MVPsA Founder Centric Module

Question

I’m building a community of street artists and connecting them to brands who want to hire them.

Question

You want to open a new chain of fast food restaurants.

Question

You have a crazy product idea and the manufacturing setup is expensive.

Question

If we had to launch in 48 hours, what would our product look like?

EXERCISE

@robfitz

t

Los Angeles Times Magazine, 1992

Quote source@twitter

Three Types of Learning

1. Exploration

Question

I want to create an online market place for fine marble sculptures.

2. Pitch

Question

I have a web app idea. It will take 7 weeks to build.

3. Concierge

Question

I want to build a app that recommends the perfect computer to buy.

www

EMAIL

Learning is progress. Building stuff isn’t.

Let users & customers help with the grand

plan.

Paul Graham

Launch fast & iterate. You haven’t really started working on it till you’ve launched.

Larry Sanger

No, this is not an indecent proposal. It’s an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia.

Strip features ruthlessly to ship versions

quickly.

Rule of Thumb

The biggest strength startups have is speed. Every feature you add reduces that advantage.

Question

We’re building a better TV. What features does version 1 need?

EXERCISE

Rule of Thumb

You can’t focus your product unless you know exactly who it’s for and what they want to achieve.

Jobs Obstacles Goals Current Solution

Customer Slicing

Decision Trigger

Interest Trigger

How deep do you go?They are real people (not attributes!)It’s clear where to find them.You’ll walk away if they aren’t a good fit.

?

Question

If we just focused on a specific customer group, how could we focus our product for them?

EXERCISE

David Hansson

You have customers, they pay you money for your product or service and you get profit, and it’s such a weird notion.

Question

What are your top risks?What are the fastest ways to resolve them?

EXERCISE

Question

What are your fastest risks?How could this learning lead to course-correction?

EXERCISE

An MVP is an experiment that tests a critical, falsifiable hypothesis of your business.

Question

I’m building social tools to help conference speakers get more retweets, follows, etc.

You reach scale by doing things that don’t scale.

Question

I’m building a marketplace for event organizers to find & hire speakers

£1040

Question

How can we make a better startup conference?

Question

How come thought-leaders don’t talk to each other?

Question

What topics should we schedule?

Question

Will people pay for membership rather than events?

Question

This is hard. How can we do less work?

Question

How can we seed stronger relationships in our community?

Question

I’m building an automatic business card scanner for smartphones and the tech is difficult.

Question

I want to start an airline.

Question

Listen to the pitch as if you were an investor.

What are you most worried about?

EXERCISE

Design MVPs for as many of the

risks as you can.

Sell itMake itFake it

Ask themWatch themCompare it

THIS WEEK

What’s most likely to sink you?

What’s your most important metric?

What can you do this week to attack it?

Amy Hoy@amyhoy

You keep working and you get another brick. And then you’re like “Ah! Now I have enough bricks - I can do something with these bricks!” And you have a wall.

Thx!Salim Virani @saintsal

salim@foundercentric.com