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Tales from the PROS is hosted by Michael Georgiou, Co-Founder, and Eric Lawrence, Director of Growth at Imaginovation, an award-winning app and software development company. Each episode dives into honest, unscripted conversations, hard-earned lessons, and educational insight into how to help bridge the gap between technology and people.
If you’re a founder, exec, or innovator trying to navigate the tech world without getting burned, this podcast is your no-BS roadmap. Through real talk, personal stories, and insights from the front lines, you’ll pick up smarter ways to build software, steer clear of common mistakes, and choose the right partners in a crowded, often confusing space.
Whether you’re scaling a startup, driving digital change at a larger company, or just love keeping up with tech innovation, Tales from the PROS brings you straight-shooting advice and inspiration without the fluff.
Michael Georgiou (00:43)
Hey everyone, welcome back to Tales from the Pros and I'm your host, Michael Georgiou co-founder at Imaginovation joined as always by my co-host and our Director of Growth, Eric Lawrence. In today's episode, it's all about what happens after you launch your MVP. MVP is a minimum viable product and I don't just mean bug fixes or new features and updates. Today's episode, we're gonna be talking about some of the hard stuff, building traction,
creating repeatable revenue and evolving your MVP into a real thriving business. You shipped an MVP. That's great. It launched. That's awesome. Now the real work really starts. Getting your first customers, proving real demand and scaling what actually works or what doesn't work. Today, we're mapping that journey end to end using our Launchpad approach. How to solve the right problem.
Validate with real users and grow only when the data says you're ready. So let's get started. Appreciate everyone for being here. Thank you so much. Eric, what's up, man?
Eric Lawrence (01:43)
Hey, how's it going? This one's dedicated for all the entrepreneurs out there.
Michael Georgiou (01:44)
Good.
Yeah, yeah, let's do it man. Yeah, no be a fun be a fun show today I'm excited. Well excited kind of kind of get going so
Eric Lawrence (01:55)
Yeah, I'm excited too. And you know, the fun, fun part about what I do is, ⁓ you know, being on the front line, speaking with a lot of people, there are a lot of entrepreneurs that we speak with and everybody's journey is unique, right? But
Michael Georgiou (02:09)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (02:10)
The path to success, I feel like this is one that we've helped a lot of people take. There are a lot of similarities to it and there are things that we've learned along the ways. you know, from a technology perspective, that's what we really want to focus on today because for, build a successful business, there's, there's a lot of aspects to it. There's the marketing, there's getting the right people on board. It's having the right vision, but I think on the technology side, that's what a lot of people are really trying to figure out. And especially
if you're building a SaaS product. What does that roadmap look like? So I'm excited to talk about that with you today.
Michael Georgiou (02:45)
Yeah, that'll be good. And yeah, it's good because a lot of entrepreneurs, small businesses, startups, they really need some good, clear guidance. And I think just the approach that we have to share today will offer that to them. And it's going to give them something, hopefully tangible, something of substance that
is going to be very positive in kind of their journey and their experience of, know, once they've built a product and they've launched it in the market, kind of what happens after that? You know, how can they really get this product to be successful and to start really generating revenue, building into a kind of a operating business and, you know, making it scalable and successful for the future.
Eric Lawrence (03:29)
Absolutely.
Well, I think to, to at least get into it. know Michael, you have a background in entrepreneurship. You've been actually a part of, of counseling in a lot of those instances. So, might be good if you wanted to talk a little bit about your background, because you've probably seen a lot of both wins and losses in this arena.
Michael Georgiou (03:50)
Yeah, yeah man, mean, I think it's, know, in kind of the world of product development and when in relation to entrepreneurships and in relation to startups, when in my experience, the ones that created a product, even through us or through someone else, right,
When they launch it, what I've seen, what happens a lot, is they don't typically see a lot of traction and success after the launch of that minimum viable product. And I think that's where it gets really tough. Sometimes the initial build of it and the launch of it is not the hardest part. It's actually growing it, scaling it, improving, innovating it. of like a, it's like, in a sense, it's...
It's building a business. It's the same thing, right? Because the app or the software product that, the digital product that was launched, it's basically your business, right? It's your technology that you're getting to a certain target audience. You're trying to provide value. You're trying to solve problems and challenges and pain points to that audience. But it's not always that easy, right? There's a, think, a very clear path for success that we've seen at our company that can really
help and guide people to have true kind of product fulfillment, which therefore is going to help their customers, help their audience see positive impact from the products that they're launching out there in the marketplace. And there's a lot of steps to that. So I think today, we want to really discuss the ⁓ kind of the launchpad approach that we have here at Imagine Novation in today's episode.
