Case Study: The Index Cofounders Focused On Creating A "Minimum Loveable Product" In Their Product-Market Fit Journey

Momentum and simplicity were the keys to Index's early PMF success.

Nov 16, 2020

Problem: The Need For An Easy-To-Use, Intuitive, And Useful Dashboard Tool
Business analysts without a technical background need to easily create dashboards tracking key metrics.
Market: Index Targets Pay-As-You-Go SMBs Instead Of Enterprise Customers
Dashboard creators at SMBs are Index’s target customers due to the startup’s pay-as-you-go business model, as they are easier to acquire then enterprise customers in multi-year contracts.
Solution: Building A ‘Minimum Loveable Product’ (MLP)
Index is a no-code dashboard builder for analysts to intuitively import, clean, and present data and key metrics. Their MLP was designed around momentum and simplicity.
Team: De-Risk Your Founder Relationship With A ‘Worst-Case Scenario Plan’
The core team consists of Xavier Pladevall and Eduardo Portet, who de-risked their founder relationship by creating a ‘worst-case scenario checklist.’
Takeaway: Momentum and Simplicity Lead To PMF
Index’s success has been because of its focus on product simplicity to drive momentum among their target customer base.

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I got the chance to speak with Xavier Pladevall and Eduardo Portet, co-founders of Index, about what they are working on at their startup and any advice they have for emerging entrepreneurs.

Index is a no-code dashboard builder. The startup lets users import data from multiple sources, remix it inside Index, and quickly get started w/ a set of pre-built templates.

Xavier is the co-founder & CEO of Index. Born and raised in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Xavier moved to the United States to attend college. While in school Xavier worked at Facebook where he spent most of his time working in internal tooling for product & operations teams. Eduardo is the co-founder & CTO of Index. Born and raised in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Eduardo moved to the United States to attend college. While in school Eduardo worked at Medidata - a large medical technology company where he spent most of his time working as a data engineer working on systems migration.

Index’s Founder File: On Evaluating Risk

Xavier’s and Eduardo’s Emails To Contact Them: xavier@tryindex.com & eduardo@tryindex.com

Index cofounders (from left to right): Xavier Pladevall and Eduardo Portet.

Problem: The Need For An Easy-To-Use, Intuitive, And Useful Dashboard Tool

What are the fundamental problems you’ve had to solve on your journey to product-market fit?

There are three main problems that we think about every day:

Data Hygiene: how do you make sure that all the data you’re importing from different sources is consistent and accurate (regardless of how it looks in the original source)?
Intuitiveness: how can you make an arduous task (data analysis) intuitive for non-technical folks?
Use Cases: what are the most relevant use cases for KPIs and business metrics? There is an almost infinite number of metrics a team might want to measure. Which ones should we help people track?

Why are these problems essential to solve for creating the best solution for your customer?

These are the crucial problems to solve for us because it helps us de-risk the business substantially. The most significant assumption that we need to de-risk right now is that Index is a tool that everyone can use inside a company (i.e., it needs to be intuitive). It needs to be used by different functions inside the company (i.e., it needs to have the right set of templates and integrations). If we de-risk these two points, we can keep building and expanding. It also means that we’re building something that our customers systematically find useful.

To identify customer pain points, we focused on creating a series of circles w/ the names of features inside each circle. We started building the main features we needed (import data, create graphs, etc.), and over time we will move towards the outer circles. To move to a new circle, we need to hit a particular milestone (e.g., revenue, engagement #, etc.) to make sure we're hitting specific proof points before we keep shipping features. This framework is optimized for helping us stay focused.

If we de-risk these two points, we can keep building and expanding. It also means that we’re building something that our customers systematically find useful.

Market: Index Targets Pay-As-You-Go SMBs Instead Of Enterprise Customers

Once you identified the critical problems to solve, what led you to realize there was a huge market opportunity to be unlocked by doing so?

To us, it was very clear from the beginning that there’s a massive opportunity here because it’s a market that already exists in some capacity. People are already paying for business intelligence tools. We think we can build a substantially better tool and expand that market.

Therefore, the real question for us has always been how can you build a product that can be 5-10x better than incumbents in terms of UX, pricing, and functionality. In other words, we’ve tried to take a bit more of execution risk rather than pure market risk.

There are most likely several segments of the market you could choose to attack first. What section of the total customer base did you focus on first to establish product-market fit, and why?

As you’ve correctly indicated, there are several ways to slice our customer segments. Here’s one way we think about it:

SMB vs. Enterprise: being a small startup, it might seem intuitive to go for the SMB and then move up-market. Although this is true, it was not a trivial decision because every other player in our category has a robust sales-driven motion to win large contracts. Nevertheless, we decided to start with the SMB market because it fits well w/ our self-service model, which is also part of our value proposition.

