Minimal Viable Product

Aside from the usage of expletives, there are several other similarities in Jonathan Wegener's Minimal Viable Product (MVP) article to my "Kevin Costner is Full of Sh*t" posting (more on the title below).

A little background: an Minimal Viable Product is the 1.0 version of your software, service, product, whatever, that you can go to market with. It is called minimally viable because it is just that: it is the quickest thing you can whip up that demonstrates your core thesis or offering, with little room for much else. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, famously said: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

This principle can be difficult to follow. Jonathan Wegener, author of Back of the Envelope, points out:

"Manhattan is full of gorgeous skyscrapers. No self-respecting person walks around thinking to themselves “Gosh, if I were going to build a skyscraper, I’d want mine to look like sh*t.” That just doesn’t happen! Instead, we have a natural tendency to want to ‘one up’ the status quo: “I’m going to build a skyscraper out of gold!”"

I was guilty of giving into this line of thinking when I was building myBusinessTies in 2005 (a Facebook for Wall Street back when Facebook was just for college kids). I was following the Kevin Costner "build it and they will come" mantra. I developed a fully featured and stylistically beautiful networking platform, but had no customers and no idea how to acquire them, or even if they wanted what I was peddling. My result: long development time and significant effort invested, full product, but no idea if anyone wanted to use it, and no user marketing strategies.

If following the MVP strategy is the way to go, you might wonder why you don't see more of them out there. The answer that Jonathan offers up is:

"the heart of the issue is that very few of these minimal viable products exist in the real world. Why? They rarely stick around! Customer feedback quickly drives additional improvements and features. Soon, memories of the mediocre original product completely fade away!"

Bingo. MVP either guides your product forward quickly or advises you to cut your losses, avoiding over investment into a less-than-promising venture. What I should have done with myBusinessTies was spend less time developing and more time reaching out to my potential customer-base, demonstrating the core offering of the platform, gathering feedback, and then iterating my product appropriately (or realizing that Wall Street didn't want an exclusive web-based network). Either way, better than marching blindly forward.

If it helps, realize your product only has to be an MVP for a short time. After you gather feedback and have a better idea where to push your product next, you'll step out of that category towards a Viable Product that is polished and professional.

The key is this: don't blindly over develop and over invest, but rather practice customer discovery and development and don't hesitate to get out in front of potential customers and clients as early as possible. It will make you a happier entrepreneur.

Solving the "Marketplace" Business Model

I came across an interesting article today about how to solve the "marketplace" business model issue. The article was posted on A Smart Bear and you can read the full text here. I wanted to share it with the Good Dinosaur collective, perhaps a rousing entrepreneurial discussion will ensue.

There are several inherent difficulties in establishing a market place:

• You have a double-sided market that you must capture. This is also known as the chicken and egg problem.


• Your venture itself must be two companies in one, appealing to both sides independently to win adoption.


• Size can matter. You often can't bootstrap your way to success when it comes to market place establishment. It can be a go big (and spend big!), or go home situation.

The article discusses several viable ways to persever over these challenges, such as attempting to build up the supply side of your market first by offering incentives or targeting a specific niche so you can carve out a space for yourself.

At CollegeJobConnect, we've experienced the challenges in establishing a market place, so this article rings especially true. We are currently pursuing several campaigns to build our roster of companies that want to leverage us for undergraduate recruitment come the fall (attack the supply side). We are also setting up several student affiliate programs at our target schools to increase undergraduate adoption (win both sides in parallel, carve out our niche, scale up quickly).

I'd be more than happy to discuss at length with anyone that is interested. And if you know enterprising undergraduates that are interested in working with our startup, please let me know. Exciting stuff!

Kevin Costner is Full of Sh*t

Kevin Costner is full of sh*t ... when it comes to startups at least. Build it and they will come. I implore you, do not listen to this man! This line of thinking is out in left field (har har).

I have to admit, I used to subscribe to this tag line. A few years back, I felt that if the idea was there, all that was barring a venture from success was time, effort, and determination. As a result, several of my early projects were drastically over engineered and tragically under utilized.

Case in point, in a 2005 project a friend and I wrote an entire professional network platform. It was Facebook meets LinkedIn (this was back when FB was still only for college kids and LinkedIn was lame). We were going to make the professional network that young professionals wanted and needed to join. We would monetize it somehow, but with the eyes and ears of tomorrow's top earners, we felt this would "fall into place" (don't follow this either). We wrote over 50,000 LoC. It did everything: secure login, password reset, profile creation, group formation, group messaging, secret groups, public groups, photo upload, friend requests, etc. etc. etc. We saw about 150 members over the next few months with few "sticky members." The issue wasn't that we had built a bad product / service, but more that we hadn't done our homework and gathered real world data before setting up shop.

