Your Minimum Viable Product

on afrotech dot com. But in case you haven't logged on to the end at this morning or this today, this avenue, whatever, I don't know when you're listening, whenever you've listened, if you have not been over yet, I'm going to just give you a little bit of snapshots of what you can get on afrotech dot com. So first up, early stage investor in Wall Street VET Stephanie Thomas is now going to be the managing director over

at Zeo Capital Partners. She was previously a founding member and investor at Impact American Fund IAF and helped that company scale from seven million dollars to one hundred and ten million in assets under management. At Zeocapital Partner, she will lead US investment plans, which include a fifty million dollar commitment to inclusive investing through its newly establish Barclays Black Formation Investments Initiative BBFI, established just in October like

a little bit ago. The fund was designed to invest in black led companies that are working to address wealth and skills gaps through their services and technologies. So if you're building in that category and that vertical, you need to high at a big shout out to you, Stephanie. Much success in other news of black women doing amazing things. According to shot Black, Maria Tower is behind one of the largest women's health funds. According to shot Black, so

Steel Sky Adventures. They portfolio companies include like Midi Health which does menopausal care, Origin which is pelvic floor physical therapy, twenty eight Health which is telemedicine for reproductive healthcare, in May which is a marketplace for improving black maternal health today. To date, Steel Sky Ventures manages about seventy three million dollars in total assets, that's per shot Black. Place in the firm is one of the largest women's health focused

venture capital firms, Toller told shot Black. Steel Sky partners with passionate founders innovating in women's health. We invest in series A companies with product founder fit demonstrated solutions to critical women's health issues and readiness to collaborate with leading healthcare institutions. I'm so glad about that product founder fit statement because it's a great segue into today's episode. 'm with Lucas Black Tech, Green Money. That was your afro

tech news. If you want more stuff like that, go to afrotech dot com, pin it to your bookmarks bar. Now, we're taught to give things our best, especially if you're starting out in business. You know you've got to give it all you got in order to find success, right, you know, but what if with respect to business and ideas in the beginning, that's the absolute worst thing you

should do. I want to talk about minimum viable products, and this word is specifically for businesses and startups that want to scale, meaning you want to grow your revenue faster than your costs. It's not like, you know, you're building a long care service or some lifestyle business like that, where if you want to cut more yards or cut more hair, or you know, do more nails, you've got to hire more people or purchase a lot more equipment in order to do that and grow. Because you're one person,

you've got limited resources, limited time, et cetera. It's not designed to scale. But in a scalable startup, you're growing your revenue faster than your costs. So in this regard, we're talking about something that might be leveraging technology, whether it's an application or a website, even a fashion brand or any event like let's say you're putting on a conference. Those things, the revenue can grow for a business like that faster than the amount of effort, resources, etc. That

you're putting into it. So my goal by the end of this episode not only is it that you're convinced that you may not need to dive in with both feet. I want to get you to embrace the logic and why that might not be smart, but also my hope is that you have an idea of what you should

do next with this information. So unlike the kind of businesses that I mentioned earlier, the landscape or the barber, the nail tech small businesses, if you think about it, we're not necessarily trying to be profitable upfront those kind of businesses. You're trying to be profitable with every deal with a scalable operation at the MVP stage. All we're trying to do at this point is prove that people want what we're building and that they'll pay for it.

And so with that, I need to start this conversation with talking about passion and romance, and not the kind of passion in romance you know that you googly eye and somebody, but the kind of passion in romance that you might be googly eye and your ideas. I'm going to just say it in the most stark terms. I know how just because you care about the thing that

you're working on does not mean the market does. And that's not easy for a lot of people to hear because we believe that because we think we have the best idea for solving whatever problem that the world believes, the market believes it's a worthy idea to be on the shelf. Because some ideas that you have, people may appreciate the idea, but they're not willing to pay for it.

It may not be a problem at the level of them bringing you know that they want to go in their pocket and reach out their wallet or pull a phone out for Apple pay. They may have the problem, but they don't have the pain at such a level that they are willing to solve the problem with your solution. And think about it this way, it's not always pain that people are trying to solve for it's also desire.

Maybe they think what you're doing is cute, but are they willing to embrace you or cute for themselves such that they'll pay for it at a rate or at a dollar amount that makes it make sense for you to produce the thing. So just because people have displayed some level of interest in what you've displayed interest in developing does not mean there's a place for it on the shelf. This is what this process of going through the minimum viable product phase will help you figure out.

