You have no idea how much I needed to review the material this week for my Entrepreneurship class! I could spend pages and pages to discuss code details of the website, search engines that I’ve installed and tested and details on the most inconsequential fact about the site. My realization after this week’s videos and article is the need to take what we’ve already put together and get out and conduct surveys and get feedback on the project from all of the customers. This video from Steve Blank was very helpful in helping me to quit trying to get a perfect product and just go talk to people with what I have. We need to focus on building what people want, but first we need to understand what exactly that is.
As this is a nonprofit, the business model is definitely more complicated than a regular entrepreneurship endeavor. We have customers, the food makers, and we have payers, those that are going to support the project and make sure that we can pay the bills. We have already talked with different food makers and acted on their feedback. Now, we need to polish up the site and get out to talk to the philanthropists and the USDA and see what they have to say about what we are trying to accomplish.
The Minimum Viable Product is a discussion piece that allows us to get feedback before spending a lot of time working on something that nobody wants or is willing to support. I’m not sure of which type of MVP we’re working on from the descriptions in the article on Scale My Business. There are aspects from several of them, but I think now we are on the right track for being able to conduct our interviews and further improve the product.