From Research to Market: How Deep Research and Fast Prototyping Can Transform Your Startup to a High-Growth Company

In today’s episode, we’re joined by Nick McEvily, a seasoned founder, product leader, and business consultant who has helped several early-stage companies achieve exponential growth including his startups that raised $36 million and was named the 2nd fastest-growing software company in North America. Drawing from his deep expertise in securing funds, finding product-market fit, building loyal customer bases, and scaling operations, Nick shares practical strategies for thriving in competitive markets.

Nick also reveals the most common - and costly - mistake that startups make when pursuing product-market fit and shares insights on how to avoid it. You'll also discover tips for accelerating this process while saving on product development and engineering costs, along with strategies for transforming your brand into a customer-centered powerhouse through smart, inquiry-driven research. Don’t miss it!

In this episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we cover:

• How asking the right questions can drive high-growth business decisions
• Strategies to cut development costs and minimize risks with rapid prototyping
• Proven customer discovery methods for gaining deeper insights
• Practical tips for conducting thorough research to achieve product-market fit
• And much more!

If you have any questions on product-market fit and building a high-growth startup, you can contact Nick at www.nickmcevily.com or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmcevily.

To be a guest on our next podcast, contact us today!


Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands totaling over $2 billion in revenues? Visit HarvestGrowth.com and set up a free consultation with us today!

Transcript

Jon LaClare [00:00:00]:
Today we speak with an expert in early stage growth and he shares several principles that apply to any type of business, from software to consumer products. And these early stage approaches can also help later stage stagnant businesses that are looking to reignite their growth.

Announcer [00:00:16]:
Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow? You've tried other podcasts, but they don't seem to know Harvest the growth potential of your product or service as we share stories and strategies that'll make your competitors nervous. Now here's the host of the Harvest Growth podcast, Jon LaClare.

Jon LaClare [00:00:37]:
Welcome back to the show. Today I'm really excited to be Speaking with Nick McEviley. Now he is the founder of several businesses but also a consultant to many more startups and has had a long track record of success founding and advising companies that are high growth. So a lot of you that are listening, that's your goal or you may be a high growth company already yourself. We're going to talk about some topics that I think will apply to many businesses no matter what stage you're at or what type of business you are. Now back to Nick's background. He has raised tens of millions of dollars over the years for various startups of his own and for some companies that he advises as well. So one of those that he used to own raised $36 million and that company was named the number two fastest growing software company in North America a few years ago.

Jon LaClare [00:01:26]:
So an impressive track record. He knows what he's talking about. He's not just an advisor, but he's been in the Tren and built businesses and now helps others to do the same to really drive growth in their own businesses. Again, we're going to talk about several different topics, but one key tenet that Nick is famous for and really employs well in all of his businesses, whether he owns or advises them, is product market fit. And I want to dive deep on that, among other topics. But first, Nick, I want to welcome to the show. Thanks for your time today.

Nick McEveley [00:01:56]:
Oh, thanks for having me, John. It was a flattering introduction. Sure there's some successes you mentioned, but there's been some failures along the way and I'd love to share the lessons I've learned from that. So can help your listeners avoid those mistakes.

Jon LaClare [00:02:08]:
Absolutely. And I think, you know, as you mentioned, sometimes we learn obviously a lot from successes, but sometimes we learn more from the failures. And you know, as long as we are learning from those, they're great experiences to have and helps us to avoid them in the future. But also, you Know people that we might be helping out, advising or mentoring along the way. So first of all, let's talk about this product market fit that you are so well known for. What is it and how do you employ it?

Nick McEveley [00:02:33]:
Product market fit is a buzzword, but it's fairly self explanatory. There's a fit between two things here, the product and the market. Obviously we need to learn about each. The marketing includes competitors, landscapes, regulatory environment, the person at the center of this problem and the product. How are we solving that problem? What platform is it on, what technology is used to create it, how do we roll it out and have it grow while staying in line with that market? And I think one of the biggest misconceptions about product market fit is that it's something that you do once and once you find it, that's your holy grail and you just cash that ticket in. But in reality, especially in today's market, things are changing so frequently. It's an exercise or kind of an engine that I recommend having running in the background. So you're staying really in touch with the market as it, as it changes.

