The Definitive Guide to a Minimum Viable Product: 9 Real-Life Examples

20 MIN READMarketing
Written By Noé Khalfa

If you want to understand Minimum Viable Products, and why iteration is the best way to create anything from your online course to your products to your entire business, you’ve got to first understand how nature works, because we humans didn’t invent iteration.

Nature favors small incremental changes. As Ralph Waldo Emerson described, “Nature never hurries. Atom by atom, little by little she achieves her work.”

This truism is apparent all around us. Take a look at our planet. Life evolved over 3.5 billion years to create the complex organisms that we are. That evolution consists of tiny ongoing iterations, and it’s worth noting that life will never stop iterating.

In fact it’s inherent to the very mechanisms of life that it create, learn, and improve upon previous creations in a continuous feedback loop.

Our job as business owners and visionaries is to learn from nature’s example and create products, services, and projects by evolving them over many iterations in an intelligent feedback loop.

This massive article is intended to be used as a reference guide. Bookmark it somewhere you’ll remember to look as you consider starting a product or service business or accomplishing a big project.

Going over the examples again and again will spur new ideas and help you simplify the inevitable overwhelm that accompanies creativity.

Enjoy, and may you gain much wisdom and direction as you read!

A great question to ask is, “Why are practically all of us entrepreneurs perfectionists?”

What we’re really asking is, “Why do we feel the need to complete the perfected, final version of something on the first go round?”

If we take a look at nature, it’s almost impossible to find a single new thing that was created in its final form. In fact the only thing we can think of that approximates this kind of sudden creation is destruction.

For example, the dinosaurs being totally wiped out by an asteroid bombardment and thereafter the “creation” of a toxic planet atmosphere. It may look like a sudden new and very permanent creation has happened, but it’s the result of destruction, not creation.

There is no perfection in nature, so I want you to give it up as a goal. It will only give you stress.

To take the dinosaur example further (because who doesn’t love dinosaurs), the evidence that nature creates iteratively is in what followed the destruction of the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period - 66 million years of small incremental changes beginning with plants, mammals, and other small organisms that eventually led to humans and the planet we see today.

While I’m not a paleontologist, it’s clear that everything we know in the business world was created to approximate how nature most effectively operates; in our case it’s the product development cycle, beginning with the creation of a minimum viable product.

Our definition of minimum viable product

Our definition of a minimum viable product is: The simplest complete product you could deliver to customers that would satisfy their needs and give you feedback to improve upon.

Depending on your industry, you could easily replace the word “product” with “service” or even a more specific project you’re working on like, “retreat,” “story,” or “cosmetics line.”

The main point is that we’re throwing out the model that says if you have a vision, try to create it all at once and in its final form. Throw that sucker out like that piece of stale toast I know you forgot in your toaster (no? just me?). We’re replacing the perfection model (in engineering it’s the waterfall model) with nature’s model that says if you have a vision, create the smallest version, the minimum viable product, and then improve it, and then improve it again. Keep going as long as needed.

The process of improving the minimum viable product and updating it into the next MVP is called iteration. Let’s give a nice clear definition though, so you can sound super smart to your friends.

Our definition of iteration

Our definition of iteration is: The repeated process of making small, incremental changes or updates based on feedback from the previous version.

When we talk about iterating on a minimum viable product, we’re referring to the execution of another cycle of creating, then getting feedback, then creating again - what nature does.

Outside of the natural world, perhaps the most obviously visible application of minimum viable products is in software (I’ve got an example of that below). Why is it that you keep having to install software updates? Because the developers originally issued a minimum viable product, and have continued to iterate on it, fixing issues that come up, adding new features, and making improvements. Each iteration they’re essentially creating the next best minimum viable product again and again, gaining complexity slowly over time.

While it may have seemed annoying for you in the past to continually update software, I want to change your world by inviting you to compare it to a world without updates. Imagine if the software on your phone never updated, but instead each year you could buy a single completely new software.