So what is a minimum viable product? It's just the finest for those of us who don't know what it means, a minimum viable product. And I'm gonna give you my pairaphrase and then I'll give you the actual definition per Google. So the definition, if you ask me, is what is the least I can do? The least viable thing I can do? And I'm going to come back to that word, the least viable thing I can do to prove that it is worth it to go to the next step and invest more in it. My idea in my business,

what's the least thing I can do? Because all I'm trying to do again, all I'm trying to do at this stage is prove that the market wants it and they will pay for it something the market wants. There are some things the market wants that it will not pay for at a level that makes it make sense for a producer to produce it. So I went to Google and just the first website that came up was my VA three sixty. I don't even know who does this website, but it's just the first one that came up.

So their definition of the minimum viable product is the first form of a product that you can release to users. It provides core functionality without any additional features. Entrepreneurs use MVPs and viable products to assess how customers feel about an idea. If the idea does have potential, they use customer feedback to develop the next version of the product.

There's a couple things in there I want to point out because it's important to do, because I started this conversation off talking about why you should not give your best in the early stages of a scalable startup scalable business, and that was a little bit intentionally abrasive, because I believe you should always give your best. But what I mean by not giving your best is don't do the most, do the least. You have to do viability in order

to prove. But that viability standard means you gave your all at that minimum level. What all can you do at this minimum level to make it viable? So if I am interested in starting, you know, let's say I want to start a new website and I want to do news what is a minimum viable product? Because I don't have any eyeballs come into my domain today, I don't have any eyeballs downloaded my app and subscribing to my newsletter. I don't have any eyeballs or demands from

advertisers to come and check me out. What is a minimum viable product in that scenario. In that scenario, a minimum viable product could be my Instagram page. How many people can I engage in the types of content I am going to produce things to produce content around, produce ideas around, produce words around such that I see okay, yesterday,

it was one hundred people. Following today's it's one hundred and ten people following Tomorrow, there's one hundred and fifty people following a week from now, there's two hundred people following and my engagement on every post continues to go up. That is some sort of proof that people are interested in my take. So what is the next step from that Instagram or that Twitter account, or that Facebook profile or that LinkedIn situation. I could go start a newsletter

for free. There's plenty of websites where you can go and you can create a newsletter. Keep it under most of them like make you keep it under a certain number of subscribers at the free level. Like let's say I don't know list to be true, but let's say like constant Contact or what's another one, Mailchimp. Let's say constant Contact. A Mailchimp will allow you to create a newsletter for free if you have less than one hundred subscribers.

I think Mailchimp actually does. It's constant Contact. I don't believe does. But Mailchimp, I believe, has their pricing structure to allow you to use their service for free if you have under a certain number of subscribers. So, if you want to be the next big publisher, the next big blog, the next big you know, hot take giver, the way to do that is to create content and build a following. You don't go and build a ten thousand dollars website on day one. You don't go and

buy twenty thousand dollars cameras on day one. You don't go and invest in studio time at your neighborhood podcast studio and spend you know, thousands of dollars an hour just to figure out if people want to consume your stuff. Now, if you got it and you want to do that, hey, by all means, but in a minimum viable product scenario.

To save you the time, the effort, the resources just to figure out if people care about your take is to start with what is the minimum What is the least viable thing you should you doing just to prove that the one hundred dollars you're gonna spend as an investment into more equipment, better resources, it's people, etc. That it's actually going to a good cause. That's what the

minimum viable product is designed to do. So, if you are I talked about fashion early, if you're creating a fashion brand, you don't necessarily have to go and spend a bunch of money on inventory. There are plenty of websites.

Spring is now one of them, used to be called Tea Spring, Shopify, does this now where you can create you can even sell the T shirt designs and the shirt designs even other branded things that you design and you don't pay anything effectively until somebody buys it and then they print it, they create it with your designs on demand. Amazon, I believe, is getting into this business.