Nick McEveley [00:03:31]:
And you can change your product can change with it.

Jon LaClare [00:03:35]:
So do you have any examples of that, how you've been able to adjust the market fit? Because I know you do this a lot during very early stages, making sure that it's designed right, but also talked about in the right way to make sure you're, you know, you truly are fitting the market with it. But what are some examples, maybe one example that you've adjusted along the way.

Nick McEveley [00:03:56]:
I say the company I helped start Mode Mobile, start off as an app builder, made mobile apps. It was like a squarespace for mobile. It's really easy, click, drag and drop app builder that you could one click publish to Android, to Google Play and to the Apple App Store. What we realized after creating a great product, the interface is great, you could see a mock up of your app live as you were building it. The publishing was smooth, it was a best in class product. But what we really didn't realize was what happened after the publishing of the application. We did a great job of solving the job to be done of building an application, reducing the cost, increasing the accessibility to application for small businesses, independent artists, etc. But after they published it to the App Store, they needed to go and do a lot of work in terms of app store optimization, marketing the app, merchandising it so that they would drive traffic and people would download the application and stick around.

Nick McEveley [00:05:00]:
And what we realized was we would do a great job of building a stable application, a piece of software that would enable business initiatives, but they wouldn't be able to drive traffic to it. So their download numbers were smaller than they would like and that caused their retention with our application to suffer. So we needed to make a decision. Do we want to go and help them with marketing? Do we want to build the services arm that helps with the app store optimization, or do we want to create technology to automate landing pages for people that they can drive traffic to and increase their download numbers? And the answer was no, because it just would cost us too much money to set up those motions and the lifetime value of the customer wouldn't be impacted as much as we would have hoped. So we ended up shelving that technology, actually selling that technology for scraps to a small venue arm Ticketmaster, and use the API underpinnings of that app builder to build a new product. And the relationships that we had built with those, namely musicians and entertainers to build a new product. And that's a really great example of being a bit too short sighted, I think, with your product and where it lives in the, in the total journey of solving a problem for someone. If you're only solving one part, but you're reliant on another for it to succeed, that's, that's a pretty common problem that people are, you know, entrepreneurs are blind to what happens in their customers lives beyond the problem that they're solving.

Nick McEveley [00:06:33]:
So to find product market fit, I often recommend really falling in love with your user. Fostering this concept of like a documentarian would almost that you're exploring their life, you're understanding how they're feeling, what they're doing on a daily basis, their routines, habits, anxieties, and then mapping those and figuring out where you live within that and what that allows for is clear understanding so you don't have those blind spots like we did when we were building the app builder, and also surfaces new opportunities for your product in the future. So if you're just solving this one sliver here, maybe in the future you can expand your product line to solve other problems that exist within that spectrum. So I've been caught off guard in the past and now learn from those mistakes. Make sure that I'm thinking about the product in its full life cycle and journey so that I'm avoiding those blind spots.

Jon LaClare [00:07:36]:
Yeah. What is. So as you've been through this process so many times and learned from that experience, what, what's one way maybe to avoid going far enough down the road that you need to shelve, you know, a completed technology, et cetera. So what have you learned from that? That now you can help others? Earlier on in the process you kind of started to allude to it a little bit. But maybe what helps that process to now learn in the beginning to make sure you're on that right path?

Nick McEveley [00:07:59]:
Sure. We're all visual thinkers. I think communication between teams who think differently, like a marketing team might think differently than a development team, might think differently than a sales team, et cetera. But we're all visual. So what I recommend is making a journey map that's basically a visualization of your customer's journey. And there's a bunch of templates out there. It's a very common practice, but often not employed enough. Creating a customer journey map before they encounter your product and after they encounter your product will allow you to eliminate some of those gaps, empathize with the person's experience, moving from one point to the next.

