What are the assumptions behind your vision (and how do you test them)?

This tweet has helped to guide my thinking about what to include in the first version of our product. It builds upon some of the thinking of the minimum viable product and asks: What do you need to build to test the assumptions behind your product’s vision?

Answering this question won’t always require building something. Sometimes a competitor’s product or user feedback can be enough to provide validation, but, as with any assumption, it’s important to consider and understand the beliefs behind it.

One other thing, I think the order of assumptions is pretty important to consider too. If you can prove all your assumptions correct except the first one, well then, you’ve still got quite a problem on your hands.

“It’s never going to be over, so stop waiting for the good stuff” - D.Deida

It’s funny how we sometimes wait for permission for things that we don’t need approval on. This quote (via Jake Lodwick) really hit home:

“It’s never going to be over, so stop waiting for the good stuff. As of now, spend a minimum of one hour a day doing whatever you are waiting to do until your finances are more secure, or until you have finished your obligations and you feel free to do what you really want to do. Don’t wait any longer. Don’t believe in the myth of “one day when everything will be different.” Do what you love to do, what you are waiting to do, what you’ve been born to do, now.”

At first this is a great, invigorating thing to hear…I’m gonna do it, yeah!! And then, the days start to pass - and the one hour is hard to come by, or you’re tired, or you get 30 mins here and 30 mins there, and it’s hard to know if what you’re doing in that hour is valuable.

That’s where the second part of the quote comes in:

“However, be forewarned: you may discover that you don’t, or can’t, do it; that in fact, your fantasy of your future life is simply a fantasty.”

And thus the real struggle/test begins. Not only is it never going to be over, it’s never gonna be easy either.

The Art of War meets the Art of Start?

A new to me (but seven years old to more diligent readers) post from Joel on Software made a great comparison between military and startup strategy…basically - survival’s all about Fire and Motion.

In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon…The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy (or goal), where your shots are much more likely to hit their target.

It took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. Fire and Motion, for small companies, means two things. You have to have time on your side, and you have to move forward every day. Sooner or later you will win.

With so much to be done, I’ve often struggled with making even the slightest daily progress. And, when you only have 1 or 2 hours per day to work on the startup, it can be hard to tell if the work you’re doing can be counted as progress at all.

For example - does taking the time to blog, tweet, and build up a network and raise awareness really count as moving forward? I’m struggling to find the right analogy, because while sometimes raised awareness is what you need to move forward, other times it sure can look and feel like running in place. How do you balance your Fire and Motion?

When making something, what questions do you always ask?

Related to the previous post and inspired by this one, I wanted to start a collection of questions I’m always asking myself during product development.

Here’s my list so far:

1. What is the smallest possible problem that we could solve that would potentially be useful?

1a. What job does your customer want to hire your product for?

2. If we don’t put this feature in, what will our customers do instead?

3. How do we want people to feel after they experience this?

What questions are you asking?

Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful

The above advice comes from Twitter’s Ev Williams and it’s one of the things I’m always trying to keep in the back of my mind while working on a product. Focusing the product allows for differentiation and a better fit with your potential market.

Another quote that goes well with the first one is: “if we don’t put this feature in, what will our customers do instead?” (via sramanamitra). I’m always surprised at how much less severe the answer to this question is as compared to how it originally seems.

Combined, both quotes can help to zoom in on what you’re really trying to do - and hopefully lead to a better solution in the long run.

Get your users to help put up your tent

Reading Nivi’s interview with Eric Reis on Minimum Viable Products was a revelation*. In it, Eric outlined a way to accelerate the already rapid pace of development for startups. Rather than waiting until you have an actual product ready, Eric outlined some paths to skip directly to getting user feedback.

The idea of the minimum viable product is useful because you can basically say, look, our vision is to build a product that solves this core problem for our customers, with these kind of general feature areas…and the early adopters will fill in their minds the features that aren’t quite there if we give them the core, tent-pole features that point the direction of where we’re trying to go.

We’re possibly skipping ahead on Eric’s already shortened path by asking users on our splash page what type of core problems they want solved. We’re working on a product that will be able to answer a lot of questions, but we want to make sure we frame the benefits in a way that our users care about most…so, what are you suffering from?

* = as a bonus, there are lots of other insights beyond MVPs in Eric’s interview…would highly recommend all #prevee’s check it out.

What are we doing with the Cognitive Surplus?

Tyler Cowen (of Marginal Revolution fame) has got a new book coming out called “Create Your Own Economy”. Here’s a quick note on what the book is about:

The way we think now is changing more rapidly than it has in a very long time. Not since the Industrial Revolution has a man-made creation — in this case, the World Wide Web — so greatly influenced the way our minds work and our human potential. Cowen argues brilliantly that we are breaking down cultural information into ever-smaller tidbits, ordering and reordering them in our minds (and our computers) to meet our own specific needs.

It’s gonna be fun to follow this trend to see how society shapes its Cognitive Surplus. We already have Wikipedia (and WikiRank), Twitter and Twitter search (and complementary services like WhatTheTrend), and new tools like Aardvark are emerging.

ps: have we mentioned yet that the Cognitive Surplus is gonna be a big part of what we serve up with our Essential Utensil?

Stay away from the low hanging fruit

When just starting out, it’s a little overwhelming being surrounded by all the decisions that have to be made, especially when some simple decisions seem so ripe for the plucking…

But realize that from time to time it’s OK to hang in there and resist the urge to pick the low hanging fruit. Just because you have one good idea doesn’t mean you have to act immediately (ie: don’t buy a domain name as soon as you think of one potentially good one). You might just save yourself some time and $$$ in the end. (Sometimes it’s best to learn from mistakes, right?)

ps: Need more reasons to be wary of the low hanging fruit?

“An inexperienced picker would pick the low-hanging fruit first,” Pell says. “But an experienced picker would know to start at the top.” The reason: starting low makes the picker’s job harder, not easier. “If you’re experienced, you rest the bag - which is around your neck and shoulders - on the ladder. You fill it as you go down, so it’s full when you get to the bottom.”