{"id":834,"date":"2014-02-06T12:49:28","date_gmt":"2014-02-06T17:49:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.agilityfeat.com\/?p=834"},"modified":"2014-02-06T12:49:28","modified_gmt":"2014-02-06T17:49:28","slug":"inside-the-creation-of-the-tougher-me-mvp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/34.200.113.64\/en\/blog\/2014\/02\/inside-the-creation-of-the-tougher-me-mvp\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the creation of the Tougher.Me MVP"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/agilityfeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/unnamed.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-835\" alt=\"tougher.me, agilityfeat\" src=\"https:\/\/agilityfeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/unnamed-300x54.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"54\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For the past two months I&#8217;ve had the pleasure of working with incredible <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stephaniehay.com\/\">Steph Hay<\/a> on the development of her application, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tougher.me\/\">Tougher.Me<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tougher.me\/\">Tougher.Me<\/a> is Steph&#8217;s first web product and we asked her to share some of her experiences talking to customers and creating <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tougher.me\/\">Tougher.me.<\/a> Here&#8217;s what she had to say;<\/p>\n<h2>What is Tougher.me?<\/h2>\n<div>Strength and fitness profiles for people who do CrossFit.<\/div>\n<div>\n<h2>How did you come up with the idea?<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<div>I wanted a place for my \u00abCrossFit life,\u00bb so to speak. Somewhere I could record my strength maxes, compare my own fitness to other women who are about my size and experience level, post pictures of me looking tough :), and be able to see faces of teammates in my gym &#8212; whether as a reminder of their names (hey, we have 150 members!) or just to leave them a \u00abway to go!\u00bb comment when I know they just achieved some new goal.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn don&#8217;t serve these purposes for me since they all encompass different aspects of my life (personal, work), and they&#8217;re fleeting. But neither do proprietary\/closed WOD-tracking platforms meant for CrossFit-strength tracking. I wanted something more open, accessible, and UX-friendly that I could pull up on my phone and not have to sign into in order to see my teammates&#8217; faces.<\/div>\n<div>\n<h2>What sort of customer discovery did you do before deciding to build the product?<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<div>I talked to three gym owners and learned about what they liked\/didn&#8217;t like about existing CrossFit-community-specific tools. I asked 10 other CrossFitters what they liked\/didn&#8217;t like about Facebook or WOD-trackers as places for tracking their CrossFit life. What I learned was that no tool seems to work well in solving any of these problems; almost everyone still kept track of their progress on physical whiteboards in gyms or personal notebooks. Some of them use Facebook to tout their strengths. Two of those CrossFit<a href=\"http:\/\/www.tougher.me\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-836\" alt=\"product-steph\" src=\"https:\/\/agilityfeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/product-steph-300x294.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"294\" \/><\/a>ters had switched from one gym to another, and they \u00ablost\u00bb their record-keeping because the proprietary tracking systems wouldn&#8217;t let them port their data to a new gym. Bananas.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>So the reality is I could have talked to tons more people if I was dogmatically Lean, but I didn&#8217;t; I wanted to build something that met my needs, then learn if it meets anyone else&#8217;s.<\/div>\n<div>\n<h2>How did you decide which features to include in your MVP?<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<div>The #1 test for the MVP is \u00abwill people enter content into yet another thing.\u00bb That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m in now. So I focused mainly on features that could be integrated in the sign-up process itself when answering that question. Basic info and skills achieved are part of the sign-up process. Uploading photos of themselves and completing maxes and personal achievements are three features that users are prompted to complete after the sign-up process, so now I&#8217;m watching how many users actually take that step, too.<\/div>\n<h2>What have been the biggest surprises for you in building the application?<\/h2>\n<h2><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tougher.me\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft  wp-image-837\" alt=\"agilityfeat\" src=\"https:\/\/agilityfeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/product-rich-300x284.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"284\" \/><\/a><\/h2>\n<div>Two main themes to my experience so far (not necessarily surprises) &#8212; One is that I may have built an MVP for myself that no one else wants or sees value in. I have to strike a balance between customer development and iteration to actually find if it *is* an MVP &#8212; the viable part, I mean &#8212; while keeping in mind that Tougher.Me might be completely worthless to everyone other than me.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The second is that during customer discovery, I&#8217;ve heard a few things that work against what I&#8217;d initially envisioned for the app &#8212; namely that some people want to have a private profile. This makes sense to me; now I have to decide whether these kinds of things are worth building to try and find out if this makes the product \u00abviable\u00bb or if they&#8217;re just features. Ultimately, my metric is usage &#8212; how often do people come back to update their profiles or take some action? It&#8217;s still very fuzzy what the exact path will be toward answering that question.