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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell. In the last 15 years, my OKC Thunder have had more players win the league MVP than any other team in the league. And I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
In case you’re wondering, OKC has had 3 players win the Most Valuable Player award: Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Denver has also had 3 award winners in that time span, but they’ve all gone to the incredibly talented Nikola Jokić.
What do you think of when you hear MVP? Perhaps one of the guys I just mentioned comes to mind. Perhaps is a different player from a different team or even a different sport. Maybe you’re not really into sports so nothing comes to mind when you hear MVP.
Most Valuable Player isn’t the only possible meaning of the MVP acronym. My guess is that some of you think of something else specific when you hear those letters. For some of you, MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. That version of the MVP will be our focus for today.
According to Google AI, a Minimum Viable Product is a stripped-down version of a product or feature designed to be released early and get customer feedback. It focuses on the core functionality necessary to address a key customer need and allow for rapid iteration and learning. Essentially, it’s a way to test an idea with the least amount of effort and cost before investing heavily in a full-fledged product.
Unless I specify otherwise, for the rest of this episode when I say MVP, I’ll be referring to Minimum Viable Product. I don’t know exactly when I first became familiar with the concept of an MVP, but it was sometime in the last 10 years. Certainly after I left my corporate job and certainly after I started my own company.
Yet as I look back, there are two specific examples of me implementing an MVP before I ever knew to call it that. Let’s explore those examples today and what I’ve learned about MVPs since. Hopefully in doing so, we’ll discover some details that will help all of us.
In the mid 00’s I was promoted to a new position at the bookstore chain I was working for. I was given the task of creating a new department within the company. That department was the e-commerce department. The company had been considering entering the e-commerce space for about five years, and the leadership within the company decided that the time had finally arrived to move forward.
At that time, our company had between 20-30 stores in 5 states. We had one centralized distribution center and our own trucking system. This meant that our warehouse and distribution systems were designed and optimized to pull and ship one truckload of merchandise to each store once per week.
We recognized that this was a system that would not work for e-commerce, which is designed to pick and ship small orders to individual addresses each day. And if we did things right, those orders would be in the thousands per day.
This was one of many challenges we faced as we started this new department. We also needed to identify and scope out every single feature we wanted the website to include. Once we had that figured out, we had to put together a proposal that we could present to vendors.
Of course, that meant we also needed to research to figure out which vendors were capable of building a platform as robust as ours needed to be. We then needed to interview them and hire one. Only then would we be at a spot to begin the real work of coding the website and integrating it with our existing inventory management systems.
That entire process was lengthy. It took well over 18 months for all of that to transpire. So what could we do in the meantime? Enter the MVP.
We knew that we had to solve the challenge of shipping out thousands of individual orders every day. We knew we needed to have this experience and knowledge on day one of our new website. So to solve this challenge we opted to set up stores on third party sites like Amazon, eBay, and a few others.
It worked! We immediately started getting sales. Not thousands per day, not hundreds, but dozens. We worked with our warehouse management team to develop new picking methods. Our own team developed sorting methods. We experimented with various packing materials and shipping label systems. In addition to these operational systems, we also developed customer service protocols and trained a team to handle those situations.
By the time the website was ready, we had operational and service systems that were smooth. We had trained and competent personnel. We had expertly selected and branded packing materials for even our oddly-shaped products. We were ready! I still remember the moment we all stayed late and flipped the switch to convert to our new website. Moments later we all celebrated when the first order came in!
I don’t know how many of you will ever be responsible for a seven figure project of that size and scope. It’s certainly the only time I’ve been part of a project that large. But I’ve had many other MVPs that are on a smaller scale. I think these are more representative of the day-to-day sort of MVPs, so let’s explore one of those.
I left my corporate job in 2013 to start my own company which focused on providing podcast production for other podcasters. By that time my podcast network, Golden Spiral Media, was well established and we had listeners from all over the globe. We were known for having excellent production quality.
As I thought about my exit and launching into the entrepreneurial world, I struggled with deciding whether I should leverage my existing brand for this new focus, or if I should create a new brand instead. I posed this question to several trusted colleagues. During this exploratory phase I even had the chance to sit down and have lunch with the marketing director for one of the largest telecommunications companies in the US. I told her about my plans and my dilemma. She recommended I leverage the Golden Spiral Media brand and build my new business out of that brand.
So that’s what I did. I started taking clients under the Golden Spiral Media brand and I offered one singular service: podcast editing.
I was able to land my first client in December of 2012. That client exploded into a large network of shows and paid so well that I was able to quit my corporate job just 5 months later. Over the next year I added a handful of other clients. The first client kept me so busy that I didn’t really have room to take on any other clients. It was a great problem to have.
Here’s what I learned.
MVPs are awesome. It is so, so, SO easy to get caught up in all the intricate details of a new business, course, project, or endeavor. But not all of those details matter. Call it paralysis by analysis, decision fatigue, or whatever you’d like. Over the last 10+ years I’ve seen it happen time and time again in my own life and in the lives of so many others. That is, we want the launch of our project to be perfect. We want to have every detail figured out before we move forward. I get it. That sounds wise.
The problem is that FAR too often our desire for perfection kills our momentum. It turns into fear of failure. We never launch. Perhaps whether we know it or not we have a great MVP, we just don’t ever let it get off the bench and enter the game.
Did I just mix MVP acronyms? You bet I did.
Here’s the thing. My decision to launch my new company under my existing brand was a huge mistake. I was fortunate to get that first high paying client. But that work ended up masking my error for over a year. By the time I realized it, it was almost too late to save my business.
Once I realized that I was confusing potential clients by sending them to a website that mostly featured my own sci-fi podcasts and had a small focus on my podcast editing service, I course-corrected. I created a new brand with a new website which ONLY focused on the podcast editing service I provided for other podcasters.
That made all the difference. Not only that, but as I took on more clients, I learned more about the needs of other podcasters. As I learned about those needs, I pivoted to add services to meet those needs. Today my company offers around 20 different services for podcasters of all shapes and sizes.
If I had waited to launch until I had all the answers and details figured out, I would have still made mistakes. Perhaps some of those would have been near fatal too.
But the reality is I moved forward with one service and a brand identity that I thought was best. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was an MVP. Once I launched and got out into the playing field, I learned, took in information, and real-word data and conversations which better informed me of the marketplace and the needs of the people I desired to serve.
Regardless of the size of your project there is much to be gained by launching with an MVP. Yes, it takes guts. It takes letting go of perfection, imposter syndrome, fear, and doubt. It takes courage. But my experience has shown that when we move forward with an MVP, we’ll often find that it helps us become the real MVP with a product that our customers love, exceeds our dreams, and fulfills our expectations.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag on September 29th! Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page.