Identify and discuss open questions
KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE PROJECT
“If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late,”
-Reid Hoffman
- The first version of the prototype was quite rough, but we released it and it helped us get a benchmark for cost per subscriber. We were able to measure the improvements with each iteration of the campaign
- MVP we delivered does not look like a finished product, and yet continuous market feedback has helped us make significant progress since we started.