Resources
- Kickstarter Honesty Guidelines (https://www.kickstarter.com/honest)
- MakerPad (https://www.makerpad.co/)
Transcription
Josh: [00:00:30] So Nate I did get some tips on a mike this week, so hopefully it’s better for our listeners.
Nate: [00:00:37] Yeah, well, that sounds good. And I can see it’s all, all configured differently over there. Cool.
Josh: [00:00:42] Yep. Yep. I looked like a pompous pro like with the stuff like Joe Rogan stuck up against the face
Nate: [00:00:50] it looked like a real radio announcer
Josh: [00:00:52] so a couple of things I wanted to ask you about is did you hear about the MakerPad acquisition this week?
Nate: [00:00:57] No, I didn’t. I actually hadn’t heard of them and I Googled it when I, I saw it on the show notes.
Josh: [00:01:02] Yeah, I think it’s actually, it’ll be pretty interesting as part of this episode. So what do you, what do you know about them so far? So what’d you Google?
Nate: [00:01:09] Yeah. So I just looked really quickly at their landing page and it seems like they’re low code, no code kind of tools. Is that right?
Josh: [00:01:17] No, actually I think it’s a learning platform for low-code and no-code tools. So. I believe his name is Ben Tassel. He’s an indie hacker bootstrapper type probably runs in some of our close circles. But yeah, he’s yeah, he’s sold to Zapier this week, which is pretty interesting in this low code, no code and indie space.
I think so.
Nate: [00:01:38] Yeah, that that acquisition kind of makes sense. Like Zapier is like the go-to for no code, low code kind of stuff.
Josh: [00:01:45] Yeah, I think it’s like, they’re the plumbing in my view, like they’re the, they put all the pipes together between kind of interconnecting everything else that is on their, their own little islands and APIs.
Nate: [00:01:57] Yeah. Yeah. And I think you’re right. That that really does link into what we’re talking about today. Did you want to introduce that? Yeah.
Josh: [00:02:04] yeah. Yeah. So I am a bit excited as we had our first bout of listener feedback. And this is from Hans. He says the content is great. I like hearing the stories. I’d love for you all to dig more into M M VP he’s calls it a minimum minimal viable product. Can we hear more about both of your firsthand experience with building and MVPs over, over versus overbuilding and the lessons you’ve learned?
So they all start us off with a question for you, Nate. What, what is this M M VP mean to you?
Nate: [00:02:38] yeah, that, that’s a really interesting topic. Thanks for sending that in Hans so we really appreciate that. I think when I think of MM VP, it sounds to me like a very early proof of concept, like, like there’s MVP, which is like, your software that actually does something, but this to me is more like you’re doing manual stuff or you built something in like three days that you’re just going to kind of put out of there and it’s going to kind of half work and kind of half do the thing that you want. That’s what I thought about it. What, what did you think of that?
Josh: [00:03:09] So typically at least how I define it, an MVP that everyone knows came from like the lean startup types of stuff. And there’s ideation. And there’s validation of your idea, customer interviews, all of that, that type of thing.
And I think the MVP is the. Like building out the product as minimally as possible minimum viable product. I think that’s the key piece of the MVP. And I think where Han’s started digging into was I think it’s due to either episode one or two. I don’t recall exactly when it came up, where I mentioned how I think I built the first beta of referral rock was all with like a Woohoo forums.
I, it was episode one, I believe I
Nate: [00:03:51] Yep. Yep. Sounds great.
Josh: [00:03:53] So I think it’s kind of leaning in a little more towards that and how I would think about the difference of that is it sits in the validation kind of I guess, stage of a business where you have ideation and validation. And I would think it’s, for me, it gets kind of almost closer to parallel with customer research.
If that makes sense.
Nate: [00:04:15] right. Like you’re, you’re still figuring out where your business is going to land and. And you’re using this as a tool to validate.
