Create Successful Products with the MVP Process

The Transcript

Create Successful Products with the MVP Process

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Brian Clark: Welcome back everyone to episode 7 of Unemployable. I’m Brian Clark, and today we’re continuing on from our last show talking about developing successful products.

Specifically, let’s look at examples of using the minimum viable product approach to take the guesswork out of what people actually want to buy.

So last time we talked about products in general, and why we fail to create things that people actually want to buy. We then took our first listener question, which was from Jim … who is working on getting into the t-shirt business.

While answering Jim, I told you about how two Boston brothers, on the verge of failure, turned one successful t-shirt idea into the company Life is Good. Today, Life is Good sells over 900 different items, sold online and in approximately 4,500 retail stores in the United States, plus 30 other countries.

Let’s briefly recap that story.

How the “Life is Good” Brand was Created

These guys are at their wit’s end, about to give up. They have several new ideas hanging on the walls of their apartment, but one stood out more than others to friends who they had over, who saw all the options.

They print up 48 t-shirts of that idea. It’s basically just a face with the words “Life is Good” beneath. They take these shirts to a street fair, and all the shirts sell out in 45 minutes.

It’s a great story. Three simple words on a t-shirt became a multimillion dollar lifestyle brand. The important thing though is that this story presents a methodology you can use to create your own successful product, and perhaps even more.

The more important thing is that this is an illustration of starting with a minimum viable product.

The technical definition of minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with the highest return on investment versus risk. And the way you minimize risk related to your investment of time and money is basically figuring out if people want to buy that product.

Most lean startup examples of the MVP approach involved software. Let’s look at a few examples in different product categories:

How to Create T-Shirts People Want to Buy

First, let’s do t-shirts. Basically the process is the same as the Life is Good example, except made easier by the Internet. It boils down to 4 basic steps.

1. Come up with several ideas. Don’t bet the farm on just one, unless you are really sure that this thing has a really big chance of being the thing.

2. Next you want to get feedback in some fashion from people other than you or perhaps even your immediate team. People who are outsiders see things differently than those of us who are too close to it. You need some objective reaction.

3. Print up a small batch of shirts on demand. It’s a lot easier than back in 1994, when the Life is Good guys printed up those 48. I think you can get as little as three or four shirts right now at a fairly reasonable price. So, just a small batch. Have one so that you can put it on someone modelling it. Get a photo and then you’ve got to create a purchase enabled landing page. Basically, you need to be able to see if people will actually buy the shirt.

4. Then you drive traffic to the page and see if it sells. Now, if you have an existing audience, the whole initial feedback thing, and the actual ‘see if they’ll buy thing,’ is a lot easier. You send out an email and say, “Hey, look, I’m looking on creating a few t-shirt designs. What do you think?” And then you actually pick one and say, “Hey, I’m now selling this t-shirt, go check it out and buy it if you like it.” Right? And then it comes down to math. I mean, did you break even? Say you use Facebook ads because you don’t have your own audience, did you at least break even? You know, at this point you are going to have to make a decision about the viability of the product. But I can guarantee you, you’ll be in better shape than just guessing, and then betting the farm on 300 shirts or whatever the case may be.

Let’s look at another example.

The Smart Way to Create Ebooks and Courses

So, what about online courses?

Online education is now a $15 billion dollar a year industry, and a lot of the best courses are coming from commercial sources as opposed to traditional institutions of learning. So, lots of interest here from entrepreneurs, but figuring out what to create can be tough.

Most of the people who create courses didn’t jump right into it. They usually started blogging and then created an ebook first to gauge demand. Then you take the next step to a higher value and more expensive course.

Brett Kelly – Evernote Essentials ebook. Now developing it into a course.

It’s important to realize that when it comes to courses, books, and other information products, how you position the information matters more than the information itself. Meaning, the same exact book with a different title may sell dramatically better or worse depending on how the “packaging” resonates.

A classic example of this is Tim Ferriss, back before he released his breakthrough book 4-Hour Work Week. He had several title ideas, and basically put those ideas out online to allow people to choose the one they liked best in the form of a survey.

Obviously 4-Hour Work Week won, but it was a landslide, so it not only became the title of Tim’s first book, it became a lifestyle brand in itself, with The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, and The 4-Hour Chef.

How I Sold Something that Didn’t Exist Yet

Here’s another approach to selling an online course … sell it before it exists, and then create it in a constant real-time state of feedback and iteration.

Sound crazy? That’s exactly what I did in 2007 with the first product launched off of Copyblogger, called Teaching Sells. This ended up being a massive course that taught people instructional design principles and how to sell the courses they created, but when we launched it, it didn’t exist yet.

I had spent a year a half on Copyblogger teaching people how to create better content, get more traffic, and that selling stuff to people as opposed to trying to make money with advertising. Problem was, a lot of these bloggers didn’t have anything to sell, and were under the impression that no one would ever pay for information again.

So, I wrote a report that basically made the case that people most certainly will pay for information, and especially high value online courses. I also predicted that the online education market was about to explode … something that ended up becoming obvious in the next few years after that.

We released the report for free after building a membership site for the course. We seeded it with 5 introductory lessons so people would have something to start with.

Then, we opened up for sales. Instantly we went from zero to six figures, and seven figures just a year later. When you think about it, this was the beginning of what is now Copyblogger Media.

“Wait a minute,” you may be thinking … this sounds like a Kickstarter. That’s true, but it was two years before Kickstarter existed. Plus, when you have an audience, you don’t need Kickstarter or someone else’s platform, because you have your own.

From Minimum to More Viable Product

I want to expand on that thought just a little bit, because it’s really important. Starting with that first training program in 2007, and continuing into WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, content marketing software and now our Rainmaker Platform, we’ve never had a product fail.

I’m not telling you that to brag, because I can’t really take full credit. The fact that we developed, served, and essentially bonded with our audience to such a great degree provided insight that we wouldn’t have otherwise.

Everything we’ve launched has been a minimum viable product … every single time. And we always reward our early adopters with our absolute best deal, because they literally participate in making it better.

The cool thing is, each line of business starts off beyond absolute minimum. It’s a little more on the mark than just minimum, because we’re tuned in to the problems and desires of the audience to such a degree that we’re able to make better educated guesses right from the start.

I’d call that the More Viable Product approach … essentially the same procedure, but a little more feature rich and a bit less flawed. And that’s a win right there.

That’s it for this episode. Next week we’ll answer more listener questions and maybe dig into some sexy legal issues … I know you can’t wait for that topic, but you know, it’s just a bit important.

Take care for now, and keep going. If you’re digging what you’ve been hearing so far, please give me a rating or review over at iTunes.