1am this morning the alarm in my apartment complex went off telling me “evacuate now”…Not how I expected my night to go. And today has been harder to get through because of it. I wish I could say this was the first time. But it wasn’t. It’s actually the third time in the last year that this has happened. One time was legitimate. The bottom 3 floors were flooding. The other two times, including last night, were false alarms. The building I live in is less than 2 years old. So you’d expect better! Australia is seeing a huge rise of building inspectors on TikTok creating content about dodgy work in the building industry. Cutting corners in order to finish a job quickly. I don’t keep tabs on the whole industry but in my experience it seems like cutting corners could be a problem. And I’ve found myself in that exact dilemma this week. Let me explain… TL;DR
The Dilemma of the MVPI 100% agree that you should create an MVP (minimal viable product) in order to test a product before launching it. But the dilemma is if your product is too minimal – then even a good idea can get no traction because your audience doesn’t really understand the vision you have. All they get to see is – the minimal effort. This week I feel like I’ve not achieved any big goals with BigMoves.io – the new AI Automation Marketplace I’m creating. But in reality, looking back, we’ve moved some big pieces that just haven’t come to fruition yet. Things like:
Digitally, there isn’t really much to show yet. But foundational things are taking shape. In the past I’ve jumped into using certain tools too quickly without thinking through the long-term consequences, needs, feature requirements and scalability. Just look at my Thinkific Review blogpost in the archives and how it was one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made in business. This will be the 5th business I’ve launched. And I’m doing my best to launch in a strategic way. But I still feel old habits creeping in where I just want to get something live so I can see the money coming in and create growth. That’s where I’m reminded by the words of Elon: “Great companies are built on great products.” Building Tesla into a multi-hundred billion dollar company is impressive. But doing it without spending money on advertising is incredibly impressive. If you’ve ever driven a Tesla it really speaks for itself. So while the first launch of BigMoves will be an MVP. The website will still be functioning way better than I first intended it to. It will be built ready for scale. It will look great. And it’ll showcase the vision I have for the brand. That doesn’t mean there won’t be errors or bugs. It doesn’t mean things won’t change… But since I’m able to spend a little more on the things that really matter this time, we’re going to ensure we get the most important parts right before launching. — You Can Pay In Time Or Money A mentor once said to me, “in business you can pay in time or you can pay in money”. Typically the more money you spend (if done smartly), the more time you’ll save. The less money you spend, the less time you’ll save. This lesson I continue to learn time and time again. With my last brand I did a huge part of the tech and website building. I’m not a developer or a designer but I once was a funnel builder. My skills are good enough for small funnel projects; like summits or workshops or basic websites. But what I’ve realised is that because we didn’t work with a specialist developer for that brand… The way I built the website actually slowed us down immensely in the long run. The design was average. The backend was a mess and hard to figure out what was going on. We had no reliable visibility into the customer journey. And when my team eventually took over they spent way too many hours trying to replicate what I did. It cost me in extra training time, and some mistakes were made as they were getting up to speed with what I had created. This week after working with a highly skilled developer more closely I realised that not only can we develop the website so it’s organised and easy to use…. But if it’s built to a better standard it becomes easy to create custom plugins that will automate almost an entire role in the company that I otherwise would have been paying a monthly wage for. Instead of paying a VA $15k a year, we can probably spend $1-2k upfront developing an integration from Airtable to WordPress to almost entirely replace that role. THIS IS WHAT I’M PASSIONATE ABOUT!!! Unlocking better ways to build businesses. It will allow us to minimize mistakes, create better products, spend more time speaking to our customers and focus more on impact. Rather than focusing on the draining operational components of the business. It also allows the team member who would typically take care of this part of the business to do higher level work as well. Rather than getting stuck in the weeds. This is just a tiny example of how business is changing. What’s coming with AI automations and AI agents is even more powerful. — Overall this week has been great. Even though my brain still wants to believe I’ve not made much progress. I’m interested to learn from you, have you made any similar mistakes to me? What was your biggest takeaway from it? P.S. I’m still looking to speak with AI Automation Builders. Hit reply and let me know what you’re working on. If it aligns with my vision for BigMoves we’ll create a plan to get you selling on the marketplace when we go live. If you don’t have ideas but you’re great at building let me know as I have a few product ideas that I’m willing to work with others on. I’m only looking to speak with those who are ready to begin building now! If that’s you hit reply. |
