We’re working on a startup that is designed to assist other startups.  Our primary goal is to help our users find co-founders, but there’s a huge desire not to leave them out in the cold when the perfect match is made.  There are so many ways we could help, and we hope to eventually try a few of our ideas out.  But, there’ll be time for incorporating all of that later (see discussion below).  For now, we’ll stick with helping by sharing.  We hope that being open about our experiences–the good and the bad–and sharing resources, ideas, and just about everything else will give us some great feedback and maybe help our fellow entrepreneurs (at least a little). 

So, in that spirit, here’s a blog post and discussion about Minimum Viable Product that is pretty useful.  In many ways we’re in the “conceptualization” stage of our company, and it’s hard not to avoid “feature creep.”  We’re excited about all the possibilities, and are plugging away deciding features to include or not to include.  The idea behind minimum viable product is to simply get something out there and let your users tell you what features you really need to include.  It’s good advice, and with the benefit of being able to very rapidly add and subtract features and even pivot completely it’s more possible now than it has ever been.  Things we think of as well thought out and designed were, to put it mildly, extremely featureless in the beginning.  Facebook didn’t have a news feed, a wall, photo tagging, or just about anything outside of a profile page and the ability to poke your friends, yet they listened to their users, learned from them, and now have features that we all take for granted (whether they’re still listening to their users is another topic altogether).  So, enjoy, and feel free to comment.

By the way, I’m not speaking in plural to seem bigger than I actually am.  Turns out I’ve found a co-founder!  I’m excited that he came on board and we’re really thrilled to be working on this project together.  So, yes, there will be a counter-point to my previous blog post about being a lone founder, but that’s for another day…