Nick McEveley [00:08:39]:
And when you empathize to that degree and in that level of detail, you'll minimize the level of gaps. You'll have a really strong sense of or a muscle within the company to raise those questions. Have we thought about what the person's doing three months after they purchased the product? Cause oftentimes if we close the sale, we're just happy we got the sale and we move on to the next sale. We're not necessarily thinking about the customer service or customer support experience and how that could lead to drop offs and reduced retention, which then reduces the efficacy of marketing dollars. So I think it's important for us to see visually the entire customer lifecycle and experience in as granular as a process or granular of a way as possible so that you're reducing those blind spots, you're empathizing with the user that much more and closing the gaps in your service as much as you can so you're using your dollars as wisely as possible.

Jon LaClare [00:09:41]:
That's a great way to put it. And I think this conversation really applies, whether it's in software as we're talking about right now, or hard goods CPG or consumer products or whatever it might. And a learning I take from what you just described is being flexible. And I think so many times it's hard. When we're an inventor or a developer, a founder, we've got this amazing idea in our head and we know it's going to be success. We've got the passion for it. You know, we're a true entrepreneur. But if we're not flexible to think about.

Jon LaClare [00:10:07]:
Okay, well, I might be talking, maybe it's a great product, but it's talking to the wrong market, ready to make.

Nick McEveley [00:10:11]:
Some tweaks to it.

Jon LaClare [00:10:12]:
So being flexible. I love how you talked about, you know, understanding that customer journey in the beginning. Right. Planning that out, but also being flexible later on in the process to pivot. Right. So sometimes you, you know, things come up, the world may change. Right. Or the customer base may change and you know, that can force us to shelf our product or change it really.

Jon LaClare [00:10:33]:
Right. And be able to pivot and adjust as needed to push it in the right direction. Right. And that is a continual process of improvement throughout the course of any business. The importance of not being married to our original direction that we're so convinced might be, might be.

Nick McEveley [00:10:48]:
Absolutely. And I think inventors and scientists counterintuitively don't follow the scientific method as much as they should when it comes to a business idea because of the way that businesses have been spoken about and have been advertised. Entrepreneurship has been advertised as a solution focused industry. But in reality we need to be finding problems and gauging the severity of those problems, the frequency of those problems, and understanding the person who's holding them instead of falling in love with the solution first and just trying to come up with a solution and going to sell it. And I think a lot of people who have that mentality of coming up with a solution, going to sell it have not done this exercise of the consumer journey or understood their Persona. And I know that these are like, I think a lot of CEOs and you know, quintessential business folks think that these exercises are like for kids because there's some sense of creativity and like drawing or diagramming involved. And I think it's a thing that makes such a, makes the biggest difference. And so if we can all get over that of the feeling of like, you know, being in a facilitated discussion where we're all writing down ideas on post it notes and then we go and move them around and cluster map them or these types of exercises I think are the thing that's the bedrock of what I do.

Nick McEveley [00:12:16]:
Because when people aren't doing those things and they're not visualizing these ideas, the concepts just get lost, they get misunderstood, they get debated, maybe they get surfaced too late in the process. Like a concept that could have been thought of early on in design is now being considered in development and it's throws everything off. So I think it's really important for all of us to really consider these exercises Being beneficial and investing the hour or two that it really takes to do them because it de risks all of the execution processes that follow.

Jon LaClare [00:12:56]:
Yeah, I love how you compared it to the scientific method where we use that, employ that to develop it originally, but sometimes then we stop it. Right. I think it's even confusing. The word we use is solution. Right. We're developing a solution. It sounds, sounds like there's some finality to that. Like it is the solution, but it's really a stopping point along the way.

