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Minimum Viable Development: Updates and Coming Attractions (19 Nov 2017)

A look into what’s next for this site, and for it’s writer
Ok, I know it’s the oldest excuse in the book, but I’ve been busy. Yes, it’s been over two weeks since I pushed Getting the Word Out: Using Google, Facebook, and Medium to Grow Your User Base, so I owe you all an explanation. The truth is that with the help of my business coach, Naphtali Goldberg, I’ve started to put the plan I outlined in The Business of Development Part 5: Wrapping Up, into action. In this article, I’m going to give you a high level overview of my proposed venture. This will be followed by a brief teaser for a new service that I will be launching in the very near future.

The Lean Startup

Before I give the details, I need to give you some background. As I stated in the past, I’m a big fan of Eric Ries’s lean startup methodology and book since 2012. The following, adapted from the book’s Amazon page, sums it up.

A startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty…Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late.

In order to understand where I’m headed, it helps to know a bit more about the lean startup. For those of you that haven’t read the book, here’s a brief summary.

Leaps of faith

Every new business (idea, website, app, product, service, etc.), must be define it’s value and growth assumptions/propositions. The value assumption describes what the idea is worth; for example, will it make the world a better place, make people happier, or build a better mouse trap. The growth assumption describes how the business can sustain itself and grow. If it can’t grow, then it’s probably not going to survive; by the way this is also true for charities and non profits.

Minimally viable

Now the real work begins. No matter how valuable your idea could be, or how solid your business model your still about to take a massive leap of faith. Now, you have prove that what you have will actually work. At this point, you need to:

Identify an initial group of potential customers.
Build a Minimal Viable Product (MVP). This is the smallest possible subset of features that prove that your idea can work. Please note, this does not an excuse for building something unusable because you are going to use this to get feedback from your initial customers. If you put out something bad, they won’t forgive you.
Define metrics that test your assumptions. At all costs, these metrics need to be real, and not what he calls vanity metrics. To this end, they should be Accessible, Auditable, and Actionable. Accessible means that they are not hidden away on some obscure website; it also means that they should hide the truth in some clever way, and be easy for anybody to understand. Auditable means that the data should be real, and be able to stand up to scrutiny. Actionable means that once you have the data you should be able to use it to make improvements on your product.
Now you can release the MVP and collect data and feedback from your testers.

Preserve or pivot

Once the tests are complete, and you have collected all the data, you can decide if you want to preserve or pivot. Preserve means proceeding as planned, you can still make tweaks and improvements, but you should have enough information to show you that you are on the right track. Pivot means that your original assumptions didn’t work out as expected, but you found a new direction or opportunity worth investigation.

Repeat

Figure out how you can improve your MVP, define a new set of metrics, and repeat.

Minimal Viable Development Services (MVDS)

Minimal Viable Development Services (MVDS) is the working title for my independent development business. It may change, but for now this is name on my business card. I was toying with Lean Developer, but on a certain level that would have been false advertising.

Those of you that have been paying attention could point out that strictly speaking my next venture is not a startup, but if you had read the book, you would know that it’s definition of startup is extremely broad. In addition, in nearly project I have been involved in as a salaried employee, major parts have been outsourced, and many issues, misunderstandings, frustrations could have been avoided by following the principals I outlined above. So, one of my aims is to provide development services based on lean startup principals, cross platform applications, using cloud and serverless technologies. If you want to know more, please get in touch.

For those of you in regular employment, you may be lucky enough to work somewhere that works this way. This has not been my experience. Every time I’ve tried to promote this methodology it’s met with resistance and my advice has been ignored. As a result, I’ve been looking for an oppturinity/platform to try these ideas out. If you are interested in finding out more about the lean methodology, and need some couching or consulting, I’m available.

Coming attractions

Way back at the start of this post, I hinted that I have another project in the works. It’s at a really early stage, but it has tremendous possibilities. I’m not going to give to much away right now, but I will tell you that I’m calling it TipNet. Broadly speaking, it’s a new way to publicize and promote businesses. I’m still working out the details, but I should I have a prototype, or should I say MVP up and running in the next couple of weeks. As they say at Microsoft, I’m going to eat my own dog food. This means that I will be building the project using the methods and practices I described in this post.

One more thing

As you can see, I’m going to be busy for a while, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop writing. In fact, my plans are not only to write more, but to post articles on a regular basis. If all goes to plan, the gap between this post and the next, should be less than twenty four hours, and will be a practical introduction to serverless computing with Firebase. At any rate, the gap will be much shorter that the one between this and my previous post.