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"Thus if in those days you tried renting a game you’d receive an email saying “Congrats! your rental of Assassin’s Creed 3 has been approved! Connect with the l

"Thus if in those days you tried renting a game you’d receive an email saying “Congrats! your rental of Assassin’s Creed 3 has been approved! Connect with the lender via Facebook to work out the details.” User? Meet cliff, here let me help… shove" Umm, a big part of the "MVP" is don't automate when you can use manual labor to test out a hypothesis. That doesn't mean your user has to do the manual labor. Why didn't you reach out to all of your lenders ahead of time and prep them for the relationship? You certainly had few enough that you could do it by hand. If you saw a bunch of folks contacting you wanting to rent it, you could make the introduction and let them take over. Or you could hand hold the entire way. In short, just because it's "smoke and mirrors" doesn't mean it can't be functional. It's just that you take the place of working code! When you get enough users to prove the hypothesis (and reach scaling problems of doing it manually) only then do you write code to automate it. Even more importantly than that is you now have a relationship with your super-early adopters. You can talk with them, do user research, UX testing, etc. That's something you miss out in this really bad implementation of an MVP.

namtrok 14y ago
Fair critique. I didn't write about the time we spent contacting our users and enabling the shares to happen. The key is that they expected the site to automate the process, and were always disappointed when they received a manual email from us. We have the relationship, but it's one that starts with an apology instead of a "How can I help you?"
- TillE 14y ago
  I don't understand. As pointed out, the whole idea is that you're doing everything that code would do, maybe even better. The only possible disadvantage is the speed of handling requests. Why would customers be disappointed with that?
  - namtrok 14y ago
    I cannot defend the reaction of users, they just often expressed disappointment with a "broken" system. Like going to an ATM and then getting a phone call saying, "Hi! I'm your bank teller processing the check you just deposited into our ATM" It's a strange experience and they expressed disappointment while referring to it as broken.
    - richardjordan 14y ago
      I think this aspect is often overlooked in the MVP discussion. Customers are trained to have certain expectations fulfilled and when they're not met they perceive things as broken, as you observe. I think the examples of MVPs that have worked best appear to be targeting other startups or folks in the industry with a high degree of tolerance for failure and understanding of how this all works (and therefore patience with the process). But most real-world customers end up disappointed with this kind of thing. So far as I can tell a lot of MVP-driven startups just accept that they'll lose a percentage of their early adopters over this. Worse, and I have some experience of this with a startup of my own, often MVPs come with the need for investment $$ to make them truly viable. So what to do? Well get 10,000+ folks signing up and using your system, in just a few weeks, and showing it's got great demand (that was a big number for the space). Yet the more you ramp up early adopters the bigger the cliff when you still hear crickets on the funding trail and never manage to afford to give those customers - many of whom have invested a lot of time and energy in your product - what you promised them. Many folks are okay with this. There's something almost sociopathic about many young inexperienced entrepreneurs who don't appear to think about the real world consequences of abandoning their early adopters (and their efforts and data).
      - wtvanhest 14y ago
        What's your company?
        richardjordan 14y ago
        Current company or the one I'm referring to when in the post above (which was prior startup)?
- wpietri 14y ago
  Why in the world did you let them know they were receiving a manual email? We faked a ton of "automated" email notifications and nobody ever caught on. The CEO did most of the fakery and it was really beneficial for him. He got to try out a lot of things and see what worked. Once he had something stable, we actually baked it into the product. It was especially use with matching algorithms. After doing things manually, he could say, "Well, the key factors for a good match are X". And he had actual experience to back it up, not the sort of handwavey notions these things often get built on.

namtrok 14y ago

Fair critique. I didn't write about the time we spent contacting our users and enabling the shares to happen. The key is that they expected the site to automate the process, and were always disappointed when they received a manual email from us. We have the relationship, but it's one that starts with an apology instead of a "How can I help you?"

TillE 14y ago
I don't understand. As pointed out, the whole idea is that you're doing everything that code would do, maybe even better. The only possible disadvantage is the speed of handling requests. Why would customers be disappointed with that?
- namtrok 14y ago
  I cannot defend the reaction of users, they just often expressed disappointment with a "broken" system. Like going to an ATM and then getting a phone call saying, "Hi! I'm your bank teller processing the check you just deposited into our ATM" It's a strange experience and they expressed disappointment while referring to it as broken.
  - richardjordan 14y ago
    I think this aspect is often overlooked in the MVP discussion. Customers are trained to have certain expectations fulfilled and when they're not met they perceive things as broken, as you observe. I think the examples of MVPs that have worked best appear to be targeting other startups or folks in the industry with a high degree of tolerance for failure and understanding of how this all works (and therefore patience with the process). But most real-world customers end up disappointed with this kind of thing. So far as I can tell a lot of MVP-driven startups just accept that they'll lose a percentage of their early adopters over this. Worse, and I have some experience of this with a startup of my own, often MVPs come with the need for investment $$ to make them truly viable. So what to do? Well get 10,000+ folks signing up and using your system, in just a few weeks, and showing it's got great demand (that was a big number for the space). Yet the more you ramp up early adopters the bigger the cliff when you still hear crickets on the funding trail and never manage to afford to give those customers - many of whom have invested a lot of time and energy in your product - what you promised them. Many folks are okay with this. There's something almost sociopathic about many young inexperienced entrepreneurs who don't appear to think about the real world consequences of abandoning their early adopters (and their efforts and data).
    - wtvanhest 14y ago
      What's your company?
      - richardjordan 14y ago
        Current company or the one I'm referring to when in the post above (which was prior startup)?
wpietri 14y ago
Why in the world did you let them know they were receiving a manual email? We faked a ton of "automated" email notifications and nobody ever caught on. The CEO did most of the fakery and it was really beneficial for him. He got to try out a lot of things and see what worked. Once he had something stable, we actually baked it into the product. It was especially use with matching algorithms. After doing things manually, he could say, "Well, the key factors for a good match are X". And he had actual experience to back it up, not the sort of handwavey notions these things often get built on.