What could we have done differently? We should have given a big middle finger to Kevin Costner and incrementally tested our thesis: young professionals (especially those in major urban environments a la New York City, Boston, DC, and so on) need a better way to network in the work place. At the very least, before we wrote a single script, we should have sent out an email to our friends (we probably could have gotten 500+ addresses, all in our target demographic) and asked if this perceived pain point (them: "we need better networking capabilities!") was a reality. If yes, did our proposed solution solve the problem? Make it worse? After passing these first sanity checks and receiving some initial buy in, we then could have produced a vastly trimmed down initial service (minimally viable product) to test actual adoption and utilization and gone from there. These would have been intelligent, no brainer steps to have taken. But as developers we often don't do this. We get into the groove and let the code fly. Projects like this burn you out both emotionally and entrepreneurially. You only have so much fuel in the furnace and hours in the day, so choose wisely.

This insight sprung up in my head over the past week when discussing a friend's startup idea. (No, not Bad Dinosaur). He had built a great product and wanted me to test it out. I told him I'm not going to be one of his likely early adopters and to go to XX [a popular blog dedicated to people he'd likely want to start off with] and start recruiting people (could even do this before any coding whatsoever). See if they are interested. If so, why? If not, why not? Which of the first features did they think were absolutely necessary, which were nice-to-haves, and which were unnecessary?

When giving a startup a go, you certainly have to have that optimistic dedication and drive to succeed as Kevin Costner demonstrated in "Field of Dreams." But rather than going whole hog right out of the gate, leveling his entire farm, and hoping for the best, Mr. Costner likely should have only hashed out a pitchers mound, picked up a few bats, and laid down some old shirts as bases. Then he could see if a any corn stalks began to rustle at night, or if that voice in his head starts to whisper further instructions ("now add bench seating, we want bench seating" || "no, I meant build a basketball court, dummy!").

Listen To Me (and PowerPoint), Damnit!

I used to hate PowerPoint. I previously worked at an investment bank in NYC and putting together presentations were a major responsibility for us analysts. It was a task I dreaded. How dry! How dull! What a waste of time! What's the point?!

Well, my opinion has since shifted. About a month and a half ago I was catching up with a friend of mine (no, not Bad Dinosaur) when he asked if he could run something by me. We discussed a problem his company was having and the current solutions they were considering. I thought about the options they had on the table and told him that none sounded like very solid solutions, especially for the attached price tags. I was then asked if I would be interested in building a custom solution, to which I responded "yes" - hooray, now I'm an independent contractor!

A month later, I sat at my desk composing a PowerPoint presentation detailing the work I'd done. I was spinning the tale of how the application solved their problem, how it worked and, more importantly, why my "client" should subscribe to (or outright buy) this software from me. I started thinking, I used to hate this stuff. PowerPoint Presentations suck. Why am I not having any of these thoughts ripping through my head right now? It hit me: tomorrow morning I will have a captive audience of decision makers (those that control the purse-strings) for 45 minutes to an hour! I get to sell them for a full hour! I get to hand them a document that details the value proposition of what I'm peddling and they have to listen to me! Why do I think this is a big deal?

At my other venture, CollegeJobConnect, it is a constant battle to get people to give you even just 5-10 seconds of their time. Whether it's trying to spark interest from a group of students, sell our concept to a company that is looking to hire or just "recruit better," or gain the ear of a potential investor / advisor, getting them to listen and care is a constant battle. The venture's other co-founder (#your link here, when you get a blog!) and I are constantly discussing marketing principles, customer conversation rates, A/B testing, funnels, and all that good stuff to help improve our "attention grabbing"-ness.

So what's the point to all this? There are a few. The first is pretty obvious, but harder to put into practice then you'd think. Whatever you are making, selling, or providing, make sure you have an audience to market to and make sure you can reach them effectively. An audience with existing demand is even better as you will be their potential savior and have to do less convincing of why they should a) hear what you have to say, b) use or do whatever you are asking them to do. Complete strangers are hard to acquire as customers and unveiling some web-service (or any new product) that fills everyone that lay eyes on it with joy and happiness and compels them to share it with their friends is damn near impossible.

I truly thought that once CollegeJobConnect's website was up and we emailed out to various on-campus newspapers about our venture there would be a tidal wave of support and interest solely based on our concept. Not so much. Again, getting people's attention is extremely difficult, especially when a) they don't know you, b) they have no perceived need for your product / service, or they don't understand it.