Josh: [00:04:24] right. And how can you do it? And as little commitment as possible enough to get people to understand what you’re trying to do. Which is why this is I think, super interesting today with all the no code and low code tools and hence talking about Zapier and MakerPad at the, at the top of the episode.
Nate: [00:04:42] Yeah. And I think that’s so, so important because like when you’re in the validations phase, it can be so hard to like, know whether your idea is good or not. And it’s hard to have good tools for that. So I think this is a great tool for that.
Josh: [00:04:55] right. And what’s interesting if I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this story too, Nate you know, people often ask about the start of, of referral rock and they’re like, Oh, did you do customer interviews? Did you do customer research? And I go, yeah, I did. But I didn’t really listen because a lot of them, it was very lukewarm the response.
And now if I’m kinda revisionist history , that story a little bit, I quickly jumped into an MVP, which still felt low risk and low, like, you know, part of the validation process. So it wasn’t an MVP. I didn’t whip out and do a ton of code. But I, I went and did what we’re now trying to make a thing, this MVP thing which probably I would draw the line at, like, it’s really no code, low code types of thing.
It just took to validate an idea.
Nate: [00:05:47] Yeah. Yeah. And that kind of gets to that problem of, you can ask people what they think about your, business idea. And they’re like, Oh yeah, that’s great. But until, you know, push comes to shove of actually using it or actually paying for it, like that’s when you actually find out what people think.
Josh: [00:06:02] right. Right. And I think a lot of people in customer interviews where you might show screenshots, right? And then people are clicking through and they try to make it seem almost as live as possible.
But There’s, there’s obviously a lot of different ways. . I think screen mocks and Figma and things like that. There’s plenty of these wireframe tools. When you click through, you can kind of go through workflows. But it may not actually like persist any data. I think those are also sort of forms of this MMVP idea.
Nate: [00:06:30] Yeah. And I guess with an MMVP it seems like we’re talking about it more in the sense of like that you’re actually building something that does work. It’s not just a, like a stateless, Figma test, and you can get a larger scale of feedback from, from a larger audience than from just people who are actively in customer interviews.
Josh: [00:06:50] Right. Yeah. I think it’s all, all kind of in this spectrum of validation , where you’re still being a little non-committal, but still it’s like, okay, how can I do it without standing up a database? How can I do it without necessarily a server and some other things? I think that’s probably where I would draw the line and have that slippery slope where it really is, and to be in MVP territory.
Nate: [00:07:13] Yup.
Josh: [00:07:14] So Nate for you in your past projects and things like that is, is this something you believe in? I think I re recall even recently, trying to convince you when you were validating an idea and you are a little angsty about wanting to code and I’m just like, no, don’t code anything, just like keep waiting, just don’t code anything.
So w what do you think about that?
Nate: [00:07:37] Yeah, I think , as a developer, I just get really excited about new ideas. And even before they’re completely validated , I want to build the MVP. I’m not thinking about the minimum part of it. I’m just wanting to build a small product. And the advice that you gave me that time, and you’ve given me several times before is to.
Like find ways that you don’t even have to code or find ways that are even simpler to validate. And I, I believe in the idea, but it’s a real, it’s a struggle.
Josh: [00:08:10] No, I, I get that. It’s definitely an exercise in restraint because you’re a maker at heart and you just want to build the thing. And there’s a certain level of fulfillment and satisfaction in building it. But I think on the flip side too, you’ve, you’ve seen this other side where once you’ve built it and they didn’t come, then you have this kind of like a.
An empty feeling instead, right?
Nate: [00:08:32] yeah, you get that big feeling of regret. And so like, Having been through that several times. Cause I didn’t learn the first time. I think that that going that really low code route is actually really helpful and is gonna save saved me the heartache in the future.
Josh: [00:08:49] Do you think it also helps like a sense of anxiety with an idea and uncertainty, like when you’re testing and validating something, you had the ideation phase and you’re trying to get through validation and of course you want it to work, right?