  1. First of all you’d have to completely re-learn everything you knew about how to use a phone each year.

  2. Secondly, as soon as hackers found any code vulnerabilities in your software, because it would never update, they’d be able to hack everyone who had that software essentially making privacy impossible.

  3. Finally, there would be all sorts of software issues that would come up and would never get fixed by developers, not to mention no new features would ever get added. It would be horrible, in fact I need to change the subject because just talking about it is making me feel a little uneasy.

We want you to avoid that world at all costs, so take a look at the examples below and start implementing the minimum viable product method!

In this article you’ll not only get great examples of existing minimum viable products, services, and projects, but more importantly you’ll get step-by-step examples of how to go about creating an MVP in a variety of industries.

They compare themselves to others

Most people misleadingly compare themselves to other people with products, services, or projects that have taken years of iteration to get to their current form. I did this for years until I finally had a meltdown when I realized there’s no way I could catch up to those 10 years ahead of me, and that there’s no need to because no one besides me is comparing us, and when I iterate I naturally end up in a different direction than any competition. We must learn to take that comparative energy and turn it toward our MVPs, comparing them to previous versions, not ourselves to other people.

They don't know how to break down a big vision

Many entrepreneurs have a clear vision of what they want but don’t know how to break it down into its constituent parts or into its smallest version that they can iterate on and fine tune over time. 

They’re unwilling to adapt and evolve

Many folks, especially those with zero personal growth work are unwilling to be improved or changed by the natural direction of their lives or the people around them, and so become very brittle and crash if anything doesn’t go according to plan. Changing to meet the situation’s needs requires a healthy relationship with ourselves, and many people have a toxic one.

They have a God complex

I don’t think this is you, but there are folks who believe they are somehow exempt from the laws of nature and that perfection exists outside their mind. They believe if only they can bend the world and other people to their will they’ll be able to execute their perfect vision. Eeek, run from those false prophets.

You lose money

When you try to create the ultimate version the first time round, you need big systems or structures. Simply put, big software is expensive, renting big buildings is expensive, investing in large quantities of materials is expensive. If you don’t start small and let the business become sustainable you’re going to end up in the hole.

You crash from the enormous effort

Spending months or years outputting effort to create something in one go without receiving feedback and results will cause you and/or your team to burn out. You need a healthy cycle of output and input.

You get low attendance and customer volume

Until you build the audience you simply don’t have the pull to sell to that many people. Spoken from experience, it’s better to master a 10 person event before aiming for a 300 person event. It’s better to sell small batches and then grow as your audience grows. That way you can build profitably the entire time.

You don’t learn from mistakes or improve failures

As Yoda says, “The greatest teacher, failure is.” And he means it. It may at first sound like a kind reassuring gesture, but it’s actually a dead-serious guide to living fearlessly and becoming a prolific creator.

*Note: The next section of examples is broken up into 3 categories:

  1. Minimum Viable Product

  2. Minimum Viable Service

  3. Minimum Viable Project

[Image by wikipedia]

As I mentioned above, software and apps can be the easiest way to understand the iteration cycle and what a minimum viable product looks and feels like (despite software often being complex in design).

This will be my shortest and least specific example, and soon you’ll see why. Here’s the simplest version of what releasing new software might look like:

1. Core software

First, release the MVP, the smallest complete version of your software. For example, in 1998  the website Ultimate Guitar launched, a site where people can upload or view guitar tabs to popular songs, and vote on which version they like best so others can see the best tabs.

2. Software development life cycle

Following the creation of the core software, the iteration process begins. In our guitar tab software example, the software development life cycle would involve observing user behavior on the site, and releasing updates to fix bugs in viewing or uploading guitar tabs, as well as releasing new features to grow the guitar-loving community. One of my favorite releases is when they made the iPhone app. I no longer needed to print out tabs to play along. Then when they released the auto-scroll feature, I no longer needed to pause playing to scroll down on the tab mid-song. After 22 years of updates, the software has grown and changed and become a huge success.

3. Repeat

That’s it! For software and apps it’s a constant iterating around the software development life cycle. I’m not going into detail about that cycle because there are many other good resources out there and I want to focus on the topics our community asked me to write about.

