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Your “MVP” is your Most Valuable Player

As a creative, big-dreamer type, you may be like me and get seduced by your grand, elaborate visions. It may start with a flash of inspiration and then in no time your creative mind goes into overdrive with all of the possibilities.

art-rbbiz-guiding-principles-cropped-sm-whiteYou see patterns, you connect the dots with other cool ideas, you go on tangents. Pretty soon you’ve imagined a fantastical project that will actually take you 5 or more years to implement, a team of resources that you don’t have in place yet, and maybe even costs thousands and thousands of dollars.

BUT passionate, excited you wants to get this BIG idea out there in ALL its glory pronto!

You want a new website that includes your entire product line, you want to launch that program with every level and feature you can think of, or insert your “biggest-possible-dream-ever” here.

This all-or-nothing thinking is a common pitfall among bright, driven creatives.

Unfortunately it can keep you stuck and overwhelmed because you can’t get any traction and then to top it off you might beat yourself up about not making any progress.

Well, let me introduce you to different perspective.

My hubby is a software developer and he taught me about an engineering concept called the Minimum Viable Product.

A Minimum Viable Product (or MVP) launches with only the most basic, core features needed to get initial feedback from a small group of customers.

You can think of it as “good enough for now.”

By implementing a small piece earlier rather than later, you can see what works and what doesn’t and make more nimble adjustments before investing too much time, money, and resources into developing a complicated product that no one wants.

Believe me, I can still get seduced by my big dreams and active/ambitious imagination! That’s when I need to connect back to one of my guiding principles, “Dream big, but start small.”

I remind myself of my own experience with “good enough for now” and how starting small can lead to some really cool impact over time.

This photo is from early 2004 (wow more than 11 years ago!) when I led my very first Unfolding Your Life Vision “workshop” (my “MVP,” a small no-cost gathering of trusted friends at my house).  I continued to use the approach with individual clients and did more workshops (sometimes only with 2 people!!). Then 4 years later in 2008 I finally launched my first tangible product, the Unfolding Your Life Vision kit. And then it took another 3 years until I created my UYLV licensing program. Now we have hundreds of licensed Unfolding Your Life Vision facilitators around the world.

If I had tried to implement the entire big vision of having products plus licensed facilitators worldwide, the idea never would’ve gotten off the ground. Instead, it happened through a series of various “MVP’s” over several years.

Let this be an invitation to get your imperfect and unfinished ideas out there right away and test them. Allow things to unfold over time as you learn from each MVP.

So, what’s one small thing you can test now?

I cover this topic in more detail in my Product Development e-Course. If this concept has sparked your interest, come join my Multiple Moola-Making Methods video class , where I’ll share more about how an MVP can help you diversify your income and I’ll talk more about the course. Hope to see you there!

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