When it comes to start-ups, all our reading can be summed up
in two words: speed and iteration. For sure, this is a little reductionist, but
that’s the gist. You need to be fast, and you can’t assume you know what will
be successful, so you have to try, try and try again until you figure it out. A
start-up is a business case search, not a business case execution.
Wow, I just regained consciousness. Did I write that? I’ve
been brainwashed. Well, may as well make the best of some entrepreneurial
indoctrination…
During the last intensive (that’s when we all get together
once a month to you non-BGIers), I presented an app to a handful of fellow
students. My intention was twofold: get feedback on what everyone thinks of it
and perform a practice experiment with a product “start-up.” (Ok, there’s a
happy coincidence with a third goal: produce blog material).
The result of this experiment is quite encouraging, and also
an early success story. Everyone was incredibly positive and encouraging. Many
were very excited to see what this simple app could do and I heard a million
and one ideas for new features. That feedback was invaluable because it’s
incredibly hard to take a step back and objectively assess your own work.
This also provided some interesting insight when thinking
about launching this app as a start-up (of sorts). Getting this thing in the
hands of customers students is difficult to do fast. When I started writing this thing, I thought the biggest time
sink would be just in the actual code development. After all, I was am
completely unfamiliar with developing an app for iOS. But, working through the
difficulties of app approval, enterprise licensing and finding all the internal
stakeholders in BGI, that has been a much bigger hurdle and delay to launch.
Lesson one: you aren’t done until you’re done; i.e. when
your product is actually in the hands
of customers.
A surprising issue came up during the intensive: the
buzz/hype/excitement blew up out of my control. Initially, it was great to hear
it all. However, this is kind of scary at the same time. There were open
questions to the entire community such as, “weren’t we supposed to have an app
by now?” I wasn’t trying to keep this a secret, but I wasn’t evangelizing it
quite yet either, and it seems everyone
knew about it. Yikes. In the software business, an exciting product that never
shows up is called vaporware, and is not a place you want to be.
Duke Nukem Forever: A video game that was in development for nearly 10 years, and was largely considered the quintessential definition of "vaporware."
Lesson two: Public awareness can get out of hand in a hurry,
and can easily outpace your schedule.
That seems to go back to speed and iteration. I would rather
get this app published even if it is full of issues so everyone can see the
progress. I need more speed, and I thought I was already going plenty fast!
From the few students and faculty who did see my app, I have
a laundry list of awesome feature ideas. This was super exciting, and I want to
tackle all of them, but I’m truly trying to stick to the minimum effective
product for now. That’s really hard
to do, because a lot of these things are small additions. I can see why this is
valuable though. My biggest blocking issues have nothing to do with the app’s
functionality, and if I don’t focus on all those other issues, it will never
get shipped. So, no changes for now no matter how much I want to spend my
efforts there.
Also, it’s surprisingly hard to get a truly minimum
effective product. My initial goals were several times more than what I’ve
written so far. It took some thought to figure out what the actual minimum was.
Without focusing on reducing the initial feature set, I’d probably be buried in
code and have nothing functional to show for it. (Now that’s something I have experience with at work).
Lesson three: Minimum effective product. No, really. Is it
trivial? No? Then it’s not minimum enough [sic].
One final thought. As I read through the 3 lessons I’ve
learned through this process, I’m nowhere near actually adhering or
internalizing them. I’m not a voice of authority on these matters. I will
likely have to revisit this, reread and relearn.
