The semantics of MVP

One of the many skills that working with startups taught me is to be constantly thinking about what is the minimum amount of implementation with the biggest return of value to users. For every two-week sprint, you have to constantly create a definition of what “minimum” is and apply it to your work. But finding what “minimum” means for a product (or a subset of one) is really challenging. If you’re unable to find the right balance, you might end up spending too much time on the wrong things.

Defining what “wrong” means is also challenging, but it’s a digression I won’t go into. It’s inherently tied to what success means to the project.

Ever since I started working on my personal project, the idea of what the product is has been malleable. It has been crystallizing over time, but there are still many unknowns. But even so, starting to implement it has been one of the best ways to understand what needs to be done and what I want to build. Jim Nielsen recently wrote:

We can’t visualize or predict how our own ideas will play out, let alone other people’s. This is why it’s necessary to bring them to life, have them take concrete form. It’s the only way to do them justice.

This has definitely been my experience.

A couple of weeks ago, while working on Postzine, I had a realization of what the product really is, or what the MVP of my idea is. When I think about what the product I’m building is, it is essentially a Content Management System, which there are plenty of around the web. But I don’t have too many ideas of how to innovate on what a CMS does (the management of content) but really on the creation of content. What Postzine really is a post creation tool. The focus should be on the editor first, and the CMS part of it second (or never?).

I started to research if it’d be possible to integrate a post creator with established newsletter/blog CMS, and to my happy surprise many of them offers APIs to access and create content. Instead of building a whole CMS, I will refocus on building a great post creator, leveraging all automation and visual ideas that I believe are missing from today’s newsletter creation landscape.

The semantics of “minimum” changed.