#60: How to Build A Startup Part 2: How to define and build an MVP for real
How we're building Magical Audios without funding or coding skills. The process so far.
👋 Hola friends! Thank you for opening my email! I truly appreciate it.
If you’re new here, I’m Kax — welcome! How to Build What Feels Good is my weekly newsletter about becoming your favorite version of a Leader, building a purpose-driven startup or any business, and navigating all the human mess in this often cynical world of tech… while still having a happy and healthy life.
🎉 Happy Birthday Magical Audios!
Today, January 29, 2025, our startup will turn 1 year old! While the product itself was launched on June 2025, my co-founders and I said YES to each other on January 29, 2024.
Since then many people have asked me how to find their startup co-founder, what steps they can take to find their product-market fit, or find customers without funding.
So to celebrate our upcoming birthday, let me share with you a 3-part story about the practical step-by-step of how we started and how we got here with Magical Audios.
So in this series, I’m writing about:
How to bootstrap an MVP - this issue
How to find customers - coming soon.
This is not a best practices story nor is it a success story (at least not yet). Just a “this is how we’re doing it in real life” story.
And today I’m sharing with you:
How we went from idea to MVP
What research looked like for a team of 3
How we validated our assumptions around our ideas
Because if you think that you can’t do it because you don’t have funding, tech skills, or permission from your boss… let me assure you that you’re wrong. And that’s a good thing!
01 We started with an idea
I can almost hear the collective groan of the PMs and UXers out there who have been fighting the good fight of convincing their organizations and stakeholders to start with the problem 😂
But also to the leaders and stakeholders out there reading this post, this is not meant to defend your feature requests either.
Instead, this is to say that it’s ok to start wherever.
You can start with an idea. Or you can start with a problem. It doesn’t matter.
We started with the idea of making hypnotherapy audios (like guided meditation audios) to make the treatment accessible, especially for women who have a multitude of problems that often get ignored.
And that idea alone gave birth to a long list of questions that we needed to find answers to (in no particular order)
Why hypnotherapy?
What can we solve with hypnotherapy?
Who would we solve these problems for?
Will people be willing to try hypnotherapy?
How can we serve hypnotherapy to these people?
Pretty much to sum it all up — what does our idea even mean?!
02 Which triggered the need for research
We had so many questions and not a lot of resources so we needed to prioritize.
We started with the questions that we can easily find answers for.
Why hypnotherapy?
What can we solve with hypnotherapy?
Good thing we have a professional Hypnotherapist in the team who can answer these first 2 for us.
There were so many problems we can solve with Hypnotherapy like pain management for women in labor or with period problems, symptoms management for perimenopause and menopause, insomnia, addiction, phobias, wellness problems, mindset problems, and even fears and self-limiting beliefs.
At that point, the question was — what can’t hypnotherapy help with?
And why hypnotherapy? Without going into a full thesis here… because hypnotherapy works. (But you can read the short article Andrea wrote to explain how it works here)
But for every answer Andrea gave us, it just opened up a box of about 500 more.
So now we know that hypnotherapy can solve a lot of problems and that it works, it gave birth to 300 more questions.
Questions that science journals and Andrea’s training won’t be able to answer for us.
03 It was time to talk to our target market
We started with having an assumption for WHO:
We had a wide target audience: Professional Women mid-careers in their 30s to 50s
We assumed that this segment of women were juggling the complexity of navigating a career alongside being: a caregiver, going through hormonal challenges, or potentially going through transformation in their personal lives (ending relationships, starting new ones, deciding to be child free, etc)
Still broad but at least narrow enough to start identifying who we wanted to talk to.
Once we knew WHO, it was a question of HOW and WHAT:
As in how do we reach them and what do we want to know.
The list of the things we wanted to know was long. So we had to prioritize.
We wanted to know what were the most common pain points that had the biggest impact on women’s lives
We wanted to know what they were doing to solve them and if they were effective
And what would their reaction be to the idea of hypnotherapy
Where and how did we reach them:
We joined many relevant communities as possible (e.g. Facebook groups, SubReddits, Slack communities, Whatsapp groups, meetups, etc.) and sent out surveys
We organized events and focused group discussions in exchange for a free hypnosis audio
We wouldn’t shut up about it to anyone and everyone we know in an attempt to get any serviceable insight (I, for one, was insufferable 😂)
spoiler alert for next issue: this is how we also built our waitlist and got our first customers.
🎙️ I’m going to get on my soapbox on this one because a lot of the Product Managers always complain about this part one way or another:
1. PMs in bigger organizations complaining about how their organizations don’t allow them to talk to users. Lucky PMs in smaller companies.
2. PMs in smaller organizations complaining about how they never have budget nor infrastructure to talk to users. Lucky PMs in big companies.
A common theme that surfaced from these complaints is that talking to users seems to equate to fancy user interviews.
That plus the grass is always greener on the other side.
So let me say this: You don’t need to have fancy interviews and all the processes and costs that come with it to be able to talk to your audience.
If you’re a PM or a Product Leader and this 👆 right here, is your struggle - I’d love to help you think about different tactics to talk to your users, influence your leadership to adopt a Product centric culture, or just feel good about where your career is going. Let’s chat!
04 We started validating our idea.
Insights gathered, problems prioritized, target market identified, we wanted to start validating our assumptions around our idea.