<\/div>\n<div>\n<h2>What advice do you have for entrepreneurs with a web application idea?<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<div>I&#8217;d refer them to you guys! Seriously, the workshop brainstorming session that I did with your team last fall made all the difference in helping me think through \u00abnext steps\u00bb for the many ideas I had. It was your team who helped me think objectively about what customer development would look like, how an MVP could come together, and what sort of data I could gather for each of the ideas I proposed. Tougher.Me came out as the clear winner since I&#8217;m part of the audience, have easy access to do customer development, and could get a prototype up-and-running within 2 months. It&#8217;s crazy to think I&#8217;m at the precipice of now testing all these assumptions I&#8217;ve been making. It&#8217;s been a huge learning experience, and I would tell any entrepreneur that \u00abfinding your dream team\u00bb is priceless. For me &#8212; so far :), &#8212; that&#8217;s Agility Feat.<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the past two months I&#8217;ve had the pleasure of working with incredible Steph Hay on the development of her application, Tougher.Me. Tougher.Me is Steph&#8217;s first web product and we asked her to share some of her experiences talking to customers and creating Tougher.me. Here&#8217;s what she had to say; What is Tougher.me? Strength and [&hellip;]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[85,111,57,59],"tags":[86,99,66],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v15.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Inside the creation of the Tougher.Me MVP - AgilityFeat Panama Software Test Center<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/agilityfeatpanama.com\/en\/blog\/2014\/02\/inside-the-creation-of-the-tougher-me-mvp\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Inside the creation of the Tougher.Me MVP - AgilityFeat Panama Software Test Center\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For the past two months I&#8217;ve had the pleasure of working with incredible Steph Hay on the development of her application, Tougher.Me. Tougher.Me is Steph&#8217;s first web product and we asked her to share some of her experiences talking to customers and creating Tougher.me. Here&#8217;s what she had to say; What is Tougher.me? Strength and [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/agilityfeatpanama.com\/en\/blog\/2014\/02\/inside-the-creation-of-the-tougher-me-mvp\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"AgilityFeat Panama Software Test Center\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-02-06T17:49:28+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/agilityfeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/unnamed-300x54.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\">\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"4 minutes\">\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/34.200.113.64\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/34.200.113.64\/\",\"name\":\"AgilityFeat Panama Software Test Center\",\"description\":\"AgilityFeat Panama offers customized, multilevel web and mobile software testing for a variety of industries.\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":\"https:\/\/34.200.113.64\/?s={search_term_string}\",\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/agilityfeatpanama.com\/en\/blog\/2014\/02\/inside-the-creation-of-the-tougher-me-mvp\/#primaryimage\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/agilityfeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/unnamed-300x54.png\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/agilityfeatpanama.com\/en\/blog\/2014\/02\/inside-the-creation-of-the-tougher-me-mvp\/#webpage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/agilityfeatpanama.com\/en\/blog\/2014\/02\/inside-the-creation-of-the-tougher-me-mvp\/\",\"name\":\"Inside the creation of the Tougher.Me MVP - AgilityFeat Panama Software Test Center\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/34.200.113.64\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/agilityfeatpanama.com\/en\/blog\/2014\/02\/inside-the-creation-of-the-tougher-me-mvp\/#primaryimage\"},\"datePublished\":\"2014-02-06T17:49:28+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2014-02-06T17:49:28+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/34.200.113.64\/#\/schema\/person\/bbe32c701c50634fc286a690736c113b\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/agilityfeatpanama.com\/en\/blog\/2014\/02\/inside-the-creation-of-the-tougher-me-mvp\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/34.200.113.64\/#\/schema\/person\/bbe32c701c50634fc286a690736c113b\",\"name\":\"Ford\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/34.200.113.64\/#personlogo\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/1.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Ford\"}}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/34.200.113.64\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/34.200.113.64\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/34.200.113.64\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/34.200.113.64\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/34.200.113.64\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/34.200.113.64\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/34.200.113.64\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/34.200.113.64\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/34.200.113.64\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}