A course is the combination of a curriculum (series of lessons and activities), a clearly stated end result, and a set of connecting elements to glue the series together and achieve the result.

In the case of online courses there are many software platforms out there to host online courses, like Thinkific and Teachable, but often diving right into one of these platforms without any build up steps is the opposite approach to MVP and can leave you frustrated and trying to perfect something you don’t yet understand, like trying to paint a still life blindfolded.

Here’s an example of a minimum viable product approach to building online courses:

1. Experiment phase

In this step we want to get familiar with the camera, and with the audience. Record short individual video lessons that you give away for free. Use this time to get comfortable with the 3 most important elements of camera work: capturing great quality lighting, audio, and video.

Get feedback from the way your audience interacts with these videos. Monitor which videos get the most views and make more like them. Play with different headlines and monitor which ones draw the highest number of views; you’ll learn headlines are extremely important.

2. Mini course

Create the outline for your first small course (3-6 videos max). Record the videos. Create an intro and conclusion to the course. Create the minimum amount of necessary connecting text before and after videos to tie them all into the larger theme of the series. Run this course for a limited time only.

Give it away in exchange for feedback. Treat it as your first test case of how people interact with your material. Ask all the questions and take notes. How many people sign up? What percentage of them finish the course? What’s the drop off rate after each video? How many people want to engage with you and talk about what they did in the video? How many people just want to watch and do the work on their own?

Ask your audience questions. Ask what you could do better. Make this all about the feedback. Be humble, Michelangelo, and carve that stone; there’s an angel sculpture inside.

3. First paid course

Remake your mini course. Improve upon it from the feedback you received, making a better curriculum, better design, add and remove content, improve the quality of videos, clarify unclear elements, etc.

4. Second paid course

Now that you’ve got the basics down, focus on marketing. To do this, create free giveaways, find evangelists, create challenges and do everything you can to create a buzz and build tension leading up to the launch of your course. Doing this right (without spamming your people too much) will build your audience now and for the future.

5. Third paid course

Now it may be time to invest in software to help you take it to the next level. I know plenty of extremely successful entrepreneurs who have sold thousands of online courses without any fancy software, so know that it’s more about you and the content than any fancy software. That said, if it will help you speed up the process, take on more participants, or automate manual processes, it’s worth investing.

By the time you’ve reached the 5th iteration, you’ll have developed many strategies and learned many skills that you’d never have learned if you tried to get to step 5 on the first go round.

Examples of what to get feedback on (from people and metrics):

  • The effectiveness of your headlines

  • The story arc of your videos (intro, building & tension, peak, resolution)

  • Your connecting material (text, in-between videos, etc.)

  • The overall quality of presentation (brand consistency, ease of use, etc.)

  • The effectiveness of your marketing sequence

I’ll use a cosmetics line as an example of a products business using the iteration framework and minimum viable products.

1. First product

Create one product, for example: soap. Make the best soap you can make (that may mean freshness of ingredients, design, etc.). Give away samples as gifts to test your idea. Get feedback about those samples. Improve upon your original product. Find ways to make it unique. As with the example of online courses, the first phase is all about experimentation and getting the first batch of feedback.

2. Become known

Become the soap person. Become “Captain Soap.” Start selling soap at craft fairs, and build a 1 page longform website to sell online or join an existing marketplace like Etsy. Focus on spreading clear brand awareness. Make sure people know you are the soap person. Become super knowledgeable about soap. Blog about soap. Teach workshops about soap. Do everything you can to become known in your existing communities and to reach other communities. Learn and get feedback from all these new people. Start to invest in branding and design to make your product really pop.

3. Expand your shop

Now it’s time to add new related products to your store. Widen the perception of what you do without completely flipping it on it’s head. You’re no longer Captain Soap, you’re Captain Body Care Products. Make the oils, scrubs, creams, and serums that follow your unique design or process. Uplevel what makes you unique.

If you jump too far, for example into toothbrushes, you’ll know because people will be confused and ask things like, “Why soap and toothbrushes?” Expand slowly, only broadening one level at a time. Test thoroughly at each level you expand into.