Assumption Example: We wanted to validate that the problems that people mentioned were important were really THAT important.
As in they were willing to do anything about it.
How did we test this:
We invited people in the communities we’re part of to join a Whatsapp group if they wanted to solve problem X.
We told them we’ll be sending corresponding hypnotherapy audios for their problems.
Everyday, new audio. All they had to do was listen.
So we measured success and increased our confidence through:
how many people were joining our Whatsapp group
how many plays our daily audios were getting
And we kept getting feedback.
So from here, we started building.
04 We started building
We built many things before we landed on the iteration we have now. But let me share the last 3 and all the fuck ups that went with it 😂
Important caveat here is that we don’t have anybody who can code in our founding team. So anything that needed coding has to be outsourced.
Fail Build 1: We built a library of guided self-hypnosis audios
Our premise was that since women already knew what they needed help to feel better about, we can just give them an entire library’s worth of audios and they can pick and choose.
Did not work.
We got feedback that having a library worth of guided self-hypnosis audios felt intimidating. Which one worked best for their problem?
Guided self-hypnosis audios still felt too foreign for people. How does it work? Is it safe? How often should they listen? Can they choose listen to different audios from different themes at the same time? What if they chose the wrong audio?
Back to the drawing board!
Tool of choice: Wordpress
Outsourced help: Hired a designer who also helped us out with the Wordpress set up
Fail Build 2: We designed courses/tutorials
Our premise was that if we help people understand how hypnotherapy works, we they’d get over the initial fear, and feel more confident to choose their audios well.
Did not work.
We got feedback that well… people just didn’t want to bother with learning. To no fault of their own. They were already exhausted, demotivated, in pain. Adding to their mental overload was definitely not the value they were looking for.
Back to the drawing board!
Tool of choice: Teachable for the courses
Outsourced help: None. I set up and designed Teachable.
Our Current Build: We designed programs targeting specific problems.
Putting everything we learned from the previous build and the learnings from our experiments before — we landed on a few conclusions:
The Whatsapp group experiment worked because people were being given the audio. They didn’t have to think. We were thinking for them.
Which makes sense considering the majority of the problems we prioritized to solve meant that our target audience was just too exhausted to think at this point.
And that’s how we landed in our current version:
We started targeting the specific problem areas our target audience complained to us about
Andrea put together several audios in a specific sequence that she deemed to be most effective at addressing the problem + other underlying problems that contribute to it
I set them up in a way that we were delivering the audio to those who signed up every day for 7 days. With clear instructions on how to listen + optional materials that can help amplify the impact.
And we’re on our 3rd program and people are signing up to join, completing the programs and giving good feedback.
This version also opened the doors back to our first build. With customers who have tried the available programs but feel more confident now in choosing audios for themselves.
Our biggest challenge now is to widen our potential customer pool — but that’s for another story.
Tool of choice: We continued using Teachable for this since it can support the set up that I needed.
Outsourced help: Design was outsourced to a friend who agreed to do it for free in exchange for hypnotherapy. I did all the technical setup.
05 In Conclusion
It took us half a year to get to the version of Magical Audios that we have now that’s actually getting traction.
We had our constraints:
We were a team of 3
We didn’t have any funding
We didn’t have any designer nor developer in the team
But knowing our constraints early and not fighting against them is what, I think, helped us move faster.
Kat and Andrea’s out of tech experience actually brought us so many ideas that did not require a single line of code (yet another point for diversity, friends!)
We had no processes but we had learning intentions. Which made it easier to find insights every single opportunity we can.
We purposely wanted to make fast decisions so we can change our mind quickly too if we need to. And our size and stage is an advantage for us to do this.
But every decision meant cost. And we were draining money from our pockets fast. So we also needed to be mindful of those decisions and be intentional about where we want to put our money.
Instead of spending so much time being frustrated by our constraints and limitations, we let go. We can’t change our situation. But we can change our mindset about it.
So note to PMs:
If you feel like you don’t have the means to talk to your users or experiments, think again. 👆 you might not have the means to do it as the books say, but you definitely will always have the means to do it one way or another.
If you feel like you don’t have the permission to talk to your users or experiments… do it anyway!
And a note to the leaders out there:
If you give your team the right environment to build, even with half the resources, I assure you they can build value. If we can do it with 3 people, you can do it too.
Questions for you!
For the startup peeps reading this who have co-founders:
How did you get to your MVP?
I’d love to read your stories in the comments section below 👇
📣 My 1:1 coaching waitlist for March is open!
Are you an accidental Product Leader and you need help navigating your new leadership role, set up your team for success, and make sure you have time for the rest of your life?
Are you an experienced PM wanting to be perceived as more senior and be top of mind for cool opportunities that always seem to pass you by?
Are you a Senior PM not sure if you want to make a jump from IC to Leadership or just feeling very very very unsure about your performance and where you want to take your career?
I’d love to support you! My approach is a balance of practical work - wherein we define goals for what you want to achieve, design a strategy for it, and identify next best actions that you can take in your day to day. As well as mixing it with a holistic approach to make sure you have the right system to take on your challenges with energy and strength.
I’ve built products and product organizations before. I know how it works. And I definitely know how it feels.
If this is the kind of support that you’re looking for, I’d love to chat!
If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me til the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.
❤️
Kax
PS. Here are more ways for us to connect: