 it's kind of funny yeah so we're gonna pick up a little a little piece in the West Wing and funny funny thing about this is that this is the only image on the internet that you could find that has like most of the main characters in here and if you look in the upper left the girl that's kind of got like a crazy crazy eyes going on here she's actually only in it for one season so it's kind of a funny joke that this is the only one that has most of the main characters but by the presidents obviously Martin Sheen Leo McGarry here is the chief of staff deputy chief of staff is Josh Lyman Sam Seaborn played by Rob Low is the deputy communications director and then Toby Ziegler played by David Chief is is the community or the communications director and then CJ Craig as the press secretary so what we're gonna do is we're actually gonna pick up a storyline they're getting re-elected they're going out to get re-elected and we're gonna we're gonna talk about how the government kind of comes up with ideas for bills and how does that relate to products all right so here is Oh technology this one played earlier the thing about what happens if I slip and fall down in front of the election I like that it's work but you know how to do college that's a man's job man's accomplishment it should be a little easier that's a little easier and then that difference I know I'm my natural Toby Ziegler I work at the White House every minutes of talk so where we picked up was in the middle of Josh and Toby out in Ohio trying to get back to DC they got left behind at a motorcade at a campaign rally and they had started talking about education and here they met Matt who is is a guy that makes 55,000 dollars a year has another 25 in from his wife and he just is trying to get by took a real hit in the stock market that day and and the the notice that you saw when they kind of pointed to Josh who was who wasn't really talking to the guy who was over ordering a beer he's kind of like hey hey we need we need to talk about about this and so that's that was the Q to Toby to say hey let's let's talk about this I want to hear about so there's there's a whole nother little bit of story that they that they kind of go through in this and they talk about they hear Matt and what he what it is that he's trying to do and this really hits for the product world when you're when you're coming up with an idea and you're solidifying that vision so you could be working on maybe it's a website or maybe it's a course or an e-book or something like that hey we got Ryan in here so we're we're we're getting them in one by one here this is great and so it's it's the the idea that you encapsulate in that is is that you you are forming an idea it could be it could be anything what what they're trying to do is solve a problem and the problem as we all know it is education is super expensive right education becomes this this like $60,000 a year endeavor that you end up graduating with a job that pays 30 and you're in debt so it really speaks home in that sense but when you think about it as a product we're all of our things start you know you have a passion for helping somebody maybe it's a you know it could be could be you know what I just like to help small businesses build websites and that's that's my idea so how do I form that idea into something so we're gonna pick up their story a little bit they they make it home successfully to Washington DC and separately they they start envisioning what what it is about that conversation with Matt that they had and they're gonna have a little conversation now this this conversation is so my West Wing love is they really adopted this this walk-and-talk thing so they're walking around the building they're talking and that's that's like an Aaron Sorkin go-to anytime they're having some dialogue they're always walking around so we're gonna pick it up right there so we all know the CEOs get bonuses the workers don't but in the sixth grab talk about Congress ending the deductibility of salaries over a million and then the measure excluded items that the IRS need to be incentive-based in other words the bonuses are tax deductible in other words why can't it get 35 million for crashing the company and the company gets a deduction investment in the future workforce and innovation in the ideas economy investment in crime reductions not a value to capital than writing off the bonuses the guy last time in the bar the one who's taking this daughter visit colleges he said it needs to be just a little easier totally every nickel spent on college tuition should be 100% tax deductible not cap the index and bracket every nickel 100% that's exactly what I was going to tell you it's hard to see on the screen but it says Watkins deals company or something like that as the headline of the paper so they both have the idea right after talking to Matt hey let's make this idea let's make college cheaper and what they do is they went and found clarity on it and that's what we all do when we thinking about a project that we're gonna take on a product that we're gonna build this idea that we have that solves the problem we we always provide and think about more clarity so Steve Jobs said it best in the software world people think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on but that's not what it means at all it actually means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that are out there and you have to pick carefully Steve goes on to say that he's actually proud of the things that they haven't done as the things that they have done innovation is saying no to a thousand things I like that quote because as you think about like all the ideas that you could have to build a business to build a product to help solve a problem it's like yeah these are all good ideas but until you really have that clarity around it you're not going to be able to move on it I have I've have tons of ideas and every time I'm at a word camp and I see a friend I'm always like hey check out this new thing I'm thinking about and I get a little bit more clarity on it but I've probably never moved on it and that's and that's where we're all as especially as like entrepreneurs freelancers anybody that's that's really really in that mindset you think about that all right so that's phase one it's all about ideation all about vision and getting a good firm understanding the second is is value proposition and and so value proposition what is it well