I know you've learned a lot about lean startup and MVPs in your other courses, but I just wanna emphasize how much overlap there is here with this concept of biasing yourself towards action. Here's a video about the early MVP, the minimum viable product of DropBox. In this video, you'll see their very first offering. A simple video explaining what the service is, how it works, and what are the benefits for it. It's super simple. They probably had not built the product yet. But they knew what they wanted it to be. So, instead of waiting they just biased themselves towards action and tested it. If you watched this video and it appealed to you, then you could go to that website and try to get it, try to get access to your two and a half gigs. Well maybe you could, maybe you couldn't. But at the very least, DropBox was getting a bit of data. They used to call themselves a Free DropBox, as you can see here. And they're finding out what the conversion rate was for that fictional service. Another MVP I can tell you about is from Buffer. So the person who created Buffer said, I believe that there are people who wanna make more tweets on Twitter, but they don't wanna bombard their viewers. They don't wanna bombard their followers with five, six, seven posts all at once. It would be better for them if they could spread them out. Just because they're creating five pieces of content in this hour doesn't mean that they shouldn't send them every three or four hours. But they won't be at the computer, they won't be able to send them later. So, let's have a service to do that for them. So, he sent a tweet on his personal Twitter account. There's this thing that exists, I invented it, it's called Buffer. And it'll automatically stage your tweets for you. If you want it, click this link. People clicked the link, they went to the page in the middle there. There's a header across the top, it says Tweet more consistently with Buffer, and then it gives you three choices. There's a free version, the $5 version and here's what you get, and the $20 version, here's what you get. People who clicked on those links went to the third page there, shown at the bottom. A little message that said, actually, sorry, you caught us before we were really ready. We'll be ready soon, though. If you wanna know about it, give us your email address. Without having to spend any time or money building this product, Buffer, the creator of it was able to take action, get some conversion data, and find out would people really pay for this? Did they respond well to the features he was offering. Eric Ries, who coined a lot of the terms that we know and use now for the lean startup method, talks in this video about the importance of using these MVPs for learning. In our first example we talked about biasing yourself towards action by creating a fake product and seeing if people wanted it. The second example with Buffer. They gave an opportunity for a sale actually, but it was fake. But they gave themselves a chance to get that conversion data. In the third video, Eric Ries talked about the unit of progress for a startup, it should be learning. That MVPs are experiments and that we're trying to apply the scientific method to entrepreneurship.
