3 Tabs in Chrome = App!

We launched our MVP with zero lines of code - it's held together with chewing gum, but it works.

You’re spinning five plates, whilst people are throwing plates at you, you’ve got an itch on your nose, and your arms are tired. If you stop, or drop a plate, you’re shot. If you keep going until the bell rings, you get to try again with eight plates next week.

If you pass that round, you get to bring seven friends along and you can all just spin a plate each, maybe two if you’re feeling adventurous.

That’s the game we’re currently playing, and the first bell is about to ring. Good. My wrists ache, and with the number of plates strewn across the floor, you’d think there’d been a month of Greek weddings in the office.

Our MVP and Funding

Wednesday morning is our second pitch to the Antler Investment Committee to raise pre-seed funding. In the last few weeks of my blog-less toils, we’ve onboarded our first vendors, launched a private beta-test (v.0.000001) of Tappy, and proven our concept. This app consists of three Chrome tabs: Google Sheets, Glide, and Zapier - oh, and there’s a Twilio account in the background sending automated SMS.

We opened up on Tuesday to the first ~30 users keen enough to sign up from our mailing list, then shuttered the gates. Why? Those first 30 are likely to be the keenest users, most accommodating of shoddy functionality, and most inclined to give feedback. Not to mention, actually use the app.

This also gave us breathing room - we anticipated that it would break, there would be flaws in the back-end logic, and gaping holes in the UX which we’d need to patch, pronto. We sent the email out en-masse to our ~500-strong waitlist, knowing we were jumping off a cliff and would need to build the plane on the way down.

“We need to strangle the growth of this” is not a sentence often spoken in most businesses, unless you’re in the PR department of an airline which has just kicked the hell out of one of its passengers, or of an oil company which just ruined an ocean. In this instance, we had to launch with a closed beta, as the app is viral-by-nature. It revolves around users sending things to one another - if each user sends a ‘tap’ to three of their friends, then this will spread faster than… well, I can’t think of a suitable metaphor right now. That’s great news if you have a dedicated support team and tech team in place that can handle outages, but when I’m out and about and the best I can do if anything fails is fiddle with the Google Sheets app on my phone (our current back-end!), it’s perhaps prudent to not open the floodgates just yet.

The feeling of the first transaction coming in, that wasn’t from our parents, or friends that I’d blackmailed, was surreal. When your phone is buzzing more throughout the day with notifications of transactions than it is for the group WhatsApp chat, you know you might be onto something.

The best part is the validation of our use-case hypotheses: people are buying one another drinks for birthdays, as a treat-now-but-for-later, and for remote gifting during COVID-19. They’re setting up dates, planning catchups, and sending other everyday messages, but sending those messages with some weight attached, usually in the form of beer, bubbles, or a bun.

This is all well and good, but now the hard work really starts - once we’ve raised funding, we’ll need to onboard the next few hires of our team, and get to work building a watertight product, onboard more vendors, and market to more users. Whether we raise funding from Antler or elsewhere, we’re excited to see where we are in one, six, and twelve months from here - because now I’ve seen a glimpse of this in action, I’m sure-as-shit not letting it fail, and the threat of returning to a corporate job is more than enough impetus to get us to the moon.

If, ultimately, the Antler investment committee decide not to back us on Wednesday, then there’s a plethora of VCs and Angels out there - we’ll make it happen, but it will take a little more email-tennis and pitching to get over the line, and I’ll have a few more plates to spin.