Practical business, tech, and leadership. Several times a week.
It just got too creepy for me. When I was searching in plain-old Google the names of my friends started showing up in the auto complete. Google has gone too far, and if so many people didn't have my Gmail address then I would delete that too.
In this article, I will argue that most so-called “MVPs” are not really MVPs because they are not focused on the process of learning, and as a result, wasteful. I think that there is a lot of value in not trying to build too much. This low-hanging fruit likely accounts for the proliferation of the term. But I think that a lot of the value of an MVP is testing the risky assumptions every startup has.
I'm one of those guilty people who thought that an MVP is just a scaled down version of your fully envisioned product. Turns out an MVP might not even be a product at all.
An MVP is something (anything!) that tests the riskiest aspects of your new business. If you're worried about whether your so-called future customers would even be interested in your product, maybe an MVP is just a landing page that takes e-mail addresses of people that want to be notified when your product launches. A product that doesn't even exist yet... one that you will build if you feel would have sufficient demand based on how many people actually respond to your site.
This is revolutionary to me. I was going to be satisfied with building an MVP (read: scaled down product) in 4 months for an arbitrary launch date. But now... maybe the deadlines should be getting something out there in 4 weeks to see if the assumptions I'm making are holding up.
When deciding what features to offer in a product, you have keep your focus on what value you're offering the customer. It's tempting to include a lot of features that are nice to have -- but do they really add value to your core offering? What pain point are you trying to solve for your customer?
Can you solve that pain point even with omitting some of your features?
This is especially crucial when creating a minimum viable product. You can only include the features that contribute to the core service that you're offering. You'd be surprised at how many features you're including are nice-to-haves and not need-to-haves.
A prototype becomes a product as soon as you start putting too much effort into the details. Or, once you start putting too much effort at all. Once your prototype is no longer quick or dirty, you've strayed into enemy territory.
I wish I were better at rapid prototyping. I tend to take concepts too far without truly testing to see if the core offering actually works.
Prototyping is a skill. It's a skill of saying no, and it's a skill of including just enough of what's needed in order to get by.
I think a lot of people would really like that.
Problem is I don't think I could come up with the daily tips (obviously). Anyone want to volunteer to be a writer?
I've been reading a ton lately. I'm learning Ruby (and consequently Ruby on Rails)... so watch for some more posts on this later. I'm also trying to improve my Unix skills.
Here are two free e-books that I've found lately that are really good at addressing their topics:
While reading The Innovator's Dilemma I've had some interesting thoughts regarding the iPhone vs. Android debate. I've decided that Android is positioning itself in the wrong market.
I believe this is true whether you feel that iPhone or Android is better. It all comes down to where each of the phones is positioning itself in the market.
As I watch all of the commercials on TV it becomes really apparent that the Android "movement" is trying to unseat the iPhone from its position as the "favorite" smartphone among consumers. They try to flash numbers to show how Android devices have bigger screens, faster processors, Google e-mail (no way!) and (at least until a few weeks ago) how Android devices offer Flash.
You can insert your own trite arguments here.... because everyone really knows that iPhones are really what most people want. They don't care about any of those other features when it comes down to it. This is a secret truth that avid Android supporters don't like to admit.
But according to a very valuable principle in the Innovator's Dilemma, this feature-comparison approach is the wrong way to try and disrupt the iPhone-dominated smartphone market. In a best-case scenario this will only result in a war of attrition -- where both sides get bloody and no one wins. In a worst case scenario, customers will keep their loyalty to the iPhone and Android loses in the end. Take your pick.
The Innovator's Dilemma teaches another approach. Since the iPhone has already positioned itself in the upper end of the smartphone market, Android needs to position itself in the lower end in order to properly disrupt the upper markets in the future. Don't compete in elegance with the iPhone right away -- customers in that segment of the market aren't interested in your plastic phones anyway.
Android should use its lack of features to its advantage. It should position itself as a super cheap, entry-level smartphone that anyone can afford. Price it at $49 with no contract. Negotiate with the carriers to offer 3G data on a pay-as-you-go basis similar to the iPad. Sales will explode, and smartphones will even be in the hands of the boy who pushes the plow.
Hasn't Android learned any lessons from the $99 Touchpad? There's not just crazy demand for cheap tablets, but cheap smartphones too. People won't even try to compare it to the iPhone when they know it's supposed to be a simple, cheap, and reliable way to have basic smartphone functionality.
And then, in true Innovator's Dilemma fashion, the Android devices can move upmarket and disrupt the iPhone's segment of the market. That's because the Android OS will improve over time and will finally be able to offer the same elegance and quality that has been present in the iPhone on Day 1. That's the question that everyone keeps trying to address whenever the next Buffalo Chicken Sandwich update comes out, isn't it? Has the Android OS finally reached the polish of iOS?
When Android does reach that point, customers will finally be able to make an apples-to-apples comparison between phones (sorry for the pun).
So I guess the real question is... will Android manufacturers ever pivot to focus on the lower market segments?
Absolutely not. Here's why.
