Is your startup going to be a business… or a hobby? How can you tell?!

Below is a video of the presentation I did at Harvard Innovation Lab last month – I initially called it Creating Your Minimum Viable Product, but it’s really about: how can I validate that I’m creating a viable business (as opposed to a very expensive, time consuming hobby) before going off and building it?

I include a bunch of case studies of what other startups have done – successful or otherwise – and provide some tools to help you along the way. Hope you enjoy!

In my last post, I shared my How To Build Your MVP presentation that I gave at Harvard. But of course I get it’s a little hard without the voice over… so, here’s a walk through for some of the MVP examples from real startups. If you have more, it’d be awesome if you could share them in the comments!

The Anti-MVP: If we build it, they will come

The Point – Before Groupon, Andrew Mason created a not-so-well-known startup called The Point. The Point’s vision was to harness the collective power of all of the people on the Internet.

Whether you’re raising money, organizing people, or trying to influence change: if you can’t do it alone, you can do it on The Point.

Awesome idea, right? Andrew and his team thought so. They went off and spent 10 months building it. When they put it out there only to find that people weren’t using it (at least not in any kind of numbers that could lead to a sustainable business), they spent another 10 months back tracking only to realize that the Right product to build was a totally different one (Groupon).

» Andrew Mason discussing what happened with The Point

Moral of this Story: Don’t be like The Point. Instead, try one of these MVP ideas…

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The week before I started at Harvard Innovation Lab, I was there as a guest lecturer – giving a talk on How to Build Your MVP to a bunch of Harvard undergrads who were working on creating – for many – their very 1st startups.

I wanted to show them that they didn’t have to (in fact, shouldn’t!) just go off and build some big product. Instead, start small, get a little something out there, see how people react. Even better, talk to the people you think are your target audience – what problems do they have? How are they solving those problems today?

Here are my slides from that presentation and stay tuned… I’ll follow up with a post walking through the MVP Examples I give here.

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The intersection of students & startups is a really happy place for me and so it’s been awesome that I’ve gotten to teach students about how to do startups at four (!) different universities over the last 4 weeks (yes, it’s been a whirlwind!). MIT, Harvard, London Business School and Northeastern. Developers, designers, business students, scientists, engineers – all  coming together around the excitement of creating their own startups.

To celebrate, I decided it was about time to create some new content – including this new Lean Startup 101 that I presented at Northeastern Entrepreneur Club’s Husky Startup Challenge this weekend – which was a ton of fun!

Here are the slides (and there’s a video of the presentation below):