4. Invest in infrastructure

Now that you have several products, and you know which ones are your hot cakes and which are your experiments, it’s time to get a more solid structure setup. Build a more thorough website, create beautiful and consistent branding, streamline the production process where you can (without compromising quality or the environment). Become as efficient as you can without making yourself rush or turning into a machine.

5. Scale over time

Continue to get feedback as you build your brand. Perhaps it’s time to widen your store one level to include accessory products like brushes, loofahs, and soap containers. But only add items that your audience is missing, or that are related in some way. Stay tight within the feedback loop and at this stage don’t be afraid to drop failed experiments. In fact now you should constantly be experimenting and pushing some ideas to success while letting others that don’t do as well fall away.

The next three examples follow the MVP model, but are SERVICES, so I’m calling them minimum viable services.

This example is dear to my heart because I’ve not only worked with lots of yoga teachers, but I am a certified yoga teacher and was once on this path. A yoga teaching business is such a great example because it makes clear what all service-based businesses need: to focus on building a loyal audience. Most of your money as a yoga teacher will come from repeat customers, not new customers, so build your business accordingly.

1. Teach at studios 

When you begin, don’t do as I did and attempt to go from yoga teacher training right into starting your own business. Instead focus on building a following. The best way to do that is to start teaching at local yoga studios, gyms, and fitness organizations. In an interesting way, you can get paid to begin building your business.

2. Private lessons

As you start to learn your style and get more and more comfortable teaching, you’re bound to find students who want private instruction for a variety of reasons. It could be that they are too shy or nervous to go into a class, or that they have detailed questions they’d like to ask about in person, or perhaps most likely, they have specific fitness or health goals and want someone who can work with them to build a plan and hold them accountable. This is your time to offer privates to the followers you’ve built.

3. Workshops & Intensives

As you grow your audience and gain more regular students who like your teaching style it’s a good time to start offering workshops and intensives if you haven’t already. The most loyal core of your students will want to attend those events to get more time with you and to learn the valuable skills you have to offer.

4. Online platform 

As you grow your in-person audience, it’s also a great idea to begin growing a wider audience online through Youtube and your website. This will not only act as an offering for your local yoga students when they travel, or have to miss class, but will also open doors for you to travel and teach, attract students outside your community, and collaborate for events like festivals, or corporate gigs. In business terms you’re growing a wider audience and providing ongoing inbound marketing to your current audience.

5. Retreats

Yoga teachers don’t use retreats as a way to bring in new students to their audience. It’s just not an effective strategy because retreats can be very expensive and complex to run and require a great turnout to be profitable. However, if you have a solid audience, retreats are a phenomenal way to turn sometimes students into always students, and to turn regular students into enthusiastic evangelists for you. It’s like creating a superhero lineup of some of your most dedicated students, or the ones who want to get away and be held in a container by you. That’s a big increase in trust, and it can pay off in the long-term (as well as being a fantastic way to get paid for some luxury time). Add this to your business model when it feels intuitive and right, when you can afford the time and financial investment, or when students are asking for a retreat.

6. Teacher Trainings

After years of teaching, leading workshops, and creating retreats it may be time to begin a yoga teacher training program. By this point you have die-hard students who want to soak up everything they can from you, and passing on the teachings can be a beautiful way to do that. This is a big step to consider adding, so make sure you are collaborating with great teachers and experts and have lots of support.

Workshops and retreats are worth talking about because even if your business isn’t in the retreat industry, you may want to include workshops, retreats, intensives, conferences, summits, or festivals within the structure of your business to gather people together.

1. The workshop (1-2 hours)

When you begin to offer events, as with all things MVP, it’s a good idea to start bite-sized or as candy bar companies like to call it, fun-sized. Start with a really well planned 1-2 hour workshop. On your first couple workshops don’t leave it all to improvisation (unless of course you’re an improv business).

