Learning and Profiting from Black Swan Events — Val Agostino, Monarch Money

On the podcast:The importance of passion for the product you’re working on, how to differentiate in a crowded market, and why achieving the ‘viable’ in Minimum Viable Product is harder than ever.

Key Takeaways:

📉 Ad-based revenue models too often lead to a degraded user experience. For ad-supported products, the real customer is the advertiser, not the end user. This causes a conflict between doing what’s going to create the best product and what’s going to drive the most advertising revenue. 

🚀 The bar for what makes a “viable” MVP is always getting higher. While no app first ships as a fully-formed 1.0, it’s now rarely viable to launch an app as a barebones MVP (minimum viable product). There are just too many apps offering too much competition to not offer a compelling reason for a user to switch. 

🔍 The “Jobs to Be Done” (JTBD) framework allows you to dig deeper than surface-level features. Gathering user feedback is essential, but users rarely request what they truly want. JTBD demands going deeper than feature requests by addressing the underlying need that the user wants to fulfill. 

❓ To get to the root cause of a user problem, ask the “five whys”. When a user makes a request, get into the habit of asking “Why?”. The more times you ask, the more clarity you’ll have on what you actually need to build, giving you jobs-to-be-done that can best meet the needs of your users. 

🌀How to capitalize on “black swan events”. Adaptability and swift action are key to managing unexpected high-impact events. It's essential to pivot from past decisions without being anchored by sunk costs and to act and ship quickly to capture new opportunities.

About Guest:

👨‍💻 Seasoned Internet entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience building groundbreaking apps.

🌿Formerly an early employee at Mint, Val had a vision for a better, more user-centered financial health app.

💡“Try to pick a problem that you want to work on for 10 years — even if it were to fail. That’s how I feel. Even if Monarch were to fail, I would feel good that we moved the ball forward, we did something, we helped people along the way.”

👋 LinkedIn

Episode Highlights:

[7:54] Ads vs. subscriptions: Why subscriptions (not an ad-supported model) were Val’s first choice for Monarch.

[9:12] The real MVP: In today’s subscription app world, the bar for a minimal viable product has gone way up.

[13:46] Just ship it (or don’t?): Getting customer feedback during the design phase may take more time up front, but it means identifying your users’ key “jobs to be done” in fewer product iterations.

[23:10] The five “whys”: Ask yourself… what is your app really selling?

[24:56] Disappoint-Mint: How Val went from the Mint team to creating Monarch — and what happened when Mint shut down.

[34:17] Modern marketing: Talking to potential users on forums like Reddit can be an effective way to build trust and win fans.

[36:31] The butterfly effect: What’s next for the Monarch team and business.

[38:02] On a mission: Val and the Monarch team are passionate about helping users improve their financial health.