Jon Tyson

No this is not a post about me trying to get into some athlete's pants. It's a post about a thing called a Minimal Viable Product and why it wouldn't work for us nor for our clients.

Before I explain what an M.V.P. is, I want to explain why I'm even thinking about it. You see our beloved new company, isn't new at all. In fact, it's already five years old. So the evil little dude that sits on my shoulder, weighing me down, with guilt, doubt and pessimism (I call him Norbert, he’s less threatening that way) was laughing at me the other day when my developer said he saw a date noted in some code he was reviewing from 2013. I shit myself. Could it really have been five years? Why had we taken this long to get to market? Am I a terrible team leader? Was I too caught up in features and code quality my customers may never see? Where did the time go?

I always thought that an M.V.P. is the practice of releasing a product as quickly to market to see if it is viable and then iterating on it from the feedback received to make it better. I have since read several variations on the same theme, the one I liked best says that it is the practice of Build > Measure > Learn > Repeat. Ultimately it is about taking an idea and putting it out there quickly to see if it will float.

And there’s the rub, “QUICKLY”.

Why hadn’t I done that? How much further along would we have been if I had? Indeed, I had seen some of our competitors launch and gain traction while I was sitting on a product that had features their customers were begging for.

I suppose M.V.P. makes some sense on paper. But in reality, I ask myself, what benefit would my customers see in us if we simply cloned the competition, or worse, appeared to offer less? Why would I release a product into the market that I was less than happy with? What if I don’t get a second chance to make a first impression?

Despite Norbert’s derision, I believe the answers to these questions are so self-evident that I am surprised at myself for even worrying about it.

I guess I’ve be focused on M.V.A. Maximum Value Added. And I think it is already paying off.

I had a call with a prospective client the other day, who explained to me that they wanted to be able to accept payments for their sports photography business but that they didn’t require client galleries for proofing. Since we specialize in event proofing, it took me a second to realize that they just wanted a way for their customers to choose from a list of products and pay for their order and they would handle the image selection in-house. It sounds simple, but when you understand all the different ways that photography products can be sold or bundled, you too will understand that no vanilla e-commerce system can handle the job. I blew her away when I said that, since our system can already take form payments and we have an incredibly robust shopping cart that can sell anything you throw at it, that we could start programming a solution for her immediately and it wouldn’t take long to merge the two.

So yeah, it has taken us longer then expected to get here, but the fact that we took into account, “what could be” in our development cycle and not the bare minimum required, allowed us to be faster on our feet in this case and impressed our client at the same time. And it is those “wow” moments that every entrepreneur should be pursuing. Those impressions are what make any business successful and meaningful. That's why I am in this.