The ideal state of being for a workshop is to have everything planned out when you walk in, while being willing to throw out some or all of the planning in favor of what’s happening as you read the room. Some ideas on how to go about adding a workshop into your business: run a free 1-2 hour monthly workshop to build community and become known (it’s great marketing), get featured in a larger conference or event, collaborate with another expert to combine audiences, get a gig in a corporate office or organization.

2. The intensive (3-4 hours)

Get tons of feedback from your workshops. Many great facilitators will bring in feedback sheets at the end to improve and tailor their future events to their audience. Once you feel comfortable with your 1-2 hour workshops, it might be time to take the next step over to intensives.

These can be wonderful experiences for participants to dive deeply into material they’ve wanted to spend more time with. Whether you’re designing an intensive around deconstructing whiteness, yoga arm balances, credit repair, reiki, building a bicycle, or any other subject, you’ll often find that 3-4 hours is the minimum time required to actually go deep into a subject.

3. The all-day event (6-8 hours)

At this point you may be imagining a retreat, conference, summit, or lecture series. As with all steps in the minimum viable service and iteration model, you should design your all-day event as an even deeper dive into what you previously covered in 3-4 hours or 1-2 hours.

However, there are new elements you’ll need to think about like food, how much material people can absorb in one day, how to break up content, and how to vary learning styles so people don’t get bored. This is the first really significant commitment jump, so plan it carefully.

4. The weekend event

The next big leap is to weekend events, which are quite popular. After attending hundreds of weekend-long trainings, retreats, conferences and festivals, and organizing dozens, it’s clear that they are a leap from all smaller events that fit within one day.

Why?

You’ve got a lot to think about in addition to what we’ve already talked about, from lodging, to waste management to break times. However, there’s something uniquely special about weekend events. People get, for the first time, the experience of living in your environment. They’re no longer just attending an event, they’re living at an event - it’s their world for the weekend.

Because of that, there’s a level of bonding and relationship-building that’s otherwise impossible to create. And that might be just the thing you want to do with your audience.

5. The multi-day event

In our final step of iteration for this example, we have multi-day events larger than a weekend. Whether they’re 4 days long, a week, or a month, if you’re considering an event like this you’ve crossed another threshold. It’s worth noting you never have to escalate to this level, and you can iterate on steps 1, 2, or 3 forever. However, if you’re running a wellness business you may dream of creating these kinds of immersive experiences.

My biggest advice here is to do these three steps: attend a handful of multi-day events to get the experience of being a participant (and take notes), offer to help support someone in running an event (and take notes), and finally turn that research into trying it yourself.

Whether you’re a health coach, life coach, career coach, business coach, personal trainer, angelic guide, tarot reader, or any other kind of coach, all coaching revolves around trust.

For the iteration process on a coaching business you should focus all of your efforts around building and sustaining trust. This can be a slow type of business to start, but it’s a line of work with great traction over time.

When you start building trust with people they become loyal and may work with you for years, I know that’s been our case at Worth The Journey. It’s well worth it if you build it slowly and don’t rely on it for money at the beginning (too much pressure).

1. Research period

If you’ve been reading the examples so far, you’re starting to understand the process. The first step is to get as much practice coaching as you can, and to do as much research on who you work best with, what their problems are, and how to develop language to speak to them.

So, do trades, offer discounted sessions and free group sessions. For example when I started Worth The Journey I offered a 6 month free coaching group to 10 entrepreneur friends of mine. This was my main test group, and eventually became a monthly paid networking event we called Homebase.

After those 6 months I started charging for the group. Interestingly in the spirit of continuous iteration, a couple years later we had a brilliant realization that we needed more free ways for folks to engage with us and enter the top of the funnel, so we made Homebase free again.

The main point here is that we began with a clear research period that was as easy for people to engage with as possible, and free often opens a lot of doors to getting great research done. 

2. Build your audience

I wish I had done this sooner. In this step you’ve done your initial research, and now it’s all about becoming known.

So put on workshops, get in front of new people, speak (practice at Toastmasters if you’re nervous about public speaking). Give away lots of material for free, but charge for sessions.

