How to use ChatGPT to test your ideas fast with a Minimum Viable Product
If you’re like me, you have plenty of ideas. Lots of things you want to do. The limiting factor isn’t ideas - it’s time. You have to prioritize what ideas to execute and which ones to hold off on.
One of the best uses of ChatGPT is to speed up the time it takes to get from your idea to your Minimum Viable Product - the simplest version of your idea that you can test out.
The faster you can go from idea to MVP, the faster you can test the market to see if people want what you’re building.
The worst thing you can do is spend a year building something no one wants. Sure, you can still learn a lot along the way - but that’s also true for a product people want!
So, here’s how to use ChatGPT to go from idea to MVP faster.
What’s a Minimum Viable Product?
A minimum viable product is the simplest version of your idea that you can “ship” to consumers to test interest in the market.
The concept comes from Eric Ries’ Lean Startup methodology, where an MVP is the simplest version of a product that allows you to test an idea with real users before investing precious time and resources.
Here’s an example from film and TV. Before Tara and I begin working on a 100-page screenplay, we write a 5-10 treatment. This is just a word document that outlines the story, with all the characters, plot points, and big moments in there.
The treatment is our MVP. It’s the simplest version of our story that we can send out to producers to get a sense for the marketability of the idea.
Here’s another example from my journey writing online. Many of you found me through my e-book: Become a Content Curator: The Fastest Way to Start Writing Online.
Well, before I wrote a single word for the book, I created a sales page for it to collect emails. You can see that page here: https://contentcurator.carrd.co/.
Now you may be thinking that it’s CRAZY to build a sales page and take pre-orders for a product that doesn’t even exist yet!
No, it’s not. It’s practical and saves me from wasting my time building something no one wants. When I launched the landing page above, I had 30+ sign ups in a few days. That was a signal from the market that this product could work. So I pivoted to something I knew I could execute, and wrote the e-book.
Now, the best part about ChatGPT is that it can do much of the heavy lifting of an MVP for you.
Use ChatGPT to build your MVP.
Tara and I are always thinking of new ways to get more “shots on goal” with our screenwriting. It takes six months to a year to develop and write a movie script. The more projects you have out working for you, the better the chance something good happens.
So, increasing our “shots on goal” means increasing the number of MVPs that go to market. More treatments = increased chance of making a sale = more revenue.
The problem with using ChatGPT for this kind of thing in the past is that we have a very specific tone and writing style. It’s funny, informal, and unique to us.
Well, as ChatGPT has gotten better and better, we’ve been using it to emulate our style. We uploaded all our scripts and treatments we’ve written in the past, and then ask it to mirror that style to flush out some of our movie ideas.
The results were nothing short of incredible. It captured our voice, and cut the time it took for us to get a tight treatment from one day to one hour. We wrote up and sent out four treatments to a producer we are working with in a single afternoon. That’s almost a week’s worth of work in four hours!
That’s leverage, baby. And we are comfortable doing it because we know we can deliver a great script.
You can do the same thing to create a landing page for your product idea. Look at this - I asked ChatGPT to analyze my “Become a Content Curator” page, then write a simple landing page in the same style for a product that helps people use ChatGPT to fast-track their MVPs.
Here’s what it came up with:
What’s stopping you from refining this idea, building a landing page for it, and capturing emails to see if there’s interest? Nothing.
So go build an MVP. Use AI to do it 10x faster than you could before. Test the MVP in the market (with a release date for the product), and if there’s demand for it, build the product in time for the release date. Because anything that gets done gets done because of a deadline.
And if there’s no traction, forget about it and build a new MPV. Repeat. Simple, but not easy.
Start now.