it's really a few things the biggest one is it's a headline right it's it's a subheading or or subheader with two to three sentence paragraph it could be three bullets X Y Z and then there's something of a visual so so let's look at what a good example of of a value proposition is here is campaign monitor's website this may be a few months old now but you can see their their value prop is send email your customers can ignore it's easy to use professional grade email marketing and automation for today's fast-growing businesses makes you makes you really get the idea of what what what it is that they're selling if you're if you're looking to sell or send email to customers hey this is a great thing to look at because I don't want my email to be ignored when it gets into an inbox right so they're they're speaking home to you and they're saying they're getting you to let kind of look in to them more here's another one wp 101 learn wordpress the easy way who's got time to waste on boring tech books tired of homemade videos filled with us and arms or confusing tech jargon ready to finally learn how to use wordpress to create your own website today and then there's a start learning now and you can see in the background they've got a bunch of people around a computer kind of learning right and so again this this can speak to the certain audience that you're looking at as as as that value proposition goes in another one is opt-in monster so this is a fun one because it is going to kind of move through so it's convert fill in the blank visitors into subscribers powerful conversion optimization toolkit to grow your email list and boost sales and so you can see as it's flipping through there so again another way to think about how do you create a value proposition around your idea to help your customers or your prospects understand what it what it is that you sell all right so we're going to take one I think one last look at the west wing a second and get into the rest of this this is a clip from an event that kind of wraps up what they're talking about as we hit into the next phase of product development and this is is there at the rock the vote event so the rock the vote event is a real event that happens around elections and what we're going to see is there's not only clarity among senior staffers but they've also started to test kind of some of that value prop and what they're going to finally finish is what we're going to look at in the next phase called a minimum viable product and that's that's kind of where where they take an idea get the clarity get the value proposition and then take it over to the president to say okay here's what we think we need to do here's how we need to do it here's the steps in order to make that happen can we go and do it they in in the government they don't get signed off until the president says yes let's go and do this let's see if we can start it up here take the standard adoption so let's forget for home and mortgage main what's the tax liability 13,000 20 months to which that that's 25,850 let's throw in hoax roman board and it's 34,000 dollars saying the books are tax-adaptable to the right personally think the fear should be tax-adaptable but we'll have to cry another day so one kid in college tax liability just dropped from 13,313,000 we'll get this bill done in a few days more thank you to CJ when she gets off all right so they're they're actually going to CJ the press secretary just as a hey let's make sure that this makes sense and and then we'll take it to the president by the way since we're done with the west wing analogy for a bit they take it to the president it goes and that becomes one of their campaign promises is to change the education all right so let's talk about minimum viable product does anybody know what MVP means no okay so it means essentially what is the minimum amount of of solution do you develop to solve the problem we're going to look at a one that I think is probably the best tech cases out there and that's unsplash has anybody heard of unsplash.com no all right so unsplash was developed by two friends that that saw a problem how many people are looking for stock photography for a client you know you're building a website you're like I need stock photography well most stock photography is like the same like cheesy grins cheesy smiles cheesy poses all that kind of stuff and these two guys are like you know what we're done with that so what they did is they went and hired a local photographer and they said hey we want to take 10 photos at this coffee shop and we want to make them available to everybody for free we believe that that being able to do this we have this idea that better stock photography or better universal royalty-free photography would be a place that we can play in and so that's exactly what they did they took three hours from the from the time that they came up with this idea and had the the photographer to it being launched so what does that look like well they they used a they used tumbler I need to fix that side they used tumbler and a $20 theme so they they didn't have to worry about hosting it was just free they could just stick it up there they hired that local photographer and they took 10 photos at a coffee shop and and and those 10 photos are like a computer with some wood nice wood table and a coffee and a guy sitting at a computer that's that's the 10 photos that they took then they uploaded them for free to the tumbler site so you can just download them they then at the end of those three hours they submitted on splash to Hacker News which is a place that they felt would be kind of where their audience was within a few hours of posting these images were were hosted on like their own Dropbox account too so this is kind of crazy they had over 20 000 photos downloaded in fact they had so many photos downloaded that they had hit their bandwidth quota in Dropbox and so then the thing didn't work now what was great about on splash is it didn't take a lot of time right took three hours to build it was a proof of concept they they just used the tools that they had available and in WordPress it makes makes sense to for us to be able to do that as well right we could build a WordPress site we can use beaver builder we could use whatever and create a real quick minimum viable product to test the waters in so today on splash has over two million photos downloaded which is kind of crazy that's that's a month they ended