I know Shopify, does I know t Spring which is now red, which is now Spring Red Bubble is one And this is something you can do just to prove that people want your stuff. Every year, at least once a year, sometimes twice, but at least once a year, I get somebody who is because I have a marketing technology agency. Also we do video production and all that stuff creatio and so every year I'll get at least

one person who says, hey, I created this book. I want to market and sell it, develop a website for it so I can sell it. And I'm like, I'm thinking to myself, like, who's waiting for this book? Who's who asked you for this book? And so they spent all their blood, sweat and tears writing this book that nobody's waiting for. And it baffles me that people do this now. If you want to write just because you got to get it out. That's fine, but there are

better ways. If you're writing in order to be a published author, in order to sell your knowledge, insights, words, there are smarter ways to go about doing it. For instance, if I'm writing a book, here's what I would do. I would write one chapter of said book. I would write one chapter of the book, and I would write no more. Unless you know, again, you just got to get it out, that's fine, But I would write one chapter. I would create a one page website. You can do

this on the variety of sites. Google allows you to do this for free. If you want to spend a little bit of money, that's fine too. But create a one page website that allows people to insert their email address for a free chapter of the book. Now, nobody knows you haven't started writing the whole book. Only you know. But you can say, hey, book name is how to Build an MVP. It's coming out in twenty twenty five. But if he goes to this website right now, you

get a free chapter. And in order to get that chapter, when they get to the website, they got to give you that email address. So they give you the email address, they automatically get this free chapter. In their inbox. It's just a PDF. It's easy. So now, not until I have created this one page website that allows me to collect email addresses, and in return for those email addresses, an automatic email get sent to that new subscriber, because you're adding them to a newsletter, which is the point

of this. Not until I have done that at enough and got enough subscribers, would I believe that there's enough people who want my book on creating an MVP. So if I'm looking at this website and I'm seeing three people, I'm making up numbers, but three people in three months have signed up to get the free chapter, there's probably gonna be one person waiting for the book. That's with thirty three percent. That's high because not everybody who subscribes

actually wants the content. So you got to determine the MVP to determine if I should spend the hours it's gonna take, the weeks is gonna take, the months, is gonna take, the dollars is gonna take to then go get somebody to create the artwork and do all the illustrations or whatever whatever whatever like, if I'm going to spend that spend that time, energy resources, etc. On this book.

I better know somebody's waiting for the book. So what you do is once you know, hey, there's a thousand people waiting because a thousand people signed up for this thing. I know too many people who have books, boxes of book boxes of books in their garage that they wrote a book and they thought they were going to be on the New York Times bestseller list, so they went and bought all of these books of the thing that they wrote that nobody asked them for. They didn't do

any preparation of the market. They didn't do any market development to generate excitement interest in the book that they were writing. But what I gave you is a very simple way to do it. And you can do this with almost anything. You can do this with an actual application. You can build your debt and you can start getting market research on hey, this is how the app works. And you can build mockups. There's actually websites that you can go to, such as flutter or flow is one,

retool is another. And what you do is you go to these websites and you build a mock up of your app, a mockup of your website, and then you start showing this thing to people, you start demonstrating it to them. The buttons are very often on a lot of these apps. The buttons will work. So if I'm on one page and I click a button, it'll take me to what I would see actually as the second page in a real app on my phone, but it's

just a mockup. And so the buttons are like clickable very often in a lot of these new prototyping softwares. And so then I'm taking that and I'm showing people who are in the target demographic, the people who are the people who I'm targeting or will target. Once I have found that the marketplace actually wants this thing and they want it for me. Oh, we'll come back to that in a second. That the marketplace actually wants this thing,

then I know, okay, I might have something here. Because I actually showed this to people who could use it. They would pay for it. They might even even signed up for my email list. They might have actually given me a dollar to be the first user once it's built. All sorts of ways you can determine if people are serious about using the product when it's ready. So I mentioned a second ago, I meant to mention this at all in the episode, but I'm glad I said that

it was do they want the thing? And are you the best person to build it? Because there is such a thing as product market fit, which means that my product is designed in such a way that the market who it's designed for it's built for they match. So the people who would use this thing are willing to use it because it's made for them. Is my product design to situate that it's made for the market that is trying to satiate? Then there's a question of founder

product fit. Just because you have an idea for something, what makes you uniquely situated to do this thing? What is it about you that says, you know what? I believe you're the guy to solve this problem because eventually you're going to have to sell users. Eventually you're gonna have to sell investors. And what they're going to be looking at is not just the idea, not just the product, not just the team you developed. They're also going to be looking at you and saying, what is it about

this person? What is it about Jill? What is it about Henry that makes me believe he's going to go out into the marketplace evangelize this thing and win? Are you the best person to solve the problem that you're trying to tackle just because you're passionate about it and just because you had an idea or just because you had the idea, does that mean it's best for you? That's work you gotta do. Do you have the skills those personal qualities that the market believes aligned with the

solution to the problem. So these are things that at your early days of starting a company, starting one that specifically scales or that should scale. These are the questions you have to answer and so your work, hopefully number one. Hopefully what we've accomplished today is getting you to think about are you doing too much too early? What are things you can do that might not be the ultimate thing?