Secondly, Get Involved. Broadcast what you are working on, what you're interested in, and what your specialties are. Build stuff and learn by doing. The only reason I fell ass-backwards into this job was because my friend remembered that I was "working on some web-thing that helped kids find jobs or something" (this is unfortunately his understanding of CollegeJobConnect, and he's a close friend!). Put a lot of pokers in the fire, you never know which ones will get hot. Furthermore, do you think I would have learned RoR, Capistrano, HAML, etc. without this new project? I don't like to swear, but no f*ing way. So don't be shy, jump into the deep end. Your efforts will yield benefits in one way or another, I promise you that.

Finally, all work is cumulative, so treat it as such. Looking back, yeah, I didn't like PowerPoint Presentation composition, but I should have attacked it with a bit more drive. I'm now spending time learning things I should have already had under my belt. If what you are doing is not too fun or seems dull (but pays the bills right now), take a step back and think about how it is preparing you for future projects and how it is making you a more skilled and valuable individual. Hone your skills and take pride in your work.

All in all, I now look at creating a PowerPoint presentation as a reward for hard work. It is my time to shine and convince you to do what I'm pitching. And I'll probably get more than a few seconds to do so :)

Roller Coaster

I recently went on a California extravaganza, which began in the LA area and meandered up the PCH to San Francisco, stopping in at Carmel-by-the-sea (official name!) and the Red Wood Forest. Here is a picture of me in San Fran with some guy leaning up against me.


While I was in SF (that's what I'm calling it, hope it sticks) being whisked around by a cab I realized riding in a cab in San Fran is exactly like being on a roller coaster at an amusement park. Following this mental breakthrough, I started to raise my hands above my head and yell with glee as we drove down some very steep roads and made the "tick-tick-tick" noise of our taxi-coaster being pulled up by an imaginary chain lift as we climbed seemingly vertical inclines. The taxi drive did not make this mental connection, unfortunately, and refused to take part.

During this elevation-exploration I began to have thoughts about my experience with our start-up so far. Some days you are top dog and can do no wrong; while others look utterly hopeless and you wish someone had created a word that meant "lower than rock bottom" because you would use it liberally! A small company is an emotional roller coaster and learning how to manage this is paramount.


One thing our start-up has been focused on recently is sales and marketing. We have the idea, we put together the initial team, we built a product prototype, we defined our business model, and (in my mind, most importantly) we found paying members and established proof of concept. Don't get too excited in Good Dinosaur nation - when I say paying members I'm talking < 10. Our team agreed, what we need now is to improve our reach.

Sales and marketing can be difficult by itself. Selling and marketing a somewhat innovative or industry divergent product or service can be really difficult and can stick your start-up roller coaster in those low points quickly.

It is very easy to fall into a negative feedback loop when selling. For example, you have a bad sales call, which causes you to question your start-ups potential, which causes you to pitch poorly next time around, which causes even more panicky feelings, which causes your team to get into arguments, which leads to worse sales meetings, more in-fighting, yelling, screaming and ... OH CRAP WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?


Now you are left with nothing but sadness and frustration, and probably no more start-up.

So, my recommendation, diversify your focus! It works for investing! It can work for your brain. Concentrating solely on Sales and Marketing yields the same pitfalls as focusing solely on Product Development or Capital Raising or any one thing. Budget your time accordingly, or make a "cycled schedule" where you do one sales and marketing action, one product development task, one business development oriented item, and one capital raising action. Only after you complete the whole cycle can you move back to the beginning.

For example, I was getting frustrated with our ability to find the right people to speak with, so I took a break and began making progress on our capital raising efforts by starting to collect a blog roll of authors that either own or work at possible seed investors. I wasn't seeing success during sales efforts, so I put the phone away, and jumped on the web in search of our next possible partner, advisor, or investor. I could have also gone and wrote some code. Or worked on updating our business plan. Or whatever else needed to be done. You get the idea.

I guess the main premise here is that you will have a lot of frustrations, let downs, and difficulties with any venture. Remember to not keep smashing your head against a wall that just won't move at the moment. Taking a step back can help you discover a way around the obstacle and preserve your dome-piece's structural integrity. Win, win.

At the end of the day, handling the roller coaster of emotions that come about at a small company is a required skill. If things get really bad and you find yourself burnt out, take a vacation! I hear California is lovely :)

No One Cares About Your Stupid Start-up, Stupid

How do you get those that should care about your company to actually care?

One of the bigger frustrations a new company can likely run into is generating awareness and adoption of their product. This reality can come as quite a surprise to a would-be entrepreneur because you mainly hear about the success stories: for example, thefacebook.com launched at Harvard and quickly spread around the Ivy League like a California wildfire). This survivor bias can skew expectations concerning the effort, creativity, and capital that likely needs to be expended to gain initial (and future) customers.

