Issue #12 - Example of a Minimum Viable Product and haiku by AI

Hey all,

I hope you are doing well and life is good.

This week I wanted to share my experience of creating a Minimum Viable Product. I learned a lot by doing this, especially the meaning of minimum in the term Minimum Viable Product.

The real MVP

Ok, ok, before we start - let’s acknowledge it - if you’re reading this - then to me you are the real MVP. But today we’re not talking about that type of MVP…

…today we’re talking about the Minimum Viable Product.

It’s a term I first heard in the book titled Lean Startup. The book discussed a simple fact, people build products full of features before even knowing if there is a market, or if people actually want a specific feature.

The book gives some great examples of this happening, where a full solution was developed and when it was released, the users didn’t care about it. Or worse, there wasn’t a market for it.

So the idea of the MVP is to create a minimum viable version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback. But here is the thing, minimum means MINIMUM… and most people don’t really know what minimum means…

“If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late” – Reed Hoffman, LinkedIn

Let’s look at an example, during my MBA I created a robo-advisor. In short, robo-advisors use cool maths to recommend stocks. There’s a whole bunch of research stating that people need them and will use them, and how they are opening up investing to broader audiences. We’ve also seen the rise in services like Robinhood for buying stock, but next people will need tools/services to help understand which stocks are good, or not. And that is where robo-advisors come in and that is what I have.

So I started building one…

It started with a web-based service and then moved on to a mobile app. Actually, I made two mobile apps because the first one wasn’t very good. This included taking a React Native course to make the 2nd app better.

I also needed a backend, a system to download stock data daily, do all the calculations and upload it somewhere.

Yep, that’s right, I also needed some online service to hold the processed data and create an API so the app could access it.

And of course, I needed an authentication system too.

Again, I made a 2nd backend system, the 2nd version was simpler and more secure than the first.

This was my “Minimum Viable Product”. I needed all of this to get a minimum version of the product into the hands of the end user.

I had fallen into the trap that most people fall into, in fact, I had fallen into many traps people fall into when creating a product…

• I created a very complex system(s)

• I felt that the Minimum Viable Product was an app that people could use

• I was embarrassed by my first app so made a second app, one I wouldn’t be embarrassed about.

• I hadn’t tested the market, I didn’t know what features the end-user (which I didn’t have) would want

In short, I had an over-engineered Minimum Viable Product (which still isn’t ready).

So what should I have done?

I should have embraced the true meaning of the Minimum Viable Product - what is the absolute minimum I can put out there, test and get feedback on?

By this point, I’d been writing these newsletters for 11 weeks (wow that’s a lot) and I thought, what are the minimum features I am trying to demonstrate?

• I want people to have some idea of which stocks are interesting. Perhaps the highest gains and biggest losers. That would be a start.

• And what about some of that fancy maths I could do? Yeah, let’s throw some of that in there too - highlighting which stocks a robo-advisor would recommend.

Now knowing the minimum feature set and matching that with my 11 weeks of experience writing a newsletter, I combined the two.

That’s right, you guessed it - a weekly newsletter containing that information.

So last Sunday night, I spent about 3 or 4 hours modifying the code I had to produce and write a newsletter for me. It makes the tables of data, downloads related news for auto-selected stocks and then does the fancy maths to recommend stocks.

I can run this every week (hopefully nothing breaks) and I can copy/paste the results into a new newsletter and share.

No App, no authentication system, no online service with an API - just a small backend script.

Is it the product I want? Not at all.

Am I embarrassed by the current product? Yep, it’s really not what I wanted or envisioned, it doesn’t do all the cool stuff I want.

Is it enough to test if a market is there? Yes! After all - if I can’t give away a free newsletter containing financial advice, then I probably can’t find an audience for the app.

This is my Minimum Viable Product, my MVP.

So what’s next? Well, I’ll try to market it, measure the interest, get feedback and then decide.

If it dies, then that is ok. It only cost me 3 or 4 hours (excluding the many weeks I wasted on the earlier version). The aim of the MVP is to build, launch and test as quickly as possible. And this has been the learning from this whole process.

Want to see this MVP? You can signup below, but please - ONLY SUBSCRIBE if it’s relevant to you - I don’t want to measure sympathy signups 🤣

A haiku by AI

I’ve recently been playing with ChatGPT, I might write about it one time.

I asked it to write me a poem about ‘personal growth’, and here is what it made…

Seeds of self-awareness

Bloom into true potential Growth,

a constant quest

Fin.

Thanks for reading this far, I hope the MVP discussion was useful. The experience of making an MVP was really good for me. Especially really trying to understand what minimum in Minimum Viable Product really means - and just how small/basic/minimum you can actually go.

I hope you all have a great weekend.

John