Like you’re not, you’re not in this to go back. Back a step and go back to ideation. You want this to work? You’re, you’re putting a little more muscle into it than just, you know, what is on the, on the scratch pad. But do you think it’s like there’s amount of angst, like sitting in that validation phase?
Like, is this going to sink or swim and part of kind of filling that void and relieving some of that anxiety and uncertainty is like, let me at least try to check some boxes and build a little bit. Is, does that.
Nate: [00:09:30] Yeah, and I think that’s kind of where the instinct to start coding is because code is very predictable and straightforward to me and. It’s comfort. Whereas validating is discomfort because you don’t know what’s happening. Right. And I think you’re right. You, you can use this minimum MVP to to remove some of that anxiety by doing small things in the right direction.
Josh: [00:09:59] right. Yeah. I think you’ve learned more about doing like landing pages and other things like that. Like, there’s, there’s a few more tricks, I think, in your tool bag now you know,
Nate: [00:10:08] Yeah. And I think when you see some, some success and you see what happens during that success, you see how people are reacting positively to your idea already in validation. Then you can kind of understand that, okay. I need like a certain level of user engagement before I go out and build all this code, as opposed to just thinking, well, you know, the Internet’s a big place.
It’ll take time for them to find me. And, you know, maybe I’ll just fix all my marketing problems later instead, too. Be validating early. And you know, if that, if that idea doesn’t make it, it doesn’t make it, then that’s okay.
Josh: [00:10:44] Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So yeah, so we got to get you to kind of kick that habit. Start focusing on an MVP in the validation phase and just maybe late night eating, you know, you want to pick up some of that, some junk food in your belly to kind of absolve some of the anxiety of the validation phase.
Would that be a better substitute?
Nate: [00:11:05] There you go. There you go.
Josh: [00:11:06] I mean, you’re a tall guy. You got to get out of your frame to fill out. There you
Nate: [00:11:10] I got a lot of junk food space. Yup. Yup. So you, you talked in the earlier boat doing an MVP with Referral Rock. You wanna tell us a bit more about that and your experience there?
Josh: [00:11:20] Yeah. I mean, I think, I think we covered it a lot in the episode, but I’ll recap a little bit. So we talked about, customer research or talking to customers, but I did end up using a Wu Fu form. It was our admin interface, essentially.
It was like, okay, where upload your logo, put your information in here, all of that stuff. And. What I did do, I guess, arguably a little bit of code, low code is I translated that into like a resource file. So it took the CSV that came out of the the WooFu forums and essentially made like a resource file, which is usually an XML or a JSON type of thing.
And I had A file for each customer. And all it had is it put up a very rudimentary, like here’s what the logo goes, here’s this. So they could actually see the the, the referral page that they built.
Nate: [00:12:15] Yeah. And so if you like, had to think about that, did you spend a lot of time making that or like what.
Josh: [00:12:21] Well actually this is kind of coming up with another topic I’ve wanted to broach for a while, but is this is, this is the. End result of a previous project right before Referral Rock. So I had a project right before referral rock that I was also working on with a it was kind of seeding it out with this, with, with another guy.
And essentially he, I was on the engineering side and he was on the sales side and he wanted me to build a prototype and I was sort of resistant to it because he’s like, I’m going in all these demos and. I’m like, okay, well again, what can I, you know, I downloaded like an HTML template, like off of the Theme Forest, which is one of my go-to places.
And essentially that’s where I born out of the idea of the, the resource files, because it had. Project previous to that for some customers, for like client work that I did I got into like multilanguage stuff. So then, you know, people wanted a resource file to do language strings. So I was like, Oh, let me reuse that code for this.
This project with this sales guy, because he wants a demo. And I don’t think he needs to build it all out, but I will spend like a weekend building this out off of again, reusable code that I had from past projects and thus born that kind of design pattern. So then I’m like, Oh, I could just use this for anything else I want.
And then, and that’s where it evolved even further of getting like a Wu form for people to have and fill it out themselves. And I’m like, Oh, quick transform into a resource file. And boom, I can just. You know, mint these without, with minimal effort without a database.
