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    You can reach me anytime @cmckella. I'd love to hear from you!

    About

    I'm Campbell.  This is my blog. I founded Loosecubes, an office sharing community, and live in New York City.

    I believe everyone has the power inside them to do something great.  Although not everyone aspires to greatness, I think you should.  I hope my blog will encourage you to take a couple steps forward every day. Let's do it together.

     

    Entries in customer development (1)

    Monday
    Feb072011

    Chunky startups

    Maybe this is a lady thing but I spend far too much time worrying about being fat.  

    Then I started an internet company and all of a sudden I’ve got to spend a bunch of time worrying about being “lean.” In case you’ve been in Siberia (no offense) the last couple years, lean means build a minimum viable product (MVP) using as little money as possible, get your product out there, get feedback, iterate, repeat.  Here’s the thing: we started lean, put an MVP out in June, then had a breakdown in our engineering team that led to a regrouping and planned re-release that’s coming in March.  Yes, ten months later.  In my book that’s not a short iteration.  

    We had to build the whole backend again from scratch.  Which means, we are building the MVP (again) plus several features I know we need based on months of learning.  See, that’s the awesome thing.  While our site was stalled out, I spent day after day talking to potential customers.  It’s kind of painful not to release the MVP again, but it would further push out our v2 release date. And we know what people think about our current site. This development cycle will be two months long. That’s hardly lean.  But it’s not really fat either.  It’s perhaps a bit chunky.  And I’m OK with that.

    Pass the pizza.