And we have a visual that I think we can share today that it portrays, it expresses that journey pretty clearly. And hopefully it provides value to all of you out there. my hopes are that it's gonna lead you to be successful, because you don't wanna be that statistic out there that failed within a year or two or three years.
you know, after you launch your MVP out there in the market, right? You want to really scale it and grow it to reach its highest potential.
Eric Lawrence (05:57)
Well said. Before I get into the Launchpad program and walk through what that looks like, I want to start with the number one misconception that I run into when I talk to people. It's, it's when I speak with someone, they're so laser focused a lot of the times on what they want their product to be.
That's, that's all they want to talk about. It's this is the vision that I have. It's going to change the world. This is exactly how I want it to be. How much does it cost? How long does it take that sort of thing? And they're so laser focused on it. It's, like, once it's built, everything's just going to work out. Everything's just going to find its way to be. And really the reality is building that MVP is it's just step one. It's just step one of a bigger process.
Michael Georgiou (06:20)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (06:41)
And what your product is three years after it's built may be completely different. In fact, it probably should be different from what it was on the first day that you launch it. And that was a reality that I think we've, really having to challenge a lot of people and a lot of entrepreneurs on for some, comes natural and they understand that. But for others, they, they are so attached to what their vision is initially that viewing the bigger picture and the bigger roadmap.
has always been a struggle. So we really built Launchpad to align with the greater vision of what it takes to launch a successful product. So I'm gonna share my screen and we can walk through what Launchpad is and why we see it to be successful for, you know, a lot of the business out there that are bringing a product to market.
Michael Georgiou (07:30)
And Eric, that's really good, man, honestly. Kind of talking about the misconception, we see that a lot, right? Where it's almost like this micro type thinking where you're so emotional and passionate about your concept and your idea. Whether you're an early stage startup or you're an existing business, and we've seen this happen with both sides, right? Where even existing companies, sorry, even existing companies, they...
might have a ⁓ new product that they want to build and launch out there in the market, and even those fail. So, you know, there's a really clear path in our experience, right? Everyone has kind of their own processes and things like that. I'm not saying this is the blueprint, but this is what we have seen that works ultimately very, very well. And you just need to make sure that you're prepared, not only...
with the team that you have, with the funding that you have, with the plan that you have, but it's also with the mindset. A lot of it comes up here, right? And it's setting yourself with those expectations and that reality that it's a long journey. you said it great, Eric, that what you're gonna have now in the market or when you first launch your first MVP product, it's going to change and evolve.
later on down the road. It's like kind of raising the kid, right? It's like initially it's exciting. You're like, you you're so excited. There's a lot of difficulties too, right? As we know being parents, but you got to nurture it. You got to, you know, put your sweat, blood and tears into it to, you know, give it everything, right? To make it the best that it can be. It's kind of a little similar. I'm not comparing a baby to a product. I'm not, promise. So everyone calm down, but.
Eric Lawrence (09:11)
A lot of people
it is there,
Michael Georgiou (09:14)
But it is their baby,
exactly. I mean, this business has been our baby, so it's kind of no different. But yeah, we can go ahead and kind of get started on this, reviewing this process here that think will really help people.
Eric Lawrence (09:28)
Yeah. And to start with phase one, launching the MVP, this is what a lot of people are so keyed in on, which is getting their idea out there. And I want to start with this. and again, just talk about what all is involved in this first phase. So it says here, yeah, obviously like what, what you're trying to do is, really figure out what that core problem is. What's the why behind the idea? What's, what's going to be the key differentiating factor of what you are bringing to the market versus what's
already out there. And off of that, you want to, you don't want to get stuck in development for over a year. You, you ideally want to be able to launch lean. What's that minimum viable product that MVP doesn't have all the bells and whistles.
But that's, that's really the focus. That's the first piece is just like, get your product to market, launch it. I know for some, they want to go maybe even more prototype. This, this is less about prototype. This is more about if you're serious about building a product that's going to be successful long-term and you want to put a viable product out there from the beginning and not something that's going to be a throwaway. So I think that distinction is important.
Michael Georgiou (10:38)
Yeah, and we'll stay here for another minute or two. Not that we want to get too deep into the initial MVP, because we're kind talking about more of the process after the MVP is out there, but going back to the first step of building a minimum viable product, from our experience, it needs to be something that solves
a core problem out there in the market that fills in some sort of a gap or a hole or there's some sort of gray area out there. And whatever you're trying to do, there's thousands of ideas and concepts that have succeeded and many that have failed. But ultimately, it's to launch a product that solves a problem for a core audience, a target market or
you know, ICP or buyer persona, whatever you want to call it. But yeah, essentially that's what it's about. And in terms of the actual product itself, right? It needs to be simple enough where you're not making the product clunky, where it's over-featured rich, right? Sometimes we, you know, we worked, Eric, with new kind of, you know, MVPs that they wanted,
something that had everything in it, everything, all the features, functionalities. They wanted to solve 10 different problems and it ends up being a freaking clunky ass product, excuse my language, but it does. And it's cluttered, the user experience is poor. And that's where you need that guidance to ensure that you don't need to launch a product out there that's too overly featured rich. It needs to be simple.