Jon LaClare [00:13:15]:
Right. It doesn't mean that we can't change it ongoing and you know, employing that continual. Right, exactly. Continual scientific method as we go forward. Well, I know you, you and your business, you help a lot of startups and early stage companies really go in the right direction, setting short term and long term goals for really driving success for the overall business. And a couple of quote unquote buzzwords you use are doing deep research and fast prototyping. I'd like to talk about both of those. So what do you mean by deep research? How do you employ that in your process in order to help these businesses grow?

Nick McEveley [00:13:49]:
Yeah, I'm not clairvoyant, John. I don't have the answers, but I do know how to surface answers that give us confidence. So the way to do that is by asking the right people the right questions. And I think a lot of people in businesses, I've had conversations just this week with some of the founders I'm working with where they're assuming their customer is one person and so that they're selling to that one person. But really that's the buyer Persona. Right. But it's really, it's the user that they need to be architecting the solution for. So let's say it's a customer service tool.

Nick McEveley [00:14:25]:
They're selling it to the head of customer service or to the head of operations who's concerned about these KPIs responsible for these things. But the person who's using it is maybe two rungs below is like a customer service representative or a customer success manager who needs to be looking at dashboards and integrating this widget with two other tools and linking it up. But we're blind to those needs because we're so obsessed with the executive who's buying the tool. And so by choosing the wrong person to examine and to understand, we are building a suboptimal solution. So even though we think we know the user who's buying it, who's actually using it, is that the person that we need to be understanding the Most confusing these two Personas with the buyer and the user is super common. So I think understanding the psychography and the habits and behaviors of the person who's using your product as well as the person who's buying it, instrumental to success. And choosing the questions to ask these people is really important too. When I talk about deep research, I mean deep empathy and I also mean research that is representative is surfacing insights that will fuel the rest of the company as well.

Nick McEveley [00:15:49]:
Product is conducting the research, but sales, marketing, hr, hiring, fundraising are all impacted by the results of the research that we do as product people. And so I think we have to include them early on when we're coming up with the questions. Let's say it's like we're asking these questions of this user, not the buyer, but the user, and we're curious about their needs. Here's the questions that are going to affect product. We're probably drafting the questions first, but marketing is curious, Sales is curious about the answers to those questions. Maybe we'll get to the end of the research process in synthesis and talk about all the conclusions and recommendations and sales will be like, well, why didn't we ask this question about their most pressing metrics internally and how we can affect those metrics or improve those metrics or marketing will voice their concerns, Their voices weren't represented when that happens. We weren't using the research tools and budget and resources wisely because we could have really given valuable insights to other members of the team. So deep research is choosing the right person and it's asking the right questions and then it's synthesizing that in a digestible way that the whole entire team can capitalize on, not just product.

Nick McEveley [00:17:12]:
That's what I mean by deep research.

Jon LaClare [00:17:15]:
Well said. It reminds me as I think back to when I got my MBA at the University of Chicago years ago, I was interviewing with a few consulting firms, know the Big McKinseys of the world, et cetera. And I learned a lot about their process during that. Now I went a different path and have been, luckily for me, I love what I do. But you know, launching new products, et cetera, my sort of career since then. But a lot of what they do, you know, these high powered consultants as they're called, right. It really is. They just get paid to ask questions, right.

Jon LaClare [00:17:41]:
They're brought in to big organizations to ask the right questions. You know, these are later stage Companies, typically, right. Fortune 50s typically are. There are their clients, but really that's their expertise is just asking questions. And I Think, you know, if we can now employ that or bring that into our businesses at an earlier stage, right as we're launching or building a business, driving that high growth. It just comes down to asking the right questions. And it doesn't take genius necessarily. It's learning the process, learning what questions to ask, but almost more importantly, making sure you are asking questions, you know, continuing.

Jon LaClare [00:18:13]:
I love how you said the scientific method before. I keep going back to that, but it's continuing that scientific method which is really just vetting and proving and asking questions along the way at every stage of the business. Yeah, absolutely. You talked about fast prototyping as well, or you do talk about that as part of your process. Can you go into that a little bit more detail?

