Mike Murchison, co-founder and CEO of Ada, critiques the common Lean Startup habit of rushing to code an MVP instead of conducting qualitative customer discovery.
“Writing software is the fastest way to learn, but in my view, it actually rarely is. It can be, but it rare, it rarely is. So I think we've conflated progress. We've conflated like developing an MVP with progress or rapid progress. Those are two very, very different things.”
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More from Mike Murchison
Insight
Murchison: Minimizing customer contact is an obsolete legacy from analog call centers
“The paradigm of talking to your customers less, you know, is really, really born of an era where, People really weren't making as many data informed decisions. And it might have been because a lot of this information wasn't digitized to begin with. If you're r…”
Mike MurchisonOct 17, 2022▶ 6:33How to Pivot to Product Market Fit | Mike Murchison, Founder of Ada ($1B+ Valuation) · PMF Show
Disclosure
Ada founders secretly tested their own software while working as support agents
“The reason we knew Ada worked in the early days or was going to work is because we didn't get fired. You know, we ran this software and our managers, you know, they didn't care. Like they loved the fact that response times went down. They couldn't tell the dif…”
Mike MurchisonOct 17, 2022▶ 31:52How to Pivot to Product Market Fit | Mike Murchison, Founder of Ada ($1B+ Valuation) · PMF Show
Insight
Murchison: Excellent software requires mastering the underlying manual process
“All software is at a fundamental level, all software does is it replicates and scales some manual process that exists in the physical world. And our belief is the extent to which you can understand that manual process better than anyone else, or at least under…”
Mike MurchisonOct 17, 2022▶ 22:45How to Pivot to Product Market Fit | Mike Murchison, Founder of Ada ($1B+ Valuation) · PMF Show
Insight
Murchison: Discovery problems are validated when interview responses become predictable
“Picking up the phone call, you have a 10th phone call in a row, and people are saying, almost, you're using the exact same phrases when they're describing the problem, and they're reacting to it the same way. So I, you almost feel like an anthropologist. You j…”
Mike MurchisonOct 17, 2022▶ 9:11How to Pivot to Product Market Fit | Mike Murchison, Founder of Ada ($1B+ Valuation) · PMF Show
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Murchison: Ada co-founders worked support at seven companies simultaneously
“We were employed by seven different companies at one point, all at the same time. And we lived and breathed customer service for the better part of a year.”
Mike MurchisonOct 17, 2022▶ 10:36How to Pivot to Product Market Fit | Mike Murchison, Founder of Ada ($1B+ Valuation) · PMF Show
AssertionSupported
Murchison: Contact center agent turnover averages roughly 45% annually
“Attrition rates in contact centers Are on average about 45% annually, meaning that in the enterprise, about half of all customer service agents will leave their jobs every year.”
Mike MurchisonOct 17, 2022▶ 25:43How to Pivot to Product Market Fit | Mike Murchison, Founder of Ada ($1B+ Valuation) · PMF Show
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