Surprisingly people tend to respond to these product releases without too much complaining. Eric says this way you can find out many things the customer wants, likes, or dislikes. It also saves you a ton of time and cash, if you find out your entire idea sucks sooner than later. You can trash it, and find something else to build. This is what my company Passdown is doing. The thing is we didn't even put anything out, and people were going nuts for just the idea spoken from our mouths. Super odd place to be in.
As we want to reach a broader market than friends, family, and a few hundred strangers I set out to make a video explaining what Passdown does, of course I made the one with a warning language first, but I did not think that one would be good to put on the official website. Some people might not like the word fucking. So I made the clean one, and well, it kind of sucks. But I put it on there anyway, cause it does explain what Passdown is building. So I call it my minimum viable video. You can view it here: Clean Version
It's complete with mistakes. Yeah, the foul language one is better. Hmmm It has pot, sexting, and the word fucking in it. I don't know why that makes it any better, it just came out better. It flows, it has no rough patches. Maybe I'm better at the real life stuff and not the clean stuff, I don't know. Yet, I think the clean version explains Passdown better, and it's a shorter version. Here is the dirty version It's not that dirty!
Originally I had 'You Never Know When' on Passdown's home page. I moved it to another tab. That video is important as it's the reason why I came up with the idea of Passdown. The video shows my brother Mark's apartment exactly how it was when they found his decomposed body in it. You can view it here: Leave Your Mark I removed it from the home page as I thought it might be a bit dark, even though it ends with a delightful little girl, my daughter smiling.
Ahh, I'm feeling frustrated. I want to make some killer video, some high quality video, that looks smoking professional, yet, I haven't found the right path to do this with my skills, and we have no cash to pay a professional. So it's lean building, and if that means I make a video that sucks but does explain the product, well, than that's a Startup!
Cheers ~ Enjoy your Friday night.
Wow, Thanks people for being interested in reading this and putting it on the top ten list! Number eight right now. It does not matter how crappy your minimum viable product is or any other parts of your startup. Just put it out there and build traction, while you make better videos and products! The crappy one might be worth more than the perfect one.
ReplyDeleteThanks again. I don't know who you are but I appreciate you give LSSUG a read. It means more than you know to me.