Nick McEveley [00:18:34]:
Yeah. Prototyping is great because it's cheap and fast. To make a prototype of something you're usually not having functionality, there's not too much feedback from the system to the user. It's mostly user input. And what that allows for is reducing your costs. The alternative is you build something, it's a little bit easier because we have no code tools these days and AI can code stuff for you so much more cheaply. This might be an antiquated perspective, but the idea of prototyping is based on design. Moving pixels in a vector software is so much easier and cheaper than it is moving code with a well educated engineer deploying that, testing it QA and then maintaining it over time.

Nick McEveley [00:19:30]:
When you add code, is it messing with things? So there's just a lot of weight associated with real development. What I like to do in the prototyping phase is reduce a lot of the risk of those engineering decisions. The way that we can do that is through, you know, these really powerful prototyping tools. Framer, figma, Protopy, rip, Envision. But there's, there's been these tools that have been cropping up over the last five years or more that really empowered designers to test business cases fast and effectively to at least illuminate some of the issues in either the UI or the engineering, like the database configuration and the architecture of the platform before engineering begins. And then that ultimately reduces cost and time spent by engineers on an ongoing basis, which kind of can compound because software is additive and we hear the word refactor a lot. And if you're refactoring something and you're doing that frequently, especially means you didn't make the right choices to begin with. And that's totally fine because software is soft and that's beautiful.

Nick McEveley [00:20:42]:
That's the benefit of software. But it's also a symptom that you might have not been prototyping enough or haven't been de risking some of those engineering decisions sooner.

Jon LaClare [00:20:53]:
Well said, Nick. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would be helpful for our audience?

Nick McEveley [00:21:00]:
I would say that the mentality that we all take to customer discovery is really important. The most common mistake I see is that sales founders, marketing founders, even technical founders are talking to their customers in a sales way. You don't want to be selling your product to someone. You want to be showing them that you're really curious and that you're interested in their opinion, the way that they live their life, and building something that will serve them, not the other way around. Because I think your posture and demeanor in an interview should be one of a researcher, should be one of a curious person, not of a salesperson or of someone who's looking to get something specific out of that interview. You want to be open minded. And when you take that perspective of staying open minded during a customer interview, their posture will change. They'll start generating ideas with you instead of reacting or staying a little bit more closed off because they feel like you're trying to sell them some shit.

Nick McEveley [00:22:08]:
And the quality of the ideas and the feedback that you get will be so much more improved. That's what I would leave with the listeners today, is to stay curious during your customer discovery process and try to remove your ego and preconceived notions that you have goals, that you're going into it, obviously write the script well, have some ideas on what exactly you're testing specifically. But be an explorer with your customer and if you've done your job well, they understand themselves at the end of your interview better than they did at the beginning of it. And you've been able to surface some things that are hopefully really unique that competitors are not, because you're inquiring that much more earnestly.

Jon LaClare [00:22:57]:
Thank you. Well, to our listeners. Nick has run several successful businesses, as I mentioned early on in this interview, but now he helps clients. He helps companies to grow from early stage basically into the stratosphere, whether it's raising money or bringing on early customers or developing your product, et cetera. He can really be a tool to use as a resource in your own business. Nick, if any of our listeners want to get a hold of you, how should they do that?

Nick McEveley [00:23:23]:
I got a website, nickmceveley.com and I'm also on LinkedIn posting some stuff, but I'm just a guy, so no big brand, website or agency associated with me. Just looking for some interesting, innovative folks to help share my lessons with.

Jon LaClare [00:23:42]:
That's fantastic. Please I encourage everyone to go to his website. We'll include the spelling of the website in the show notes. Or if you're driving, go check it out on YouTube or whatever podcast platform you might be listening to. This I do want to mention as well. Did you know you can meet with a member of my team absolutely free for a free 30 minute strategy consultation? Over the years, we've launched and grown hundreds of products since 2007. We learned some of our strategies while growing OxiClean back in the Billy Mays days. We're here to help, so please go to harvestgrowth.com and set up a call if you'd like to discuss further.