Don’t play slimy marketing games and try to trick people into signing up with you. If you write an eBook, make it a complete, quality book and give it away in exchange for email addresses. Remember, a coaching business is all about building trust.

As soon as you start trying to rush people into sales, playing the “make 6 figures in 3 weeks” game, and putting on sketchy sales webinars, you’ve exited the building labeled “trustworthy coach here” and entered the building labeled “salesperson trying to get your money here.” People know BS when they smell it.

Give lots away for free, because as a coach people aren’t paying you for your material, they’re paying you for the relationship and everything included there. You don’t sign up with Yo-Yo Ma to learn sheet music, you sign up because no one can show you how to play the instrument like Yo-Yo Ma.

There’s almost nothing he could give away that would cheapen the value of his private lessons. Think about it, if Yo-Yo Ma put a free phenomenal cello lesson up on YouTube, would that make an eager cello student more or less likely to want to take a private lesson? More! That student wants to eat it all up.

The bottom line: Don’t work for free, but give lots away for free.

3. Define your business model

Now that you’ve made a name for yourself, it’s time to settle into your offerings and clearly establish your business model. Imagine your business model like a set of concentric rings.

For example in the business coaching wing of Worth The Journey, from the outside in we offer free blog and resources, free consultation sessions, paid focus session intensives, paid coaching packages, and paid monthly retainers. Now’s the time for you to get super clear and create your unique structure of offerings that works for both you and your people. 

4. Get good at marketing

Now that you have an audience it’s all about studying and excelling at marketing. It might be time to hire a marketing manager, but whether you or someone else takes it on, it’s time to stabilize your marketing efforts and get into a regular flow with both your existing audience and in your outreach to new communities. This includes learning social media strategies, creating regular content, collaborating with others. All of these skills will take you through the next iterations of your business.

5. Level Up

If you’ve been writing lots of articles, write a book. If you’ve been coaching for years it might be time to raise prices. If you’ve been working with one income level of folks it might be time to expand. The key point here is that you’ve been working hard for a long time and now you’re ripe to harvest the fruits of your labor and take the business to it’s next level. Always remember you can escalate in tiny iterative steps. That’s the best way.

These last 3 examples are of PROJECTS you might find yourself needing to get done.

As I’ve done above, I’m going to show you each kind of project from the lens of iteration and as a series of growing minimum viable projects.

Photo by Eli Schiff

Branding is a great example because most folks jump into branding totally blind. You just hear, “You don’t have a brand?! All businesses need a brand.,” then panic and rush to get a logo made by your 15 year old second cousin who’s taking an art class online. Panic usually leads to ineffective or irrelevant action. Take it slow and intentionally. Follow the steps.

1. Brand name

Start with the basics, establish a clear name for your business or brand. As you come up with your name, decide how far you want to take the imagery. If your t-shirt company is called Thread Level Midnight, you might want to theme your brand lightly or heavily with a secret agent vibe. Your brand should feel honest, whichever direction you go.

2. Simple logo

This may be the time to hire a design professional, but if you’re just playing around with ideas, I recommend going on Canva.com and playing with logo templates. Some logos are focused on the wordmark (text-only), others focus on the icon, and others use a combination.

3. Professional design

If that’s all going well and you know the direction you want to go, it’s time to get a professional logo made with brand fonts and colors, and a brand guide that will give you a helpful set of rules on how to and how not to use your brand for best consistency. We have a fantastic design team here at Worth The Journey, so use us when you need it.

4. Brand refreshes as needed

Once your brand is properly designed you shouldn’t touch it for at least a couple years. But as it starts to age you might find that it’s time to get a refresh. Your business name will likely stay the same, but you can update your logo, fonts, and colors to match the current version of your business.

Think about it like spring cleaning, except instead of every spring it’s every handful of years; and just like with cookies, you get to decide how many years equal a handful. You’ll know it’s time for a refresh when you start to feel like your logo is outdated.

We’ve built a lot of websites, and lucky for you we’re going to let you in on the big secret, and you don’t even have to sign up for anything to get it. Ready?

