Company MVP
(For anyone just tuning in, this email is part of a multi-day series we're doing on Cost-Cutting. Check out the first post if you want to start from the beginning!)
We often hear the term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) when we talk about the fastest path to creating a user-driven product.
MVP = The barebones initial release of a new product sufficient for validating the product and gathering feedback.
But MVP can also be a helpful framework for looking at companies:
What is the minimum viable setup for running my company effectively?
You can use this lens to separate Mission-Critical spending from Optional spending.
Ask yourself:
If you had to rebuild your business from scratch today, how would you construct the MVP version of your company?
For the sake of this exercise, let’s pretend you magically own the product that you actually sell. You don’t have to hire an engineering power team to create the code base from scratch or remake your product line, but everything else in your company (people, processes, tools) never happened.
How would you build the company in the leanest possible way?
Questions you might encounter while you do this:
Is there one product you’d focus on selling and others you’d toss?
Would you hire a freelancer or a service instead of that full-timer?
Do you actually need an office? Your own equipment?
Before you freak out, know this:
I am NOT suggesting you actually cut your thriving business down to an MVP version. This is a hypothetical exercise.
The point is to get you to be ruthlessly honest about what is CRITICAL
And what is optional.
Since this hypothetical, you’re also giving yourself creative permission to start from scratch! You can reimagine your company with the benefit of hindsight: You never bought that stupid benefits package you now hate. You never hired that person you’re now on the fence about.
The benefits of this exercise are two-fold:
Helps you identify critical expenses that keep the business running
Unblocks your brain from imagining cutting expenses that feel like you “just can’t” cut but wish you could
Try it out, and let me know what you discover!
We’ll use these insights as one more focusing function to our grande finale on Cost-Cutting this week: Deciding on Cuts.
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