Creating Your MVP
You won't know what your company should really be "about" until your customers tell you.
I teach high school kids about the world of business in the only way I know how: They create a business from nothing, launch it in our first few weeks together, and then grow it.
My goal is that by the time they graduate, this hands-on learning will make them more skilled and knowledgeable than the juniors at our local state college, Florida Gulf Coast University.
FGCU’s school of entrepreneurship is ranked 12th in the nation. I’m competitive. This goal makes it fun for me to go to work each day. It’s also fun for my students. I can’t tell you how many times in the past seven years FGCU’s professors, donors, advisors, and pitch event judges have told me my high school juniors could teach FGCU’s upperclassmen a thing or two.
Braggy? I’m bragging about my kids. I hope you’ll forgive me. I’m not just proud of these young business leaders; I admire them. They’re good people, smart problem finders and solvers, and they’re remarkably skilled self-teachers.
How do they pull their level of success off year after year after year?
It all starts with their MVP, which in the startup world stands for Minimum Viable Product.
That’s exactly what it sounds like. Once they’ve formed teams and established class rules for the year, they try to figure out what their business should be about.
They’re always wrong about this, but that’s just part of the process. Their MVP shows them how people will take to their idea.
There’s nothing fancy about an MVP – indeed, that’s the point. When you’re thinking of your own, focus on the word Minimum, as in, “What’s the most basic, borderline lame thing I can create to show people what I’m thinking about for my business idea?
The reason they do it – the reason you need to create your own MVP right away – is that the ability to touch, feel, see, and interact with your product is going to be worth its weight in gold to you.
Here are a few examples:
MVP to Show Your Idea.
One year we had two guys who wanted to make an app for an idea that they described as Air BNB for homemade food. I’ll tell you more about that another time.
This app, called CommunEats (for Community Eats: get it?), would have involved coding, which they didn’t have any skill for at all. But that was fine, because to start with, all they needed was what is called a wireframe – basically, static pictures of what each page of their app would look like as you shopped, filled it out, and ordered your homemade tamales (or whatever). Five pictures or slides would have sufficed. Their wireframe ended up with around ten. They made them as PDFs.
Showing these PDFs of what their app would look like changed their entire experience talking to prospective customers, prospective developers, our class mentors during the semester, and our judges at our semiannual pitch event.
For an app, a wireframe is a perfect MVP. It really is minimal. With a little bit of image drag-and-dropping in PowerPoint or even a Word document, you can make it yourself, even if you’re an ADD extrovert (like me) who has nooooooo talent at sitting down long enough to master Photoshop or write actual code or whatnot.
Not an app guy or gal? Thinking of something a lot more tangible? That’s perfect. Most of my students fit into this same boat.
Here’s another example of an MVP that proved me wrong.
MVP to Sell.
Another year, a team of four decided to start a vegan bakery named Nagen, for Naples + Vegan. It was inspired by one of their sisters, who was a vegan and complained there were no sweet options in town for someone who ate like her.
A what bakery?!!! I thought that was one of the dumbest business ideas I’d ever heard. Vegan to me says sawdust-flavored. Bakery items speak to me of eggs, milk; butter… how on earth were they ever going to make this work?
The thing is, my job isn’t to tell my students which ideas I think will work – thankfully for these future superstars, because man, was I wrong!
Instead, my job is to foster an environment where my students try stuff out, which usually means they hit a number of dead ends as they travel toward ultimate success. It isn’t failure till you quit, though; until then it’s just practice, and I wanted to watch these four practice dealing with misfortune for a while so they could learn from that and move on to their next idea.
If your business is a bakery, your first MVP should be a baked good of some sort. They decided on chocolate chip cookies. Yum! My favorite.
They looked up vegan cooking advice on YouTube. They asked our school’s culinary department’s chefs for recipes and advice. Some of the adult culinary students helped them bake. Their tireless effort and all the collaboration they inspired was really cool to watch.
Their first cookie, their initial MVP? I was so right. Truly flavorless. Taste some printer paper and you’ll have a good idea what our pallets were up against that day.
Their second cookie? Flavorless in its own way, and also gooey. Not good-gooey, either. Definitely more proof to me that they had a wise (if mum) teacher.
