The DIY MVP

• career

I promise I am keeping up with my one-project-per-weekend goal so far this year. I’ve just fallen a little behind posting about them. I made some more progress on the light dimmer which will be posted soon, and I fixed both my synth and my recording monitors. I also competed in the Static Showdown last weekend. Once the judging ends and I clean up my project a little bit, I’ll be sure to post about it.

In the meantime, I want to share my thoughts on creating a Minimum Viable Product. This evening someone asked for advice on how to build a delivery service startup, something I have a little experience with.

As for getting it off the ground, there’s always the classic MVP: make a single page website that describes the problem and collect email addresses to gauge interest. There’s also the get-out-and-do-it MVP. Next christmas, talk to some friends and neighbors and offer the service. Get some strapping young kids to help move them, and actually go through the process of buying trees and delivering them by hand on a small scale. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll have saved yourself a whole bunch of money and time, and if it is viable, interest will grow to the point where you will need to scale. Then you have to build the platform to keep up with orders, and the platform becomes whatever you need to keep growing. We used a similar technique for our Instacart for students startup last year, and we fell in the first category. But while it was running, we only built what we needed to keep up with orders. So our order form was just a Google Form, and we built an SMS messaging notifier for when deliveries where on the way only when remembering to text everyone became too much to manage. I’m a big advocate of building a service product as you need it, rather than planning what it looks like from the beginning.