The secret to building an effective, beautiful, modern website is to focus on phenomenal photo and video, copywriting, and design (in that order). To be more specific:

Photos & Video

You need a lot of high quality photos and videos to make a modern website (websites are image driven now) so take tons of photos, use models if needed, and do your best to avoid stock photography on the main parts of your website (stock photos are fine on your blog).

Copywriting

Your copywriting should be pithy, easy to understand, and broken down into clear chunks that we, your audience can digest. But! If you have horrible photos on your site, it’s just going to be a wall of text that no one will read. So seriously go take like 100 photos right now. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.

Design

Finally, the design of your site should be spacious, easy to navigate, uncluttered, and on brand. The key at every level of iteration is: keep it simple.

When in doubt hire a professional. We’re always here for you when you want a beautifully designed website.

1. One-page website

We’ve gone over this with countless clients: your first website should be simple and clear. Don’t get fancy, just deliver clear information. You likely only need one elegantly designed page for this. If you’re a sucker for fancy things like I am, in this first step of iteration I strongly, strongly, strongly urge you to limit yourself. Remind yourself a thousand times, “The website isn’t the point, my work is the point.”

2. Adding individual pages

Once you’ve been rocking your one-page website for a little while, you might find the need to add another page, perhaps to fill out an “About Me” section, or give more details on the services you offer. When you do so, it’s important to keep the new pages visually consistent with your other pages. Get feedback, monitor web traffic and clicks, and find out what people are most drawn to read or click on. This is all feedback for your next big step.

3. Branded 5-page website

This is your first rebuild, and if possible I want you to partner it with your brand being professionally designed. This is the first website that you want to be a perfect representation of who you are, who your business is, who you serve, and what problems you solve. If you've made websites before, then go ahead and create your own. Otherwise, I recommend getting a web designer to build this site for you at this stage. Here’s why:

  1. There are many elements of the UX you’re not paying attention to when you throw together your own site.

  2. Building a website can take forever if you don’t know what you’re doing, and you have many more important things on your todo list! 

4. Custom designed website

It’s finally time to get a website custom-designed for you and your business. Make sure you have a great design team with a clear step-by-step process that you understand. This isn’t the kind of project you want to hand off to your now 17-year-old second cousin who just got into art school. Find experts who you can meet with and share everything you’ve learned about your sites over the years, everything you’re looking for, and who can then offer back what they’ve learned, and what seems to be the most effective in your industry. This is an exciting time!

5. Website refreshes

As with branding, every so often you’ll need to do a little spring cleaning on your website. Some agencies offer ongoing website maintenance, which we recommend investing in if you don’t know how to or don’t want to update your website yourself. There will also be the occasional times that you will want to rebrand or rebuild. When you do, go back to iteration step 4, except take it to the next level. I’ve added a story below to describe this a little more.

Bonus story

Here’s a little story from building my own websites that shows why I believe in the minimum viable project method so much.

I started with a 1 page website when I created my first ever yoga studio. It was on Weebly and was ok. I had 1 or 2 pictures, and mostly it was text. But it worked! Good job Noé for taking it slow.

Then for my next business, I tried to build an elaborate, fully custom site on Wordpress. I was so obsessed with creating a fancy site that it got way too complicated for me to build and I never got the site live. I poured a lot of money into a designer to give me custom mockups that I never ended up using. Slow it down buddy!

So on a friend’s recommendation I went to Squarespace, and with the help of an expert moved to a simple 5 page website. It worked really well for my coaching business. Then when I started Worth The Journey I moved to about 10 pages, and I started blogging. Our last website was about 20-30 pages, and for the first time included video.

Then, when we officially launched our agency and changed a few internal business structures, I knew we needed to upgrade sites. At this point I had built numerous sites for myself and others, and wanted to make the best, most effective website I could possibly imagine.

Now we have around 100 pages of beautifully crafted information, a huge number of photos and videos (I haven’t counted) with hundreds of lines of custom code, and it took 8 months to build. It was a big deal to put this website together, but it was worth it because it matches where we are now and what we’re capable of.

