Want Good Feedback? Build An MVP And Ask The Free Market

“No one knows anything.” That’s what famed screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All The Presidents Men) says about Hollywood. And it’s pretty much true.

No matter what market you’re in, if you’re looking for a hard yes or no about the viability of a creative project, investment thesis, product or business idea, no one can give it to you.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t try to give it to you. You just better take that opinion with a grain of salt the size of Jupiter and a hard look at what incentives may be impacting their opinion.

Ultimately, the free market is the final arbitrary of “truth.” If you want good feedback, ask the free market.

The Free Market Always Tells The “Truth.”

If you have something valuable, the free market will tell you. This is because, in a free market, every person is free to make their own decision. If you have a product or service someone wants, they can buy it. No one is telling them they can’t or preventing them from purchasing what you created.

In other words, there is no authority figure influencing the market or deciding who’s creating value and who’s not. The free market as a whole decides, not any one person.

Brett Hall talks about the power of the free market to combat coercion in a conversation on Naval Ravikant’s podcast:

“What we say on the side of free markets is that we’ve extracted coercion out of that decision-making process. No one is forced into purchasing a service or undertaking an agreement… All that we’re saying when it comes to the free market is that the individual gets to decide without being coerced.”

That’s why the free market always tells the truth. If you’ve created value, the market will reward you.

Use Your MVP To Test The Market As Often As You Can.

Your MVP is your Minimal Viable Product. It’s the simplest version of your idea that you can “ship” to consumers to test interest in the market.

Here’s an example from the world of film and TV. The first thing my wife and I did when we were thinking about writing a feature film was put together a treatment. This is a 5-10 page document that outlines the story. This was our MVP.

We sent our treatment around to producers in Hollywood to get the temperature of the market. And we quickly found that there was a ton of interest. Two months later, a well-known producer in our genre was on board to help us write the script, and then take that script out to buyers.

Here’s the thing: writing a script is a long process (more than a year later, we are still rewriting). That’s why it’s so important to test the market! You don’t want to waste years on a project / idea / start-up / business that has no customers.

When I worked in branded content, our MVPs were the written proposals we’d send to clients. And when I worked in unscripted TV, we made “sizzle reels” - short 2-3 minute video examples of what the reality TV show would look and feel like. We’d send these sizzle reel MVPs to networks and see if there was any interest. If there was, we’d invest more time and money in the project.

MVPs will save you years. Instead of me spending 12 months on something I’m not sure is sellable, I can spend a few months on an MVP and know a month later whether there are potential buyers for it. They are very powerful.

Use The Market’s Feedback To Improve Your MVP.

Here’s another reason to create MVPs: the market will often give you feedback on how you can improve your product. When we got a producer attached for our movie, they immediately had a ton of great notes and feedback that would make the eventual script much, much better.

So market test your MVPs to see if your idea gets interest. If it does, take the feedback you get from the market to make your MVP even better. Then get to work!

In The Beginning, Follow Your Gut.

No one can tell you whether your idea will work or not before you ship. You can ask as many people as you like for their opinion, but all you really have is your judgment. It’s that feeling in your gut when you believe in something.

Marc Andreessen talks about this in an interview on The Tim Ferriss Show:

“Do you, fundamentally, have the judgment to be able to make that call knowing, by the way, that either way could be a big mistake. Nobody is going to tell you – you’re not going to get any confirmation from anybody that, oh yeah, you made the right call… And so I just think you basically have to fall back on judgment, and you have to fall back on some sense of the intangibles.”

Those intangibles are instincts, gut feelings, and hunches. So go with your hunch. Build your MVP. And then test the market.

Your gut knows more than you give it credit for. Go see if it’s right. Start now.

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ARTICLE SOURCES

The interview with Marc Andreessen on The Tim Ferriss Show can be found here: https://tim.blog/2018/01/01/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-marc-andreessen/

Naval Ravikant’s site: https://nav.al/feedback