Backstory – I started the railstutorial.org tutorial to learn Ruby on Rails (RoR) about a year ago. It was (and is) the hot language in the startup space. I failed. I failed big time. I’ve never been too familiar with the command line and all of the error and frequent stops made me stop trying…
The Blog
The Easiest Marketing Preparation for Your Minimum Viable Product
For the sake of this post, please make sure you read minimum viable test vs minimum viable product post. You must plan marketing before you launch your minimum viable product. If you don’t have a blog and other inbound channels while you are planning to launch your product, you will probably depend on a techcrunch…
Minimum Viable Products vs Minimum Viable Tests
There has been a lot of confusion with the terms minimum viable product and what I consider minimum viable tests. The minimum viable product is a term that is based off of the “minimum feature set” that Steve Blank often refers to. Although Steve refers to these terms interchangeably, the minimum feature set is the…
The Number 1 Mistake Entrepreneurs Make in their Blog
Writing posts for other entrepreneurs instead of their target market. Almost everyone does it and I don’t understand why. The only reason you should write posts targeted towards the startup community is if your product is targeted towards entrepreneurs. If startups are the meat and potatoes of your target market, that’s great – you’re doing…
What The Lean Startup Movement Is Missing – Golden Nugget Anecdotes
What often gets lost in lean startups and customer development is the talking to customers part. After reading “The Lean Startup”, one often remembers certain anecdotes about the startups. What they most often remember is the minimum viable products or minimum viable tests that sucessful entrepreneurs created. They often don’t remember the intensive customer development…
Complete Honesty – I’m not proofreading these first 20 posts
After my last post, I’ve come to the realization that I don’t want to proofread these first twenty posts. It’s my firm belief that no one is going to ever read them. If they do, I will hire my girlfriend to proofread and let me know how often I misspell “the” as “teh”. As a…
Do your first 20 blogposts really matter?
I’m sorry, this is a rant on blogging and does not have anything to do with minimum viable products. Well, technically a blog can be a minimum viable product, so let’s extrapolate a bit. Does your minimum viable product (or blog) really matter if no one is viewing it? Yes and no. Yes, because the…
A Secret Location of Startup Ideas – Support Forums
Public support forums make it very easy to locate problems with existing products. The easiest way to start a company is to find an existing company, niche out a specific underserved user segment, and build a product specifically for them. The easiest way to find an underserved segment is to locate an industry that interests…
Why Does This Blog Exist?
I’ve been running iBuildMVPs for the last year or so without a blog, so why create one now? The answer is simple: I see the same mistakes and answer the same messages repeatedly. Maybe if there are more resources available for building minimum viable products, testing hypotheses, and finding your way to product market fit,…