Of course, I didn’t tell them I knew they’d fail and have to start a different business. They had more to learn on their own before I’d even think to step in and guide them in a new direction, but even when I did, I would try my best not to be a jerk about it.
The third cookie wasn’t good.
The fourth cookie was worse.
The fifth recipe they tried made their classmates and me want to puke. We didn’t, but most of us spit out the bite we’d taken. It wasn’t auspicious. We’d been taste-testing for a while by then – two weeks? Three? I was curious when they’d realize what I’d known all along, that there were no vegan bakeries in Naples for a very good reason: Good flavor, satisfying texture, and vegan? Can’t be done.
The sixth cookie they brought to class? WOW! I’ve been known to exaggerate, but this is no hyperbole: To this day, I have never tasted a better chocolate chip cookie than Nagen’s breakout recipe – which they ended up selling in person, in stores, and online for about five years before they went on to other adventures.
Nagen’s MVP process was absolutely essential to the success of their business. Imagine if they’d talked an investor into forking over a few hundred thousand for a lease on a store and ovens based on the mere words, “Naples’ very own Vegan Bakery”? They wouldn’t have made a single sale!
Instead, by version 6 of their MVP, Nagen started giving samples and getting glowing feedback from other students, from teachers, from the community…. The first people who tried this version asked if they could buy a whole one, or better yet a few to take home. The next day they baked enough so they could, indeed, sell their cookies.
They were profitable from that first selling day, and they bootstrapped their business with these sales, growing organically, as the expression goes.
Who needs investors when people are dying to buy your MVP?
MVP to Learn and Improve.
Another of our most successful class businesses started off a little slowly – not due to lack of drive, but rather to apathy on the part of would-be customers.
Faer for Everyone (https://faerforeveryone.com/) started as a personalized gift-box company, with a stuffed animal, a candle, and a piece of jewelry in each box.
Their founding vision was brilliant. Buying a gift for someone special and want to show them that you truly see them? You tell Faer their aesthetic (cottage core, streetwear, light or dark academia) and they’ll sell you a box full of items curated along that particular theme.
Their presentation was great, and their plans sounded like a surefire hit to everyone they told them to, including me. They even earned $750 for second place at a Biz Kidz competition, held at a nearby mall (https://bizkidzexpo.com/). Everyone loved their personalized gift box idea, that is, except for customers. They sold a few gift boxes. Not too many at all.
However…!
(See, this is what I love about an MVP):
On our class’s selling days in the lunch room, they had some sample boxes on display. One of the things in the boxes was jewelry that went along with the personal style of the prospective gift recipients. Customers asked if they could buy just the jewelry.
Of course, the answer was yes! One of the values I encourage from day one of class is, if someone offers you money, take it! – even if you then have to figure out how to get the “what” they want to pay you for.
Don’t worry, this has to be legal and doable. But if it’s legal, if it’s possible, then yes, sell them the thing they’re asking to buy.
The Faer girls sold jewelry. And more jewelry. And by now, thousands and thousands of dollars of jewelry. Customers love Faer, and that makes it easy for Alexa and Sofia, the founders, to love Faer, too. They love their business so much that they’re taking it with them to continue growing it in college next fall – FGCU, as it turns out.
Faer’s MVP allowed them to show their would-be customers what they were thinking of selling. Their prospects then told Faer what it was they liked best in that offering and showed that this feedback was sincere with the most honest feedback of all – cash.
If you get your MVP right, it will turn into your first product and thus your first sales.
What’s your MVP?
One of our class mentors, Matthew, and I have created an MVP of our own that we’re eager to share with the world – a regional pitch championship, with categories and giant checks for high school, college, and adult competitors.
If you’re in the area, we’d love to see your pitch on Saturday, April 6th. I know it’s right around the corner, but we wanted to get started with this competition idea. You see, the event itself is our MVP. By now, we think we know how to improve on the typical pitch event that new businesses can compete in. But until we throw the first event for ourselves, we aren’t going to have that all-important outside feedback that this first event of ours, this MVP, will give us.
If you have a business or a business idea, I hope we’ll see you in April!
Apply here: https://www.pitchchampionship.com/
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