Remove Complexity From Your MVPs

This week's tip: Reduce complexity when shipping an MVP product or service

When you have an idea for a new product or service, the best way to go to market is with an MVP (minimum viable product).

While this is common at most companies, it should be a process that you follow as a solopreneur as well.

Here are the things that matter when launching your MVP:

• A landing page: A simple place to learn about the product or service and to understand the benefits of buying it.
• An offer: An offer is a way that prospective customers can actually purchase the product or service. Some common examples are one-time payments, a payment plan, or a subscription.
• A CTA: Your CTA (or call-to-action) should be a simple button that allows users to submit their payment information.

That's it.

To see an example of how I ship MVPs, let's look at an idea I had called CreatorSites.

With CreatorSites, I wanted to prove or disprove a hypothesis that I had: that people would pay $149 for simple one-page websites.

So I bought a domain name on Google ($12), built a simple landing page on Carrd ($19), and used a Gumroad (2.9%) purchase widget to facilitate transactions.

In one day, using my LinkedIn content playbook, I sold 4 sites for $596, spent just $31, and moved a little closer to proving my assumption true (I shut down this idea for other reasons).

So, skip the expensive logos, brand colors, style guide, and fancy website.

Start by proving that people will actually buy your product or service.

Get shipping. You can always complicate things later.