Thanks for the comment, Aditi! Mini-MVPs are a good comparison.
Applying this probe approach for platform risk would have been tricky. You can’t truly probe for this risk because of the long time horizons involved. Instead, we weighed the known platform risk of building on Google/Zoom vs the advantage of speed to market and an existing userbase. For us, the platform risk was lower than the risk of building from scratch and attracting zero users. You can always migrate loyal users from a thriving service. You can’t always recoup lost infrastructure investment.
We use probing as a stop sign to prevent us from investing dev resources in features that could break Tactiq or require more resources than we have. We’ve had a few features that went through probing which uncovered product gaps we had to plug to make them work. Often which required 5x more resources to build than we’d projected. Without probes, we would have accidentally overcommitted ourselves by building these, jeopardizing the rest of our roadmap.