Building a Minimum Viable Product and Efficient Website Development with Allie Reitz

Creating and developing a product can be a daunting task for most business owners. A minimum viable product (MVP) allows customers to provide feedback for future development. Thus, developers can avoid lengthy and unnecessary work. However, how can we go beyond turning this idea into a reality and make it a running and successful venture? Join us in this episode as I sit down with Allie Reitz, the Founder and CEO of MEEP, to explore the essential steps in building a minimum viable product (MVP). We delve into the world of automation and discuss the significance of creating a functional and captivating website that fosters efficient connections with people. Tune in to this episode and learn actionable strategies from the expert! --- Listen to the podcast here: Building a Minimum Viable Product and Efficient Website Development with Allie Reitz Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I’m going to talk to you today about a common situation, maybe you’re in it, maybe you’ve been in it, maybe you know someone in it. You found your idea after all this digging in, that idea that’s at that perfect intersection of what the world needs, what you’re good at, and the idea that’s going to bring your life to where you want to bring it, but the question is how do you actually make that idea become a reality? That’s a whole ‘nother daunting task after all this personal reflection that can sometimes actually deter people from really doing anything because it is long, it is drawn out to go from, okay, I have this idea, to, now I’m doing it, now people are buying it, or now people are engaging with that. And that’s where my guest today, Allie Reitz, and her organization, Meep, come into play. --- Allie, welcome to the program. How it’s going? It’s going pretty well today. How’s it going for you? So good. I was outside most of the morning so I’m feeling very good now looking at my computer. Well, that’s amazing because one of the things that inspires a lot of people to pursue any of these paths is the ability to live the life they want and you decided this morning, “I wanna be outside because,” to give a little detail about the Colorado weather today, it was a very sunny morning, and the afternoon is probably going to have a high chance of rain in most places so that’s a great way to orient your day. Yes, I’m very glad I did it. So at Meep, you specialize in having someone go from, you talk about from zero to traction, from zero to where you’re actually getting there. How does that process really work? When someone comes in, I assume most people that come in are, as I’ve described, people that already have that idea, they’ve already searched and they figured out what they want to physically do but now, of course, how to get it from, “It’s this thing in my head, I think, oh, it’d be really cool to do this for these people,” to where you’re actually getting these people to engage with you. Totally. Like you said, it’s a long process, right? And what’s in your head is probably not what you’re going to start with because what’s in your head is probably the big, fancy, shiny, awesome version that’s going to be version 10 or 20 down the line. It’s going to be —- one way that I like to describe it or analogy that I like to use is from Jeff Patton in his book called User Story Mapping. He describes it really simply, which I love. It’s like if you’re wanting to solve the problem for people, that is, getting them from point A to point B, and your idea of the solution is a car, you’re not going to start with a wheel because that doesn’t necessarily solve that problem for them right out of the gate and your first objective is to kind of validate that assumption that you can solve that problem for them. So his analogy is, you start with a skateboard. It still gets people from point A to point B. It’s a lot more janky than a car, much, much simpler, much easier to fix and change and add things to but it’s still getting them from point A to point B and the early adopters of it will recognize that and maybe tolerate some of the maybe wind whistling by their ears while they’re getting from point A to point B. And so that’s what we do for people and that’s how we kind of guide founders through that process from going, “This is the huge vision in my head,” which looks like a shiny convertible car, and that’s important. That vision is so important because it’s what gives you the motivation to start the thing because you can see and taste and smell it and you are the only one who can really see what this vision is. But then, what I believe it really takes to be an entrepreneur is to hold that vision but also step back from it and start from scratch and say, “If I really wanna solve this problem for people, what is the smallest version of that that I can build so that I can start listening to those people that I’m building it for and start learning from them?” So what we do is first we help them map out that user journey. What happens in that big-pie-in-the-sky vision from the time they hear about it to the time they tell their friend about it? And all those things that happen in between. And then we say, okay, what are our near-term goals? Because when you’re starting something from the beginning, it’s easy to think big vision, “How’s this gonna scale? What are these big numbers?” Yeah, all those things. But if we kind of step back and we do a little bit of a shrink test and we say, “Okay, I’m standing here in six months. What feels like success to me?” I can give an example of like my friend Mike wanted to build a platform that helps small businesses reduce their carbon footprint. And so we mapped out this big vision of this cool software platform and then we stepped back and we said, “Okay, what are our near-term goals here?” and we did this shrink test. It was like, well, in six months, does it feel successful if we help 10 small businesses reduce their carbon footprint by 20 percent? What about two small businesses reducing their carbon footprint by 30 percent? And that’s kind of what we ended up with, which then allows us to kind of draw a line and say, “Okay, what of this huge vision is actually necessary to get to those near-term goals? How can we do this once and prove that it’s a thing?” and his MVP ended up being something. We didn’t have to build anything to test it out. Let’s just say consulting is your MVP, right? And then, of course, that could turn into later building a platform or whatever else you want to build. You still have to build like a web page, you still have to build something and that’s like another major component of what you do as well is helping build those web pages through those like low-code and no-code solutions, right? Yeah. There’s always some kind of infrastructure that you need to support what you’re doing, especially to do that next step. Step one, do the thing. Solve the problem for someone or for yourself. Step two is now can you do that again because that’s a big assumption right there.Share on X Yeah, that’s another assumption there. I’ve seen a lot of founders have awesome ideas because they had an experience that solved the problem for themselves and it happened once and it’s hard to recreate that, to recreate the problem and the solution and have it come out right. And so step two is repeat it. Yeah. And then where what you’re talking about comes in is step one, you learn from the process of repeating it and then you learn from the process of creating a process for repetition. When you do it the third time, that’s where all that infrastructure comes in, where you say, “How can we systematize what we just did? We repeated it and here’s all the things that we had to do to repeat it and, now, how can we automate those things?” And that’s where that scalability starts to come in of, “Well, now let me try to do this for 10 people, and what does that look like and where does the infrastructure have to change?” And that’s where it becomes from consulting into a website — A product, yeah. And how often do people have to either make significant changes to their offering based on, because that first MVP, you’re learning, you’re testing a hypothesis about what you think is going to work or even completely abandon the idea, which is sad but I’m sure it does happen. Well, it happens a lot. It happened to me and it happened to every founder. The cool thing is like at Meep, we consider that a success. We’ve done the thing, we’ve solved the problem for people, we’ve listened to the data that comes back. One manifestation of success is, well, we learned that it’s not valuable for people and then we come back to the drawing board, and that’s the definition of an entrepreneur, not necessarily just barreling through and saying, “Well, what if we did this? What if we did this?” but actually listening to the people you’re building for coming back and saying, “Well, if I really want to actually solve this problem for people, do I have to make some hard decisions about what can I take out of what I have built? What is not necessary in here?” and not building for building’s sake. Yeah. I know a lot of that happens. Totally. And like the statistics are the most successful companies have either pivoted once or twice. Yeah. No more or no less. Interesting. So, there’s a balance between being like, “This is what I’m building and I’m gonna keep ramming it no matter what,” and the people that change their mind every 15 minutes, like, “Oh, maybe it could be this, maybe it could be that, maybe I’ll make a book, maybe I’ll make a new version of football to be played in Indonesia,” and so on. Yes, exactly. Having a healthy perspective on it and not necessarily second guessing your