Eric Lawrence (12:03)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (12:21)
with intuitive user experience, a strong user interface to capture the initial attention of your audience and allow them to engage with your audience, but also have enough rich features in there to get good feedback and to keep them engaged so you can continuously grow that product, right? So it's kind of a balance and then everything else comes later.
Eric Lawrence (12:44)
Absolutely. And looking at the next piece, which is phase two, that's once the MVP has been launched. What we see here is it's, it's a matter of getting your first customers. So we're looking at the first 60 to 90 days of when you're getting those first customers. That's when ideally when you have launched the MVP, you have a backlog of people that you might've collected their information on that you can get them on the system. People are really testing it. It's, basically like the grand opening of a virtual
store, you're going to get a lot of foot traffic. And with that, you're going to get incredibly important feedback. That feedback is really going to determine the direction that you take your product moving forward. And what we see for a lot of products that we build that happens at know, at phase two, when you start collecting that feedback, and start thinking
Michael Georgiou (13:20)
He
Eric Lawrence (13:36)
What am I going to do with this feedback? You start seeing new features and new requests coming through. Like, ⁓ you know, how can we enhance the platform in a way that people are willing to spend money? Because that's the whole idea is you need to figure out a way to best monetize the platform.
Because at the end of the day it's about making this a viable business for you And that's really going to be the part is you're understanding how users are interacting with your platform where they're finding the value and how can you leverage that value to come up with the best monetization plan
Michael Georgiou (14:12)
Yeah. And I would also say that for this phase after you launch your MVP, right, and you're trying to get it to your target audience, your future customer base, right? What we've seen that's worked is you need to really do it with a small segmented group of potential customers, right?
Who you built this product for? Who you built it for? Why did you build it for them? And what value is being received? What value your product is giving to them? What outcomes are your potential customers going to receive from this product? And it needs to be with a small...
group of people, you don't need to launch your product with thousands of people if your audience is that big. Hey, I we've built stuff for influencers and stuff where they'll launch it so quickly, Eric. I have one case years ago where we did this for a fitness influencer and it was a really great product. I can't say the name, but it was an awesome fitness product that we built and she was an influencer and she launched it to like...
I mean, don't even, mean, she had probably over a hundred thousand followers, easily a hundred, 150,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram. And we were telling her, we're like, listen, you know, we, we, we were begging you to just try to launch it to a small core group of people so we can iterate upon the product and improve it a little bit. So you're not going full throttle to your full customer base, right?
And then let's just say there are issues with the, not the product, it may not be the product itself in terms of bugs, but I'm talking about issues with the, maybe the, the, the, features that are in the product. Maybe they don't find the value that the founder thought would be received by the customers. And that's the thing, right? You have to be very careful. So you need to take it step by step, just take it step by step slowly, right? But surely find a small group of, of,
Eric Lawrence (16:04)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (16:20)
of people, 50 to 100, 200, whatever it might be, that are going to be very open with giving you feedback. And that is a powerful stage because that's what's going to give you the ammunition, the firepower to go back to your development team and fix certain aspects of the system of the product and improve upon it to get it ready.
for the actual market when you do launch it and when you do really promote it and advertise it. I think that's very vital.
Eric Lawrence (16:50)
Yeah, it's, it's critical. And it says here, this last piece, decide whether to pivot or persevere. Uh, it that's, that's it. Like by the end of that first initial piece where you're getting a lot of people on it, you should understand, is there enough value for, for me to continue or do I need to adjust what I'm doing? Uh, but really the idea is the outcome of this place is you, need to have enough data on the user behavior to, validate your, your whole why.
behind your product going into this and that leads into phase three finding the product market fit this is where
This you can see distinctly here. This timeline is much longer. You're out of the beta phase. You're into the, you're a growing business phase and you are scaling it and you're getting to a point where it's going to move past the breakeven point and ideally become profitable for you. But it's really going to be a place where you continue to gather feedback from users.
