I really believe any team developing a product should be talking with potential costumers from day one. Being a technical person, it’s really easy to hide behind the code and make all the decisions from my guts. But you end up playing roulette at the product launch: either you have a stroke of luck and nailed exactly the critical need, or, more commonly, few people like it and no one loves it.

With Bundlr we’re forcing ourselves to speak to a couple of potential costumers each week. We have a list of people we want to talk to and try to reach two or three weekly. So far, it’s working great for several reasons:

Solves internal discussions

We’re a team of two and often have different opinions. How do we solve the arguments? We just think what would future users prefer. After chatting with a some it gets easier to personify the target costumers.

Prioritizes features

There are really a lot of features we would like to implement in Bundlr. Content aggregation comprises many interesting use cases. How do we decide what features to do first and what to leave out? We just ask target users which features would they pay for.

It’s still marketing

People you interview are more likely to engage with your product and tell others about it. You’re still marketing your product and it’s going to pay off in the end all the people you talked to.

Great for motivation

Finally, nothing motivates us more than having someone telling us how much they want what we’re building. And even when we don’t get it right, having a clear knowledge of the problem is essential to stay focused and motivated.

I’ve been researching on platforms to host MongoDB databases. The next table compares the three services I found so far:

This information is bound to suffer changes, since some of these services are still in beta. Even MongoDB is changing as the 10gen team is releasing new features. Let’s see also if other players also enter this market. I’m really looking forward to not having to administer a database ever again.

I’ve joined LeanTalk a month ago. It’s a community where a specific topic about lean startups is discussed for 24 hours only, like “How do you know what a good metric value is?”. New topics are suggested and up-voted by the members. To get in you have to apply. There’s some really insightful advices there from time to time.

Note: The lean theme is becoming a bit hyped. There’s now services, consultants and everything dedicated to lean startups. But I believe the underlying principles are still important, like costumer development and measuring every assumption.

Lately, many curation products have been announced. Scoble mentioned Curated.by, Storify, Keepstream and Bag The Web. More recently, Robin Good did a really thorough analysis, including comparison tables, covering about 20 tools. And here we are, developing a product to help professionals aggregate content. Should we give up now and go home?

Not really. These are the reasons we really want to push forward with Bundlr:

There are many problems to tackle

Scoble started with 7 needs. Now Robin added more 25! And there are probably more with further research. The thing is, content curation is becoming a term too broad to define a single tool. Most out there are trying to solve only a set of those needs, targeting specific niches. And so is Bundlr. We’re focusing on making content aggregation simple and useful. (We already found that curation isn’t the best term to explain Bundlr to potential costumers.)

It’s a big market and no tool has yet achieved significant adoption

And I don’t expect one to become a standart, like some asked. The market for information professionals is large and heterogeneous, even if you count only professional bloggers and journalists. And it’s undeveloped so far.

No proven business model

Advertising on curated pages, sponsored streams, freemium, are some business models being tried out. It still isn’t clear what works best. Therefore, there’s room for innovation.

So, all the news around this market have only incresed our excitement for building Bundlr. But they’re also a warning: that we should focus more on the feeback we’re getting from potential costumers and less on the competition. Now, back to work.