In all honesty, there wasn't any systematic customer research. We knew the problem because we had it ourselves, and the bet is that there were other people like us out there.

Had we started w/ a market research report, surveys, or something similar, we wouldn't have been able to build Index to what it is today. We would've just lacked the necessary level of insight.

In other words, we’ve tried to take a bit more of execution risk rather than pure market risk.

Solution: Building A ‘Minimum Loveable Product’ (MLP)

How did you build your solution to maximize its relevance with the customer and ensure product-market fit?

We found customers that we can text every day or at least every other day. This has helped us keep a very tight feedback loop for our product development. Initially, we would launch something, see our analytics, and maybe get some feedback from a survey or a few back-and-forth emails. That’s not enough if you want to build a phenomenal product. There’s a lot of nuance and context that you lose if you can’t regularly talk to a customer over some time. Finding a customer that you can chat with frequently is a bit hard but so worth it. If they’re somewhat representative of your ideal user, they will drastically accelerate your product development and clarify your roadmap.

What are the things you did that don’t scale to better shape your product development?

There are few things that people tend to mention when they refer to this idea of “do things that don’t scale,” including talking to customers, responding to customer support tickets, and rolling up your sleeves to do some guerrilla marketing campaign. We think that these are all great but would also like to highlight an area that doesn’t get as much attention:

Take time making product decisions: sometimes, it might be tempting to implement the first idea that comes to mind, but it’s honestly worth it to take some time and think about things for a while, especially if they’re vital interactions in your product. This is honestly hard to do because going through this mental exercise of considering 3-4 potential implementations for every business in your product doesn’t scale. Still, in the long run, it will help you build a much better product.

Our strategy was relatively straightforward. Define what's the minimum lovable product. What set of features do we need to build for our customers to use us daily and use a competitor to turn that off? We drew a line where we thought it was a nice-to-have feature vs. a must-have and systematically built everything above the bar.

Finding a customer that you can chat with frequently is a bit hard but so worth it.

Team: De-Risk Your Founder Relationship With A ‘Worst-Case Scenario Plan’

How did you handle conflicts between you and your cofounder when making product decisions at critical junctures to arrive at product-market fit?

Very good question! Before we started Index, we put together a google doc with ~35 tough questions that considered pretty much everything that could go wrong. (E.g., what happens if our significant others move to another country, what happens if we want to fire each other from the company, etc.). This is obviously an uncomfortable conversation to have, but getting that out of the way when we started allowed us to build a lot of trust and focus on the things that matter. The fact that we’ve been friends for a very long time has also certainly helped.

What essential qualities did you look for in crucial early hires to increase your chances of discovering product-market fit, and how did you prioritize what types of hires you needed to make first?

Team Size: one of the constraints we knew we wanted to account for is that regardless of how much capital we raise, we want to remain as lean as possible. With that in mind, our founding team will only be a couple more engineers. This should be more than enough to get us to our next round of funding. This means that we lean towards engineers that are a bit more senior because they need to take ownership of large parts of the product.

Use better tooling: as humans, we have limited bandwidth, so if there are some software or non-software tools that can help you increase your leverage, use them! I try not to be prescriptive because everyone has different needs but if you receive many emails or are copy/pasting blurbs, consider Superhuman. If you have a bunch of disparate notes, consider Notion, Roam, Bear, etc. If you're scheduling a lot of meetings, consider paying for Calendly. The point is that you should be willing to adopt and, in some cases, pay for these tools if they give you an edge/leverage.

Compartmentalize your time: have dedicated days for taking your meetings, doing product work, recruiting, etc. This will help reduce context switching.

…one of the constraints we knew we wanted to account for is that regardless of how much capital we raise, we want to remain as lean as possible.

Takeaway: Momentum and Simplicity Lead To PMF

What are the key lessons you have learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?

Focus on two things:

Momentum: everything becomes easier once you have momentum. Momentum is a precursor to product-market fit and something that you have more control over.
Simplicity: make sure you have as few moving pieces as possible. If your startup gets one important thing right, you will be fortunate. The more things that need to go right for you to win, the harder it will be to get something to work. Simplicity is also essential for your narrative (i.e., how you sell your company/product to investors, customers, employees, and of course yourself).

What’s the most challenging problem you’re facing now after solving the prior one(s)?

Defining a clear and automatic adoption process: our current customer set has been onboarded in an ad-hoc fashion and manually. The biggest problem that we have to solve right now is to figure out a way to automate those processes.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Pladevall and Portet: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Sara Du, Founder of Alloy: Alloy is a YC-backed eCommerce automation platform to help you reclaim time and focus on growth.
Parthi Loganathan, Founder of Letterdrop: Coming soon, they say!
Steven Fitzsimmons, Founder of Freshpaint: Freshpaint collects data from your website and sends it to your favorite marketing and analytics tools without writing code.

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