Rapid-fire life and startup advice by Miki Agrawal
I grabbed this video by one of our Grommet Makers off of LinkedIn. It resonates for me because:
- She lays down a lot of wisdom, rapid fire
- It’s good advice for early career people. I spent a whole day at HBS recently on a panel of founders talking to three classes. Their questions were fairly universal ones for people evaluating entrepreneurship v. other options and Miki Agrawal eloquently addresses some of them in this short video. It’s well worth the few minutes of viewing.**
<div
**I do depart from Miki’s advice that “Iteration is Perfection.” The startup world is too enamored of the notion of Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This is crap advice if you are doing a consumer product or business where execution determines success (like The Grommet). We could never have succeed by launching half baked Grommet products. MVP is applicable for many apps, simple business ideas, partial execution of bigger ideas (i.e. don’t try to release the whole big product or platform vision in an MVP) and smaller components of a business. We do apply that notion of MVP within our current business for advances in our website and new offerings, and the concept of MVP was partially relevant in our early days in that we focussed serious resources on the parts of the business that made us distinctive. We simply did “MVP” executions of the rest of the business functions. We corrected those minimal efforts once we had resources–but while we were skating by I did a lot of apologizing for the areas where we were not investing.
Jules Pieri 
One Response to “Rapid-fire life and startup advice by Miki Agrawal”
Hi Jules,
Thanks for sharing this! Miki was a MassChallenge finalist last year, and she is quite a dynamic entrepreneur! My opinion (in a nutshell) about MVP is that you should not put a product or service out there for the whole world to see unless it’s good – really good! It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it can’t be half-baked. The best advice I give to startups is to find an early customer to support you. If you can actually get a paying customer to support your product or service development, then you can share iterations and get feedback with someone (or several people/companies) who have some skin in the game. It’s not enough to get letters of intention from potential customers. 99.9% of the time, they won’t end up buying when it comes time to actually pay! So get a customer (or two or three) who need your product or service so badly, they will pay you in advance to develop it. The customer funded model is by far the best way to iterate you business to success.
— Joanna