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On a startup's first MVP iteration, how little graphic design effort can you get away with? Does it depend on the product, perhaps? Should all iterations be visually polished?
1. What do you do when your market is so small that you can't grab some teenager off the street to try your product? I'm thinking of the people who buy X-ray machines for the airport, for example.
2. I know people who pretend to like ideas from your book. One guy applauds the idea of failing while also failing to do validated learning. Can you or I or anyone fix that? For example, we'll never test weather a user would prefer an interface other than a website.
3. How do I convince my boss that we need a research department?
4. Have you read Dealers of Lightning (about Xerox Parc) what is your take on it?
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My personal feeling is that the high karma that you are speaking of is not a good use of time (for that reason). I know it has helped tptacek and some others but it takes considerable time (and is a distraction) to comment on HN and essentially if you do it, you do it for fun and to learn. And if something comes from it then that's icing on the cake. I actually picked up a considerable amount of side consulting by be…
Being an active participant on HN has been very helpful to me professionally. HN karma, on the other hand, has not. The only thing that ever came from karma for me was a TechCrunch interview about HN. There are great commenters who are very well-known who don't rank anywhere on the leaderboard. 'pbsd is a well-known cryptographer. 'tzs is the best commenter on HN. 'carbocation is a doctor/medical researcher. Being en…
"I don't think anyone needs an AMA from me"
Actually I would find that fascinating.
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Being an active participant on HN has been very helpful to me professionally. HN karma, on the other hand, has not. The only thing that ever came from karma for me was a TechCrunch interview about HN. There are great commenters who are very well-known who don't rank anywhere on the leaderboard. 'pbsd is a well-known cryptographer. 'tzs is the best commenter on HN. 'carbocation is a doctor/medical researcher. Being en…
Agree and would also get rid of grayed out comments that are down voted. "I don't think anyone needs an AMA from me" Actually I would find that fascinating.
Hello Eric, I saw you speak some years ago right around the time your first book came out. I have a media background, and I noticed some parallels with what you described at IMVU and what I have seen in my industry. Typically, the projects have involved large media companies building high-quality products/brands, such as television shows or websites. They are designed and built in near-stealth mode with limited oppor…
Perfect timing. I'm bootstrapping my own startup ( http://moonlighter.io ) at the moment and had a couple questions about the MVP. 1) How can you quickly validate a business with very little immediately visible value to the user? Direct user interviews won't work here because the service is very data-driven (collecting filesystem events), so it'll require a decent amount of data collection from the user (I'll offer s…
Remember that not only does your product have to create value for customers but they have to realize that it will create value for them, and both assumptions are important to test.
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tons! I think about this all the time, since I feel a responsibility to try and talk about lean startup in such a way that prevents misunderstanding. I would say the two most fatal misapplications are: 1. "up and to the right" disease. here you split-test everything and just do whatever moves the numbers. pretty soon you are selling porn or psychic hotlines. 2. "no vision, no problems" error. It's like trying to do s…
The struggle for me seems to be knowing how much is too little and how much is too much. Do you try to err on the side of doing too little at first?
Hi Eric! I enjoyed "The Lean Startup" and I think the approach for the new book is very interesting. Besides establishing the backer-only discussion community, what other lean methodologies are you using to write this book? Along those lines, have there been any significant pivots yet? Obviously, the kickstarter seems to be doing well at over 3.5x pledged over the goal. Do you think that this is validation of the new…
1. It's a good test of the value prop for the new book 2. The Leader's Guide gives me a chance to test out ideas from the new book and make sure they work (amazing to me how many business books skip this step!) 3. I've learned a ton about book marketing in 2015 that's going to help inform the launch of the new book 4. There's a big difference between "customers want this" as a general statement and "these 7000 customers paid for this" which is a much richer dataset 5. The community part of the campaign will be a testbed for a lot more experimentation.
I noticed how even though your book doesn't exist yet, the graphic that you put up on Kickstarter looks very polished and enticing. But I've also seen startups dig holes for themselves by over-obsessing about graphic design. On a startup's first MVP iteration, how little graphic design effort can you get away with? Does it depend on the product, perhaps? Should all iterations be visually polished?
Visual polish is extremely important -- sometimes. Other times, it's lethal. It all goes back to what are you trying to learn and how well do you really know the customer.
Hi Eric, Your first mass produced book was published by a traditional, 'big' publisher (Crown/Random House). Is this new book an independent effort or are you still working with a trade publisher? Do you feel they've added value to the process for what you got the first time (versus self publishing and retaining more revenue per sale)?
The Leader's Guide is the MVP, that will only be available via Kickstarter. In fact, my book contract specifies that TLG cannot be sold at retail in stores or online.
I'm a very happy author, and the traditional process did well by me. But it doesn't work for everyone. In fact, it's a lot like VC: good if you know what you're doing but dangerous if you approach it naively.