Michael Georgiou (17:31)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (17:51)
⁓ experiment and decide, Hey, you know, in my backlog of features of, how I'm going to enhance this product, what should I be prioritizing? Because you're, you're tweaking it. You're making it better. You're running marketing to get more users on it. And you just keep doubling down on what works to make it a better and better platform. This is, this is kind of like that critical stage where you transform it into a viable business.
Michael Georgiou (18:17)
Yeah, that's very well said. Yeah, it is. The product market fit phase is a very cool stage, in my opinion. In addition to everything that you mentioned, Eric, here, it's something that I feel is ⁓ very powerful to, or I would say a better word is important, right, to hone in to your...
target audience that is actually truly finding value from the product. And you'd be surprised sometimes the initial audience from the initial like MVP stage or the planning stage, right? When you have this idea, whether you're a startup or you're an existing business and you, want to create a new product, you might think, okay, the, we want to build here is going to serve this audience. Exactly. That changes, right? That's the reality of it. Sometimes that can.
that can change, we've seen it happen hundreds of times. And that's where you got to make sure that you're using data, right? Your audience data of how they're using the product, who's using the product, you know, and get that data and make sure that you're iterating the product based on the audience that's finding the most and the highest value from it. And that's what's going to allow the
The app, let's just say the mobile app, example, that's what's going to allow the mobile app or the web app to really serve a higher purpose and be ultimately successful. This is the stage that's very critical where if you can't get past this stage, there's a high chance of failure because you might even have to redo the whole concept. So you got to be very careful of who the audience, who the
app is targeting and how it's resonating with that audience and how they're finding value from that product and the outcomes that they're receiving from it. And that's what is, I think, very critical in this stage. ⁓
Eric Lawrence (20:07)
Yeah.
And the last
thing that I would add to this is that there, there is a lot of times when you're getting a lot of users, there's going to be a lot of feedback. So you have to be very selective about what feedback you really take action on and say, Hey, these are the things that I want to prioritize in my backlog. Because really at this stage, you should never lose sight that that product market fit in the outcome specifically. What does the retention look like? What does the
revenue traction look like you're balancing these things. And the reality is you can have a great product, but if you are not putting enough budget behind the marketing efforts and nobody knows about it, nobody finds it, or maybe your marketing efforts and how you brand it just don't align with the actual value that people are getting out of it. There's just some misalignment there that
that can lead to failure. So you have to be very selective at times about what features you want to add to it. Because if you just start adding a bunch of features and spending a lot of time and money trying to jump from new feature to new feature without getting any outcomes.
That's when you kind of burn through things a little bit faster. So for today, we're not talking about the marketing. This is more about the technology fit, but I'm bringing this up because from the technology side, for a lot of people we work with, they get a lot of feedback. So it's critical to really prioritize what enhancements you want to make at this point. And don't try to overload yourself on ways to change the product.
Michael Georgiou (21:24)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and to add to that, Eric, it's also, I think, it's critical to understand that sometimes during this stage, I mean, it's hard to say this, but like sometimes during this stage, what we've seen is when an initial MVP, I'll backtrack just a little bit, but when the initial MVP was built and was launched, and then you kind of have your...
core group of customers testing and validating the product, right? Getting it ready for the market. Sometimes in between the get your first customer stage to the find a product market fit, sometimes it requires a rebuild potentially. We've seen that and I know it's a harsh reality cause you're like, man, you're telling me I have to sometimes rebuild it. It happens all the time. It happens all the time.
And you've got to think of it. The initial MVP could sometimes be different than when you're at the product market fit stage. Because when you're building an MVP, initially, right, that's more simple, your target audience who you're trying to provide value to in the marketplace could ultimately change, which we talked about earlier.
And when you're in this stage, sometimes you need to either, I'm not saying it requires a full rebuild all the time. That's not true, but sometimes it does. And sometimes it, what can it, it can require is just like a refactor of the front end of the, of the, ⁓ of the product where the design and the user experience might need to be kind of drastically enhanced and even changed to make sure that it's going to be ready for market. Because now you have more data, right? You have
you have an understanding of who the audience is and how they're finding value and what it's actually providing to them. And that's what's also going to allow you to really start generating some real money, some real revenue to allow you to grow and scale your business.
Eric Lawrence (23:32)
Yep. So let's jump into the last phase, which is phase four scaling and growing.
This one from a product standpoint, again, this is a long timeline. but what we're looking at here, it's basically doubling down on, on what's been working before. You want to build that repeatable growth engine and you're expanding on what works for, your, your product. And this is a point for a lot of clients that we do work with where as they grow and as they scale and continue to take more ownership over their products,
because for some people, ⁓ a lot of entrepreneurs, this may not be their only focus in life. But as the product grows and takes on more more success, it becomes the primary focus. This is your business. And in those instances, there are times where you do transition to an in-house team where they take ownership and you're just growing your team in general. doesn't have to just be on the development side, but it's on the marketing side on the
Michael Georgiou (24:24)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (24:31)
HR side on the talent side, your business is growing and growing and you're building your in-house team. And then at the end of the day, it's just about outcome. You're continuing to grow the business and continuing to build just a product that delights your users.