What are some ways that you can increase your customer base and get your business out of the "start-up" classification and into the "small business" category?

My friend (no, not Bad Dinosaur, he is just awful) and I were brainstorming how to overcome this hurdle. We've seen a positive member response from virtually all that have come across our start-up's service. However, our biggest challenge has been figuring out viable ways to reach our desired audience. Some of the avenues we thought would be home runs have turned out more like an infield pop-fly with bases loaded, 2 outs. Others that seemed silly to even pursue paid big dividends.

The following few seemed most viable. Please critique, warn against, or suggest others in the comments section:

• Provide complimentary products - if your initial product or service is a bit avant-garde or depends on gaining a critical member count, provide complimentary products that anyone can use and do not depend on the number of other users


• Outsourced marketing campaigns - these can be tricky and capital intensive. We have talked about everything from hiring staff and paying up front salaries with commission to running targeted affiliate programs where the top performer either receives a cash bonus or (and this might be a little nutty) is awarded a non-voting equity share in the company


• Internally run marketing campaigns - basically the same as "Outsourced" but run by us. This saves on capital expenditures but takes away resources from all other operations


• Pursue partnership with a more established company - obvious downsides are loss of ownership and independence

Product is Just the Beginning

So as I mentioned in the first post, I'm currently working on a new project. I cannot get into the specific details just yet, but lets just say the goal is to gather a bunch of data from one group (Group A) into one place and allow another group (Group B) to have quick, structured access to this information set. The Group A data is typically not easily accessible nor organized, and Group B would be very interested in this data. Nothing new or ground breaking here in the overall model. Google does this with data on the internet, UGResearch does this with undergraduate research.

Well, for all this magical stuff to happen I figured I needed to get to building the web-service ... after all, if you build it, they will come. So I set about furiously learning version control systems, the command line and all its geeky glory, design patterns, etc. I now know how to git commit, I can alter mysql tables via ssh on a remote machine, I can grep, I can sed, and I can traverse the DOM. After a bit of coding in PHP (yes, should have been RoR ... next time!), XHTML, JQuery, and CSS I have a web service that is about 85% complete.

Lately I've been obsessing over how the site works, how it looks, how it is set up. One of the main things I've been noodling about recently is if my class objects are "decoupled" enough (which I've learned is one of the best practices when it comes to OOP ... along with cohesion). To get more insight I rang my friend (not Bad Dinosaur) who knows much more about this stuff than I do. I was in for a big surprise.

Instead of discussing techno-mumbo-jumbo, he immediately pointed out that this was a minor detail - important, yes - but minor in the grand scheme of trying to get this service up and running. I was then asked a series of questions: how was I planning on rolling this out and gathering the data from Group A? Why did I think Group A would be interested in giving this data up? How was I going to make Group B aware of this service? Did I have numerical estimates on how many from Group B might use this new service? Did I have revenue projections? Cost projects? A business plan?

And then it hit me, all that I had been doing on this project and all I had been worried about was just the product. It was only a small part of the overall project. I had basically built a really cool toy, but had not even started to think about "is this what people want to play with?" or "how do I get people to play with it?"

When looking at this project or any other project, this realization I had may seem rather obvious: you need to have a product and a plan surrounding that product. Until very recently I was constantly focusing on just the product and not thinking at all about these other fundamental questions that needed to be visited in order for this venture to have a chance at success.

I was wracking my brain as to why I had left this side of the equation untouched and unappreciated ... I can build revenue models in Excel (with VBA, if need be!), I am comfortable calling people and pitching a service or conducting an interview, and I actually like thinking about what existing businesses should do to improve their offerings. I guess my issue is I've always felt that projected revenue models or strategy documents for marketing seemed a bit forced and amorphous ... there are so many unknowns when trying to predict what a product that does not even exist yet will accomplish or how best to make others know about it. It is a bit overwhelming, frustrating even, for me to try and logically document what could happen.

I realize this is not the way to think about it though. Business and strategy plans are important keys to success. You need to have an idea of how to accomplish your goals and if you have to do course re-corrections along the way, so be it. What is a better way to look at this side of this, or any, project? How do you avoid the overwhelming feeling of putting something down on paper and not having the slightest idea if it is going to work or if this is just a shot in the dark? What is the best way to document your vision and how do you effectively convey this message to potential members and/or investors?

I leave you with those questions, please comment below or rise questions I have not yet thought about that are important. I'm very interested to hear your thoughts ... right now, I'm off to start my business plan!