RUT not MVP

I saw this on Twitter yesterday:

These days I spend more time with entrepreneurs who have products in the market and paying customers, rather than the dreamers who are still struggling with their minimal viable productions and first sales.

In either case, what I teach entrepreneurs is that they need to not only worry about that first initial design for customers, but every incremental design beyond that.

The Lean Startup hints at how to do that, but doesn’t explain it well.

The framework I’ve been teaching (and iterating on) is called Tuesday. Make a plan a to change something every Tuesday. In that plan not only worry about the change itself, but also a metric to measure for success or failure and a number of Tuesdays to let it run to measure that success.

Doing this every Tuesday is a lot to ask of new entrepreneurs. If it is for you, then start with the first Tuesday of every month. If that is still too hard, the first Tuesday of every quarter.

Or Wednesday or Thursday, the actual day isn’t important. The idea of repeated iteration is what counts. Plus a heaping teaspoon of expected failure in most of ideas.

But that’s a whole other layer for another post.

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