up being so simple that that's what set them apart their their photos are now you can be a photographer and upload your own photos there but at the end of the day it solves that problem i use on splash almost all the time i'm doing a design for somebody because i can go in and just type in coffee or i could type in computer and i'm gonna find a hundred photos and i can just go and grab those in and and other apps have started to work with on splash to make that process even easier um all right so um this is this is our i let me make sure it's my last clip it is not my last clip man this is this is pretty good all right so this is a uh uh cj clip here i thought before it's only claims in any way so at the same time they should have been like the end of evidence so when congress put a million dollar cap on deducting salary they'd let the loophole for incentive-based bonuses yeah i don't know bonuses instead of base are there any bonuses you get just automatically isn't that called salary which also isn't fixed by the way but i don't want to come back to that yes all right so so they've they've really finalized that mvp at this point they've they've went and said okay we gotta we gotta we have some things that we have to move out of the way because of of legal issues um so capping out um our mvp phase we need to know what we we want to build and we really need to start with a single product don't try to solve all the problem at once find that smallest possible problem right unsplash said hey we think stock photography isn't great um we want to do that better uh and they they subsetted stock photography by saying hey let's not just do everything let's do a small thing and we know that um for the majority of our target audience we need to have a blank computer screen so that a web designer or an app designer or a developer can put their piece of artwork their their app um on those uh computers second we need to keep iterating right we're not just done once we have that first piece solved um we need to constantly go and solve those bigger problems and then the last thing is that we need to constantly communicate that vision of what our grand problem is so so unsplash their grand problem is we want to solve stock photography for everybody um and that's what we're going to solve i think they're still trying to solve that problem um now where they're trying to solve it is in product market fit so product market fit is um as defined by mark anderson uh it just means that being in good market uh with a product that can satisfy that market so so if you think of like a bell curve um product market fit is when you start going up that bell curve right um that's where you start to see um people succeed you start to see a lot of um growth you start to see a lot of revenue you start to see all of these things because you're you're iterating on your product and you're gaining more and more customers as you do that um that's that's way unsplashes today unsplashes now moved away from tumblr they're running their own custom built application they're hooking up and partnering with other developers and agencies to make their their product be be available to everybody so my my guess is they probably will at some point make it be a paid service so that's product market fit um uh the last phase is customer feedback um so you've you've at this point you've developed your product you've started to get it out there you've started to generate a lot of revenue but you also want to know what are the other problems that people are facing with your product you know if you if you are uh say we'll come let's take Gutenberg for example since since Gutenberg's a hot topic think about Gutenberg we're we're now at a phase where we're looking to release it and we're looking to say hey how can we address different things with it um that's this is a great time to get customer feedback so how do we get customer feedback well we can do it in a few ways we can do it through surveys so we all know what a survey is right you send out an email and there's a list of 10 or 15 questions um could be a feedback box on your website so you've got a product page up you've got some sort of a page you could say hey um what uh you know what what's preventing you from from purchasing this product um you could reach out directly so another way is is to take your email list that you've got as customers and you can say hey how do I you know mark you know what what is missing about about product x or or greg what's what's missing about product y another thing is we all likely have google analytics and some sort of user analytics inside of our software look at that run run with that and you can help them to make some data informed decisions finally looking at usability tests so if you have a software product talk to a user write up some questions and have them go through what those questions are or try to have them use your product or even go outside of your audience find a new group of people and have them go through it because that's if somebody's never seen your product before you're going to get some good kind of understanding of of where maybe some shortfalls are all right so building products uh so we we've hit five five areas uh idea and vision right making sure that you have that that formulated and you have you have understanding of what that problem is that you're trying to solve in the solution for it you've set up a value proposition so that you have uh a way to explain to your customer base what you're going to use and how you're going to solve that problem third you've hit a minimum viable product so you've developed something to to sell them and you've you've likely put up a sales page and you've started accepting customers you're still iterating at that point but the next phase you'll finally hit is product market fit so you're getting more revenue you're likely adding on more employees we're all successful multimillionaires and now we can go get customer feedback so i'm a j morris i'm a product manager at a hosting company called liquid web and i do this every day so i'm i'm talking to customers i'm looking at at where where our product fits in the market who is the audience what is our value proposition and constantly changing these things it's these phases are always kind of a hey let's go back and forth and figure out what works and what what doesn't work and readdress things so thanks for coming and if you have any questions let me know