A playbook for Generating Business Ideas

b. “Concierge” Minimum Viable Product
I practiced iterative product development and made use of a
minimum
viable
product
(MVP) in order to get feedback from customers and get market
validation or invalidation quickly. Basically, what that means is I identified what
was most valuable to customers and found ways to deliver it in an efficient
manner.
One of the products solves such a problem (20+ hours of time) that the MVP
was worth $99 to people. Using a “concierge MVP” — delivering the value as a
manual service rather than an automated product — enabled me to learn more
about what I actually needed to automate and how I could improve the
experience for customers. It also ensured I wasn’t building something no one
wanted. I only “concierged” what people wanted.
c. Diversify
Some might say diversifying is a fancy term for “throwing a bunch of shit
against the wall and seeing what sticks,” or “not being persistent, committed, or
passionate enough.” I say diversifying is rational and responsible.
Knowing that most of my experiments would fail, I juggled multiple balls at

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once. Some experiments did fail. A lot of the success stories you hear are about
an entrepreneur so obsessed with a vision…you don’t hear about the
entrepreneurs who do that and fail. I took a more logical approach.
I didn’t just iteratively develop the product…I iteratively allocated my time.
Each time I got a new customer I would spend a bit more time on that business.

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