Android is too fragmented. There isn't a single company driving the overall strategy for Android. The result is a confusing smattering of random products created by a multiplicity of manufacturers. This effectively kills any possibility of coordinated attack on the iPhone.
Carriers won't cooperate. There is no way the carriers are going to support lower-margin phones such as the ones I've proposed. The carriers have a need to show ever-increasing profits and, therefore, need to find ever-greater margins on the phones that they are selling. Offering a fifty-dollar phone without a contract isn't going to do this. And you can be certain that without the bargaining power that Apple has, no Android manufacturer will be able to negotiate a pay-as-you-go 3G contract for a smartphone.
Cash flow is good enough right now. It seems like the Android manufacturers are content to wage a war of attrition with Apple. They just don't realize it's a losing battle, especially when the iPhone leapfrogs everyone again when the new version comes out (this year? next year?). Besides, pivoting to the lower market segments on the outside appears to be riskier business -- because we don't have any hard numbers on just how big that lower-end smartphone market could be.
But it could be really huge. And it could offer disruption of the upper-end market later. That's the risk you have to take.
And that my friends is the true innovator's dilemma.
Today I downloaded Tiny Tower for iPhone/iPad. It's the first arcade-style game that I've played on my iDevices -- every other game I've tried is either a word game like Words with Friends or a puzzle game like Angry Birds or Cut the Rope. I'm starting to regret having made this leap.
Don't get me wrong -- Tiny Tower is pretty fun to play. It reminds me a lot of Sim City in the way you get to build and manage something based on how much money you have. The object of the game is to build a revenue producing tower by allocating space on each floor to residential or commercial dwellings. Residential floors bring you rent revenue and employable workers for your commercial floors, and commercial floors bring you money for everything that they sell. You, as the tower manager, have to decide what to build, how fast to build it, and what you're going to put in there once it's built.
It's a free app, which means there's very few barriers to getting in and starting to play right away. And if you're willing to stick it out, it's free to keep playing. That's where the interesting part comes in.
The app creators for Tiny Tower are using an interesting revenue model that can be found in a lot of games on the iTunes App Store. It's a "play for free but play faster for pay" model where you can get more perks in the game through in-app purchases.
Tiny Tower has what it calls "Tower Bux" that allow you to expedite certain aspects of gameplay. If you have a Hat Shop in your tower, for example, your workers can create hats faster if you spend Tower Bux to "skip" the time it would have taken for them to make them. So instead of waiting an hour or two (of real-life time, mind you) you can start selling some new hats right away.
10 Tower Bux for $0.99, 100 for $4.99, and so on.
This revenue model is very prevalent in the iTunes App Store. While it's nice that you don't have to pay a $60 entry cost for a game like you do with Nintendo, XBox, or Playstation... it's irritating that you also can't just buy a game and enjoy it as fast as you want. A game is now a recurring expense if you want to keep enjoying it for hours at a time without waiting.
Or worse yet -- game developers are forcing their games to go "viral" by requiring you to get your friends in on the action. Now I understand why people on Facebook are always posting about how they need someone to gift them cows or corn or whatever. Now that's annoying, stupid, and embarrasing.
I'm regretting this post-Christmas foray into this shady new world of games. Time to get out now before it's too late.
There is more to leadership, particularly in these troubled and uncertain times, than tweaking the "value proposition" — the narrow calculus of costs vs. benefits, doing things for customers vs. taking things away from them. Real leadership is about embracing the "values proposition" — doing the right thing at all times, and figuring out how to build a great business around that unwavering promise.
This rings true to me for both business and personal aspects of our lives. We need more unwavering promises to do the right thing.
Spending money is very different nowadays than it was for our parents and grandparents. They didn't use a debit or credit card when they wanted to pay for something at the store. They paid cash or wrote a check (cue the 1990's theme music). Then they kept a meticulous record and saved their receipts so that they kept to a budget and didn't run out of money.
Nowadays we don't even carry cash. Writing checks is a thing of the past. For me, paying rent was the last bastion of check-writing necessity until I found out that my bank offers free automatic Bill Pay. Now the check gets sent every month automatically. It's amazing... our family finances are on auto-pilot and managing our money has never been easier.
But with all of society's money-managing technology I think we've lost the value of a dollar and the spirit of a sturdy budget. When you pay with plastic it doesn't really feel like you're spending money. There have been times when I go to the mall, swipe three times at a few stores and BAM -- I've spent a couple hundred bucks without realizing.
Then I come home and don't think about it again. Because my personal finance software automatically imports and categorizes my transactions. My credit cards are set to auto-pay themselves off every month. Bill Pay takes care of everything else. My only intervention is to make sure we don't spend so much that we overdraft when the automatic credit card payment posts itself.
Don't get me wrong, I do think spending money should be easy -- who wouldn't want to shop online with the click of a button?
At least the WAY we manage our money should be more complicated. More manual of a process. Although I'm not about to break out a pencil and dust off the old green ledger notebook it certainly is tempting to start using the register that I got for free at the front of our checkbook. Now if I only wrote checks...
Can someone please invent some personal finance software that still lets us feel accountability for our money?
