The Imperfect Prototype

BECOME AN MVP

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars

Kevin was a young ex-Googler working at Nextstop, a travel recommendation startup later acquired by Facebook, but despite his relative success, he had an entrepreneurial itch to scratch. So he started working on his amateur coding skills. One of his ideas was to create a hybrid of Foursquare and Mafia Wars, so he hacked together a prototype in HTML5 and named it Burbn. It wasn't fancy, didn't incorporate any aesthetic design elements, and lacked multiple features. Nonetheless, at a party, he showed the prototype to some high-rolling investors who agreed to a follow-up meeting with him. Two weeks later he secured $500,000 in seed funding, quit his job, and started to build out his larger vision.

By the time he showed it to Mike, his eventual co-founder, the mobile web app was already bursting with features: current and future location check-ins, photo posting, points for meeting up with friends, and more. Together, they made it into an iPhone app.

It felt too cluttered, so they decided to streamline and slim down the app. They stripped away all the features with the exception of photo posting, comments, and — of course — the ability to "like" photos. They named it "Instagram," and eight weeks later they launched. Within a matter of hours, it jumped from a prototype with a handful of users to the number-one photography app in the iTunes App Store.

In one and a half years, Instagram acquired 100 million users, and Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger sold the app to Facebook for $1 billion.

Kevin and Mike didn't have a magic formula. But they did embrace a few key principles: They understood that in order to be successful, you need to focus on and master just one thing. They also recognized that perfection is not the answer. Kevin showed his prototype to investors when it was far from finished — in a state, in fact, that others might have considered embarrassing. It wasn't the final product, but he trusted it was good enough to spark interest.

Your life, no matter who you are, is not unlike the early Instagram prototype. Whatever stage you're at, you should be thinking of yourself as a prototype. But not the kind that must be incubated to perfection before it sees the light of day. If you've ever worked inside a large company, you know that from conception to rollout, product development is a long, costly process that frequently stomps out innovation along the way, to the point where the final product is sometimes irrelevant by the time it finally hits the market. You are not like that. You are a different kind of prototype: a super-early version called an MVP, or minimum viable product. MVPs are bare bones. They include just the most essential features needed to launch the product and get feedback. They allow for minimal risk, minimal investment, and maximum insight. As an MVP, you're able to explore an idea or a hypothesis and quickly and painlessly figure out if it'll work. You're able to go to market almost immediately and test your reception among a small, targeted group of consumers. Then you can make tweaks and revise as needed before expanding your reach — or scrap the concept altogether. An MVP solves a problem or fulfills a need — even if it's an unknown desire (more on that in a minute). The point of an MVP is to confirm that someone cares about what you're doing before you get in too deep. The key word is validation. You're validating what you think might be a good idea. The MVP phase is the learning phase. Only you're not going through decades of expensive schooling or years of on-the-job training for this education.

Early versions of products are called "beta" versions — a term that acknowledges the product might still have a few bugs — and living your life in beta mode has some significant advantages. Namely, it allows you to stop focusing on the final, perfectly polished outcome and instead explore what you can do in the meantime. I'm not telling you to thoughtlessly try out everything that crosses your mind, but rather I'm giving you a license to experiment and play with possibilities as you refine. Your life is more an abstract expressionist painting than a posed portrait, and once you embrace that mentality, the shape and substance of your life and happiness will transform.

Thinking of your life as a startup will change you in many ways, but first let's establish what it won't do: It won't make you a flawless human being. Instead, you're becoming an MVP — a lean variation of a prototype. You're a work in progress, so the goal is not perfection. You're looking to become the kind of person who resonates with others, maximizes opportunities and resources, and generally has their shit together. This means fine-tuning the seemingly mundane, teeny-tiny stuff — like what you eat for lunch or your first-date uniform — until it accumulates into a feet-on-the-ground, wheels-in-motion, functioning product. (More on creating a uniform in chapter 6.)

Whatever stage you're at in life, operating like an MVP will benefit you. After all, you'll never be quite the slick, glossy version of yourself that you dream of being (or try to present on social media: like any Silicon Valley startup, life is not as glamorous as its Instagram account would make it seem). As an MVP, you're constantly gathering feedback, looking for opportunity, and refining your life, at any age. It may sound hard, but in actuality, MVPs have distinct advantages. Whether it's your entire life or a particular aspect of it that is still operating in MVP mode, your unfinishedness can be a competitive advantage. First, MVPs are nimble. In the startup world, it's usually an MVP that showcases the seeds of something truly new and exciting. And rather than expecting flawlessness from day one, consumers are just thrilled to gain early access.

But to look around you, you'd never know that anything short of perfection is acceptable. Every day we're bombarded with airbrushed images, heavily curated social media personas, and viral stories of people doing amazing things — seemingly effortlessly. But just like you, they were once MVPs (and many of them still are, just with great PR). We can all take risks, be bold, "fail" (repeatedly), and invert all the...