What's up, hello and welcome to Side Usals School. This is your host, Chris Gillitho,

taking off a new week. Here with the classroom episode, we're going to call it the MVP of

minimum viable products. Whoa, am I using some startup language? I'm afraid I am. But don't

hold it against me. I'll explain as we go along. In recent classroom episodes, we have looked

at all kinds of topics, how to decide between competing ideas, the three elements of every

compelling offer, which might come up again today. And then last week, we examined the difference

between what people say they want and what they really want. Now, over here in my world, it is

28 days until the money tree comes out. This is my new book, The Money Tree, Finding the Fortune

in Your Own Backyard. Very excited about it. I'm going to go on the road to 40 cities. I look

forward to meeting many listeners and readers. And as a quick reminder, you can pre-order the book now.

It actually helps authors when you do that. Pre-order the book from your local bookstore. Just go in and

tell them you want to order it in advance. Or any online retailer, including, of course, Amazon.com.

All right. So essentially what's happening here in this classroom series, we are going from

thinking about ideas to designing real offers, concrete offers, actual products and services.

And I do want to borrow this terminology, this concept from the startup world, which I almost

never do. I try not to use buzzwords or trendy words or startup e-words. But I like this concept

of minimum viable product, MVP, which is essentially, if you've never heard the phrase before,

an MVP is basically a version of a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers

and give you feedback for future product development. Okay. So we're thinking about something that's

really basic. The idea is to get to market quickly. You might have an idea, let's say, to launch a

series of e-books. I did that long ago. I had a business called Unconventional Guides. And when I

first started thinking about unconventional guides, I was like, wow, what is my series of e-books?

...