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Have I been wrong about MVPs?
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Hey Reader, When I was in grad school I learned about the idea of an MVP or Minimally Viable Product. Basically it was the idea that you build the simplest working version ("viable") of your offer/product to be able to put it out in the world and get feedback on it as quickly as possible. In the creative space we see this all the time when people ask for "beta" testers for something new that they're launching - they've built a working version, but it may not have all the bells and whistles yet. I'm currently reading the book Life At The Speed Of Play by Mark Pincus the founder of Zynga (the game company behind FarmVille, Words With Friends, or Zynga Poker). There's an entire chapter called "The MVP Trap", based on the premise that we're at a place now where just taking the time to make something "viable" could be too much time invested before getting feedback. And he proposes a new idea: Let's call it Minimum Idea State (MIS). MIS isn't a whole product; it's just enough of an idea to put in front of your friends and target audience so that you can get useful directional feedback. In practice this is what it looked like for Mark: Ask any of our coaching clients - almost universally one of the first questions we ask when helping people build new offers is have you done market research with your dream clients. As creative service providers you don't have millions of users on an app that you can try a new button for one minute to see who clicks it - but you do talk to clients & your audience on a weekly basis. We've been asking people questions about their needs, wants, dreams, goals, processes, and all sorts of things that's helpful for us to make great offers for years - and to this day just about every person we've ever asked has been willing to tell us their thoughts, and the others were just too busy. What's an idea you've been sitting on for too long? This is where 1:1 coaching really shines - if you've been unsure where to start, how to make the math math, where it fits in your ecosystem, or getting it in front of your dream clients - between Jo's right brain creative strategy & my left brain business strategy, we'll walk you through testing, iterating, and launching that new offer. We have have space for one person to start before the end of the month - you can book a discovery call here to chat more. Lastly, I've been encouraged to hear the scrappiest founders say if you're not embarrassed, you're not launching early enough. -Mark Pincus
See you next week. Lyndon |
Jo & Lyndon
We're the ones you call when you want to talk through the hard stuff of entrepreneurship and increase your income. You'll get a weekly dose of business tips, resources, and "wait, that really happened?" stories from us when you subscribe to our email list.
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