Our meandering journey with Lettre — from ideation to MLP

The “Aha!” moment

Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, Mashfique and I reconnected on a cold backyard deck in San Francisco. We’d known each other since childhood, having spent many years in Chittagong, but hadn’t seen each other in over a decade up to that point.

At the time, I was going to school for my Master’s degree, while Mashfique was working at Box Inc. I was super excited to have bought a new iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil so I could use apps like Procreate and Penbook for school and was showing him how good it felt using the Apple Pencil. As I showcased the impressive tactile experience of the Apple Pencil, Mashfique was reminded of the time he had developed an award-winning annotation feature for Box. The experience with the iPad and the Pencil, he said, felt instinctively familiar and flawlessly integrated. While browsing on the App Store for something new to try, Mashfique inquired about apps dedicated to letter writing. I pointed out that essentially, every note-taking app could serve that purpose.

The App Store was teeming with a plethora of such applications — Goodnotes and Penbook among the notable ones. However, that question sparked an immediate curiosity in us. We examined the categories on the App Store and found a gap — despite the multitude of options in the writing and productivity segments, there were no apps categorized under “communication”. We exchanged knowing glances, realizing we might have stumbled upon an untapped opportunity.

While we both shared a strong passion for creative projects, life happened and this seemed like one of those “ideas we had”.

The end……. (?)

PSYCH!

Fast forward to early 2023, I got an unexpected message from Mashfique.

“I made a prototype of that idea we talked about because I found some spare time, and guess what? My dad tested it,” he said, brimming with excitement.

Mashfique shared that his father, who has always had a challenging relationship with modern tech due to Parkinson’s, found an unexpected comfort in the Apple Pencil. Something clicked. In that moment, my mind catapulted back to an earlier conversation we had about his father’s ongoing struggle with the disease. I recollected suggesting, half-jokingly, that he introduce his father to the Apple Pencil — the way it makes handwriting on the iPad screen seamless for anyone to use, an assistive piece of technology supporting one of the first skills we develop as humans.

His dad, a journalist in his prime, seemed to have rekindled his passion for writing! His positive response encouraged us and confirmed our idea had potential. With the validation we needed, we decided to dive in, head first. This could be big, we thought.

The idea resonated on a personal level too. I envisioned penning letters to my technologically challenged parents. This could indeed pave a new path for digital communication on the iPad.

Over the next three months, we took our idea and ran with it. We made it available for a very small group of close friends, family and potential customers and refined it, polished it through numerous iterations, and finally had a solid MVP on our hands.

While we had a crystal-clear vision and were confident on what we wanted to create, we made sure not to fall into the all-too-common trap of building something we loved, but no one else needed. Instead, we studied user behavior, dug deep into the data we could gather, and most importantly, we opened a dialogue with our early users. We wanted to understand their needs, get a sense of their expectations, and invite their suggestions.

It’s unbelievable how many great exchange of lettres we saw during the closed alpha. Some of our users really put our app to the test, creating some incredible lettres; things we didn’t know our app could potentially do.

We also got some amazing ideas too. Best part, we would be able to build most of them; ie they are a part of our roadmap now! This is what inspired us to look beyond just a minimum viable product (MVP); we needed to make a minimum lovable product (MLP)

During this time, we simultaneously did three things

1. We built our core-team

2. We started building a brand

3. We ran extensive market research to understand the potential we (might) have with our idea. We found quite some interesting insights which really excited us.

^Covering these in detail would require separate articles so…watch this space.

This write-up is already getting too long, so let’s all just go home today. Thank you for reading this far 

Love,

Atik from the Lettre team

P.S. — We appreciate you ❤