And look Amazon. When Amazon started, Jeff Bezos knew, Hey, one day, I would really love to be able to sell TVs on the internet. One day. I would really love to be able to sell a car on the internet one day. I would really love to be able to sell anything on the internet. But what can I do today to prove that the market will buy things online? I'm going to sell books online. That's it. When Amazon started,

all they sold was books online. And then as that started to make sense, say, okay, what things go with books that people say that they're here buying books are what kind of things can we sell that book lovers since they're coming here already to buy books. Oh, they might want a bookmark, they might want a pencil, they might want a journal. And so they started to expand and then sell more and more and more things. But the minimum viable product was a website that just sold books.

So you need to start thinking about what is it you can do today with the limited resources. Sometimes having limited resources is actually a blessing in disguise, because you shouldn't necessarily always go spend a whole bunch of money on something that's unproven. What you should do is put a little bit towards it, whether that be time, resources, dollars or whatever, and just see if the thing starts to go. And then once you figure out what goes,

that's when you pour fuel on the fire. But you don't pour all your fuel into this thing that and there's no fire. What you want is to figure out what actually is showing some signs, and that's where you go to the minimum. The minimum viable product helps you that this process of developing a minimum viable product, the thing that you can do at with the smallest thing you can do that takes the least amount of resources, that's actually viable, the least viable thing, not the least alone,

but the least viable thing. What is that thing that you can do in your category? And so think about that, and then once you determine that, do that and only that until you found success. And once you found success, you know then that people actually might want this thing. Then you go and put the resources, spend the extra time, you know, take off a day, a week of work or whatever, spend a little bit more money on the thing,

you know, buy a better piece of equipment. But not until you figured out that the market actually even wants this thing from you in the first place. What's interesting about the minimum viable product and all everything I just said it's interesting about it. But what's interesting in this moment is the viability actually is a moving target. So as you build viability at one level, the point of a business is to grow, and so what is the

viability requirements at the next level. So you're always looking to test features, test things, test test new avenues for business growth, not with again, not with both feet jumping out the window, jumping into the water, but your test thing at every stage to see where is the next easiest, most efficient path path for growth. So once you have that thing, you're making money, you're building a user base, you're getting sales, you're getting new people to sign up,

you're getting signatures on the line, you're getting interest. There's another level and there will always be another level. And so what you want to do as a founder is start to train yourself to be in this always testing sort of mentality, always testing phase, because that's where the growth is. This is what you sign up for when you go build a business. You want to constantly. It's

like playing Jenga in a way. It's like you're always you know, testing which block is the easiest one to move based on the amount of effort I can give it safely. And just like Jinga, I think Jenga is the perfect example. The perfect parallel to a minimum viable product is one you got to be fast. And so you want to release a product, some version of your product, the viable version, to the market as quickly as possible, and you want to do it without committing a whole

lot to the effort. You know, you don't want to put all your chips in on the minimum viable product. You want to test it at a level to where you're not putting the company, the whole thing, your personal self at risk. That's the point of the minimum viable product, so that you don't put yourself at risk. You're testing at a level quickly, getting the market quickly, and at a level that just gives you inside Again, you're not trying to prove that you can make money yet, You're

just trying to prove that there is a market for it. Yet. That's all you're trying to do. And then you want to learn what resonates with the market that you're going after. And so in this minimum viable product phase, you're going to learn things about the business that you would have not you would not have had an opportunity to do if you delivered this fully fledged product at the onset.

There's this quote, I think it was by Reed Hoffman, and he said, if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your thing that you release into the world, you've released it too late. So many of us want the whole thing to be perfect, with a ribbon on it everything is perfect before we release anything. And what you do is you rob yourself of the opportunity to learn what the market actually wants from you when you do that. On another episode down the line, we'll talk

about l doing that publicly. We'll talk about showing the behind the scenes and why it's important to allow people to grow with you behind and get exposure to the behind the scenes of it, the mistakes and the failures. Maybe you should show that. We'll talk about that another episode though. Hey, listen, if you got something out of this episode, y, it would do me a big favor to just share it with somebody. Share this with somebody who you think will get something out of it. That's

all I ask. I'm with Lucas's Black Tech, Green Money.