The lesson? Start with 1 page, not 100. Build slowly. Build to match where you are.

Every business owner needs a task management system. In fact I’d dare say anyone with an email address needs some kind of task management system (email is the first attempt at an online system of this kind). The biggest issue people find is that systems are either too bulky and confusing or don’t have the features they need. As a proud productivity geek, I’ve realized that each person or business needs their own unique system. I’ll help you get the framework for your own system below.

1. To-do list

The key to creating a great productivity system is to “upgrade (iterate) when you needed it yesterday.” As with every other minimum viable project, start at the beginning. At first, all you need is a simple to-do list. Some people prefer a notebook, others the Notes app on their phone. Get used to regularly taking notes.

Begin to understand your needs. Does a simple list work fine? Great! Keep it. Do you find yourself needing more project support or having overflowing lists exploding all over the place, on sticky notes, your phone, your fridge, and your email? Maybe it’s time to step forward one level of iteration, to the next MVP.

2. Small task management system

If you reach the point that I and millions of other people have reached - your endless lists have taken over your life, and haunt your dreams - it’s time to set up a small task management system. This might involve reading the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen, learning the Bullet Journal method, signing up with Asana, Trello, Todoist, Omnifocus, ActiveInbox, or any of the other great task management systems out there.

I’ve explored a lot of them, and what I’ve learned is that each person has unique needs and each tool offers a unique experience. So do a little research to find the tool(s) you like best. Once I landed on Asana I knew I found home. The user interface is great, they have cute cartoon characters that fly across the screen every now and then when you check a task off your list...it all helps motivate me.

3. Project Management System

The next level is to turn your task management system into a project management system. The difference is in two main areas:

  1. You set up your system to organize all of your life’s projects and tasks no matter how large

  2. You now have a weekly check-in built in to your system

When you have this level of organization system, which honestly is the only way to deal with juggling many large or complex projects or collaborations, you have to invest weekly time reviewing and updating your system. At this level your system becomes a living, breathing organism. 

4. Team Project Management System

Everything we’ve talked about so far is on the individual level - ways to organize your personal and work projects and tasks. The game changes when you’re part of a team because now your projects are larger, consist of tasks assigned to multiple people, and you can become blocked on a project if you’re waiting on someone else, so you need a good method of communication about tasks and projects.

Companies use a variety of approaches to tackling team projects, from the popular sticky note Kanban boards, to regularly updated online systems with weekly reviews (similar to iteration level 3, except built out for a team).

We use the latter on the Asana platform, combined with weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly check-ins. Things to think about when setting up a minimum viable team project management system: can you communicate easily through the platform? Is it easy to learn and intuitive to use? Is it customizable? Is there a robust online support network when you run into issues?

This may be the time you call upon an expert to help you set up the system and commit to learning it as a team.

I sincerely hope this article has helped you understand the iteration cycle and what a minimum viable product is so thoroughly that you could teach someone else. I hope it’s helped guide you with specific examples in or near your industry as you go about building things.

And most importantly I hope you had fun reading it.

I do my best to teach in a fun and relatable way, especially around topics that are often dry or steeped in haughty jargon. I firmly believe all business and entrepreneurship skills should be made widely available and taught to everyone and anyone who wants to brave the journey.

I want you to know I’m always available to support you in your business, so don’t hesitate to reach out and say hi!

Let us always remember that all around us the natural world has been iterating on minimum viable products (including us!) for 13.8 billion years. In the spirit of nature’s vast and ongoing creations, may you too create incredible things, make the world a better place to live, and experience a joyful and supportive community every step of the way.

 
Noé Khalfa

As CEO of Worth The Journey, Noé is on a mission to help the unlikeliest of people to start and grow businesses and to make the culture of business healthier and kinder. Also he dances contact improvisation, trains with movement students of Ido Portal, plays complex board games, and sings Glee covers of pop songs.

https://worththejourney.com
Previous

8 Ways to Tell: Are You a Workaholic or an Enthusiast?
Next

7 Best Free Online Marketing Tools for Small Business Owners