Rational Idealist

product development has been totally dominated in past few years by the ‘lean methodology’, preaching that we should all focus on less features, more iterations and a lot of customer interviews. all good and well, but i have also seen a lot of misunderstandings of this approach, leading to dysfunctional teams and products.

I believe the most problematic concept of all is the MVP – minimum viable product. everyone is pretty sure they know what MVP is, and yet, they continue to deliver either dysfunctional prototypes, or confusing ‘betas’.

sometimes, what people call the ‘lean mvp’ is actually just an excuse for sloppy design and coding. these i hate the most, and explain the fallacy with an engineering comparison:

MVP of a bridge is not made of two ropes, connected with occasional rotten wood planks that happened to be lying around. this lethal construction would serve only as a practical illustration of a concept, a sketch on the napkin, not even demo-ware yet.

MVP of a bridge is a healthy trunk carefully mounted over the river. you can use it to cross the river; you might have to learn how to walk it, but you can be sure it will carry your weight.

designing and building MVP is not a shortcut, it should take notable time and effort to do it.

lots of entrepreneurs in slovenia want to work with slovenian market first. nothing wrong with that, as long as you do your homework. marketing and go-to-market in slovenia must be very different than it would be in a larger society.

most important excersise of the go-to-market is always the sizing. and sizing a small market is particularly tricky – usually at least one of the important numbers is large enough to give you some slack, but in slovenia you must be careful.

i use a rule of thumb to quickly asses two variables:

1. number of potential customers that would be interested in the given product / service; based on how many people are receptive of the problem the product / service is solving
2. appropriate / expected pricing of the product / service, which is essentially what the disposable income of the population is – how much can your target customers spend without causing themselves existential threat

in slovenia, i believe that we have rule of tens.

for luxury items, this means:

• 1000 people can afford to spend 10.000 eur
• 100 people can spend 100.000 eur
• 10 people can spend 1M eur

and for everyone else:

• 10.000 people can spend 1.000 eur
• 100.000 people can spend 100 eur
• 1M people can spend 10 eur

so you have to know your potential appeal with the product, and then cross check with the pricing you had in mind, to see if your customers can afford it at all.

then you take those targets, and start devising detailed operational plan of activities that will get your product / service in front of those exact 10/100/1000/10.000/100.000/1M people.

and then you can come raise funds to execute the plan. 😉

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