Michael Georgiou (24:47)
Yeah. And it's a great phase to be in because in this phase, right, you're kind of in this part of the journey where you are generating revenue, you're making money and you're hiring some of your own people and you're going to be investing a lot of that back into the product to continuously grow it.
right, and nurture it and enhance it, improve it. And that's the thing, right? You know, what we've noticed throughout a lot of these phases, especially the find product market fit and the scale and grow phase, when they're starting to make revenue consistently and you're kind of starting to build like this product brand, right? And it's, like I said, it's a great place to be, but you're gonna be...
you're gonna also experience problems, right? And this is a reality of it. Like we tell all of you, right? We're not gonna BS you. We're gonna tell you kind of how it is, but you will experience problems as well where competition starts to really come in, right? And you're gonna be like, wow, we're not the only players here. You know what I mean? And there's gonna be sometimes periods or times within your journey
⁓ where you're going to have to try to differentiate your product even more. All the best products in the world, go through this, right? They end up in a much better and even a different place than they were initially because their audience and their customer behavior is changing, it's evolving, especially now with AI, that's all over the freaking place and it's everywhere and it's in our ears and in our faces and you can't get away from it, right?
Eric Lawrence (26:23)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (26:25)
That just shows you how quickly technology is expanding and how people are getting, ⁓ you know, they're getting smarter. They're getting more, they're getting pickier too. Customers are getting pickier and they want good personalized amazing experiences when it comes to SaaS products, you know? So that's why you gotta make sure that you're competitive in the market to ensure that your product is remarkable.
It's the best out there. And that's how you're gonna really make it, right? It's a long process. It's a journey. And it requires patience. It requires perseverance. It requires sometimes where you feel you might even have failed, but you just keep bouncing back up again. You just keep going. And that's what I would say is very important mentally to understand that. It's not just tangible.
It's not just the tangible product that you see in front of you that you're playing with on your phone or on your computer. It's kind of, you know, it's making sure that you're building something greater and you're innovating it and you're pouring everything into it to allow it to become the best that it can be, just like we all try to work on ourselves to become the best that we can be, right? It's the same with what we're trying to build out here in the world. So that's kind of what I would.
That's my final take on kind of that process.
Eric Lawrence (27:44)
That's good. That's good. And really those were the four phases of what we see out of Launchpad. So hopefully that's going to provide you the listener with some advice on from a technical standpoint, what sort of roadmap should you be looking at when it comes to building a successful product?
Michael Georgiou (28:01)
And speaking of successful products, Eric, might be a good time to kind of shout out our Tales from the Pro sponsor.
Eric Lawrence (28:09)
Yeah, that would be magic task. I would say we are probably in phase three of magic task at this stage, where we found a product market fit and it is growing successfully. But there's been a lot of feedback that we've gotten for magic task, which from our users, they love the fact that it's gamified. That's a huge piece. And that's what we're doubling down and really figuring out, Hey, the next version, which we are aiming for a middle of 2026.
let's add way more gamification to it. But as it is right now, it's an amazing simplified gamified task management system that we use to run all of our projects. So if you ever want to try it out, you can do so for free. It's at magictask.io and it could be used for just your daily to-do list or you could use it for work. It's really meant to be accessible for you if you're on your phone or if you're on your desktop.
And it's meant to get you away from other tools that can be a bit clunky because they're the reality is there's a lot of task management systems out there. So we want this to be for normal people that want something more simple, but more fun and rewarding. That's what it's all about.
Michael Georgiou (29:20)
Very well said. Yeah, cool. Thanks, Eric. Yeah, today's been great. Yeah, I think this is a really great episode I think we're really passionate about. And I hope all of you have found some value from this. And obviously there's a lot more information. ⁓ You can go to the link that we're gonna put in the description and you can check it out.
It's pretty much kind of a similar landing page from what we showed you today. And it has more detail, but if you are ever, you know, interested in learning more about the Launchpad program, please let us know here at Imaginovation. And yeah, we're really grateful for all of you listeners and hopefully this helps some of you out there. So thank you so much. But yeah, again, Michael Georgiou, your host here on Tales from the Pros with my co-host, Eric Lawrence.
Thank you everyone so much until next time. Thanks guys.
Eric Lawrence (30:10)
Take care.