Case Study: Blerp CEO Aaron Hsu's Search For Product-Market Fit

Learn how Hsu used prioritized user feedback to guide his startup's MVP development.

Oct 05, 2020

Author’s Note: This Case Study has come a bit early - trying to get back on schedule and stick to publishing these Monday morning. Thanks!

Note #2: Added introduction to provide context to what Blerp does! Sorry for not including this initially!

Executive Summary:

The Problem - Tracking User Engagement To Understand How They Use Blerp’s Product

You won’t know what to build without closely monitoring your user’s habit. Their behavior will give you clear signals as to what features are important to them or not.

Action Item: Whether it be a custom sales CRM or Google Sheets to repeatedly sample user behavior, you need to design your product or service to meet your power users’ needs based on their feedback and interactions.
The Solution - Build A Narrow, Focused MVP Guided By Power User Insights

Once you’ve identified what your power users care about when using your product or service, you must narrowly focus your MVP on resolving those core issues or building missing features.

Action Item: Be strict in limiting the scope of what you build with the limited time, effort, and resources in your early-stage startup.
The Takeaway - First, Understand Your Market Thoroughly. Then Build One Thing Well For Your Users. Repeat.

It’s clear that product-market fit (PMF) is an iterative process based on continually updating your understanding of the market you are trying to serve.
Action Item: PMF doesn’t stop after the first successful MVP - it has to be maintained. Improve your feedback collection process and conversion of that feedback into a great product or service.

Founder File: Blerp - Exploring Product-Market Fit

Blerp is hiring! Please reach out to careers@blerp.com to apply and be considered!

Blerp is building powerful products that empower people to create and express their digital voice through sound bites. The startup creates Blerp moments for our users when they share and play sound bites and understand how sound reaches places text and video cannot and convey emotion, tone, and rhythm. They’re currently focused in the gaming and live stream space with over 50,000 installs on our twitch integration 5,000 discord servers and growing by thousands of users a week. Blerp is furthering digital expression by making it easy to discover, create, and share audio bite content.

Blerp cofounder and CEO Aaron Hsu.

The Problem: Tracking User Engagement To Understand How They Use Blerp’s Product

What was the toughest problem you've solved recently on Blerp's journey to product-market fit?

Blerp is unique in that we have over seven integrations. We think of these as small businesses that drive value to our central platform. Our most massive platform integration on Twitch has been tough to track our users there and how to best optimize it. We ended up hacking together a sales CRM to help us track and monitor installs and active users. Now that we have it, it's been amazing how many insights we've received from it. We've been consistently growing for so long, but we never anticipated indeed how top-heavy our engagement is for our power users. We're still building different report building features that have helped us understand our users so much better!

Describe the nature of the problem. What are the critical constraints?

Today, there are no easy ways to find and share sound content. Google often points users towards youtube, which means you get the video and the search's audio component. In most cases, users are looking for just the sound clip, and a youtube video is not in a format that can easily be shared on a text message (have to scroll through and find the clip). Blerp makes it easy to directly share these clips' audio components directly into text messages, voice chats, and live streams.

One interesting constraint we've run into is trying to create the perfect sound search experience. Today we support images on Blerp and think about them like "cover art" similar to a Spotify playlist. However, we believe there are yet more innovations to come in this area. How does one quickly identify what type of sound you are looking at (is it an angry sound, happy or sad?) Is it high energy or low energy? Quickly and easily searching sound is a unique problem that hasn't been solved yet.

Additionally, one thing that is unique about sound sharing is the "surprise" element. You can think of this as the experience that Snapchat initially capitalized on. You didn't know what the picture was until you sent it. Similarly, blerp lets you send a sound in a text message, and you don't know what it is until you press play!

What was your initial thought process in solving the problem?

First, we mapped out all the products Blerp could be plugged into (i.e., live streams, messaging, stories, etc.). We then figured out that Twitch streamers were already sharing sounds but didn’t have access to a single library of high-quality sounds; we found a niche in which we could grow. This marketable discovery gave us a clear customer base to focus on, with Twitch streamers making up most of our customer base. We still have the vision to take sound sharing to more places like voice assistants and other social applications, but we’ll continue to focus on our gaming and live streaming niche for the next year. We get millions of impressions through streamers sharing Blerps with their viewers.

The Solution: Build A Narrow, Focused MVP Guided By User Insights

How did you evaluate your initial solution(s) before trying to implement them?

We did light market scoping and talked with a number of Twitch streamers to figure out what tools they were already using. We took a deep insight from watching live streams, seeing that sound already played a significant role in increasing stream engagement. We approached it by using a “build first” mentality, and designed the smallest scoped product we could to help streamers share sounds in-stream.

When you were working to implement them, what else did you discover that either confirmed you were on the right track or opened your eyes to a new facet of the problem?

Our initial assumption was that streamers were looking for more ways to add interaction on their stream. What we didn't fully realize is how communities would use them. Since launching, we now have over 95,000 installs of our Twitch extension. These streamers create soundboards on blerp.com and feature it for their subscribers. We're now known as "sound emotes" for your stream. We've always thought there was an opportunity to monetize your voice, but now we've seen even more evidence that this is possible.

When did you realize that you arrived at the right solution to the said problem?

We knew we'd found a solution when we saw moments like these created on Twitch.

It was then that we were sure we were onto something. We also started to come into contact with "power users" on Blerp and realized that there were users that not only liked us but loved the solution we presented to them despite a few initial bugs.

The Takeaway: First, Understand Your Market Thoroughly. Then Build One Thing Well For Your Users. Repeat.

Did that solution come with its caveats or tradeoffs? If so, what are they?

Distributing on Twitch meant we share revenue and are limited on certain features we can release such as view side sign in. Additionally, the sound sharing experience is also limited to Twitch; however, we think there are good opportunities on Facebook Gaming and YouTube Live.

What is your general advice for founders to face the challenges related to the now solved problem?

You must understand the market environment for which you are building. We’ve learned its much better to be amazing at one thing than mediocre at many! You can build so much more once you have an engaged user base so focus in on solving a clear problem for someone and build a platform and experience around that. Don’t start with the platform!

After solving this problem, what's the most challenging situation you face now?

We’ve found a strong initial base of loyal customers, but now we need to get the flywheel going from converting users from Twitch to our platform to our messaging apps. We’re invested in building a creator-driven economy where anyone can monetize their voice and share it on Blerp.

Previous F2F Q&A Articles:

Latest Forbes Articles:

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to check out my other work on LinkedIn and my personal website, frederickdaso.com. Follow me on Twitter @fredsoda, on Medium @fredsoda, and on Instagram @fred_soda.

Founder to Founder

Discussion about this post