Nate: [00:13:57] On an engineering level. That’s, that’s just genius, like using the translation capabilities to replace the text with like different customer information. That’s awesome.
Josh: [00:14:07] yeah. So, but again, you just it’s, I’m sure you’ve got squirreled little pieces of code or little things, and then all of a sudden you go, huh, this could be used for this too. And you kind of just connect the dots and go that’s that that’s how that, that one was born.
Nate: [00:14:22] that’s awesome.
Josh: [00:14:23] Well on a topic that I think we broached in I believe it was last episode as well.
I think we talked a little bit about, I had like a secret squirrel kind of project.
Nate: [00:14:33] yeah.
Josh: [00:14:34] So I I’ve talked a little bit about that because it is in the MVP stage. And now, you know, my, my day job now with referral rock there’s. You know, I’m, I’m looking for another project, like kind of like a hole in the head.
So this, this one was one of these ones where it started out of like a Twitter conversation where some people were asking, or I think I was regularly complaining about getting all this outbound email which I don’t know how much you get, but once you’ve done at least one podcast or something like that, I mean, they, they come out of the woodwork to find you.
Nate: [00:15:07] and they just keep coming.
Josh: [00:15:09] Yeah. So I got to thinking, I was like, what is a, what is a way that I can respond to these? So that first, if I respond, I will get out of their automated email sequence and they’ll stop emailing me, but how can I respond nicely? And instead of actually having any of these calls, cause I do not want to have any of these calls whatsoever.
No matter how many times I’ve sit, they say, can I have a quick 15 minutes? I’m like, in my mind, I’m like, no, go away.
Nate: [00:15:35] yup.
Josh: [00:15:37] but I want to be able to respond in a, in a nice way. So essentially I built a tight form that I now reply to, I have a kind of a canned email. That I say, Hey essentially it was like a hand wave and I said, I, you know, I’d love to, I love connecting with people, but at the same time, I, my time is a bit precious.
And if you fill out this form, I will promise to at least read the responses and it is now on me to respond to you. So please complete this form. And it started out as, as a slow iteration of like just a few questions. And the latest version has probably has a little bit of a branching. Logic is like, what are you?
Are you, are you an entrepreneur looking for this? So it’s so simple that you questions you would have to just gauge what they are really looking for.
Nate: [00:16:25] Yeah. And to gauge how serious they are too, that they actually are going to fill out your form and try to get access to you.
Josh: [00:16:31] exactly. So and what’s, what’s super interesting. Cause out of type four is I see all these metrics and stats, like how many people answered, how far they went through. Did they go down this branch? So post a little bit more about that, but it’s something I’m just testing. Oh, sorry. At the very end in the last question, I’m like, if you get to this far as like, what did you think, do you, did you inter do you want, I want one of these now or.
You know this, this was interesting. Interesting. I’ve never seen anyone do this, like just some other customer customer interview types of questions at the end for me to just gather, okay. You know, baby, is this a thing? I don’t know. So.
Nate: [00:17:04] That’s it. That’s a classic , Josh trick, right there. Put customer interview questions as part of your product.
Josh: [00:17:10] Yeah, true. True. I’ve taught you that one before. But yeah, so it’s interesting. I have so far I’ve sent it out. I probably been doing it about a month or so, and I respond to them on LinkedIn with it. I respond to any email I get with it. It makes me feel better because I’m responding to them and I’m not just like hitting the spam button or, or, or reply and saying, please unsubscribe and And like I said, in that message, it says like, please don’t, you know, I will respond to you.
It is now in my court. And essentially I’m trying to do it as nice as possible. And, and honestly, yeah, I will go through it just like, Hey maybe there’s a day. I am looking for a technical recruiter and I will go look through that list and see who responded nicely and who treated me with respect and they might get a call
Nate: [00:17:56] Yeah, that’s really, that’s really interesting. That’s a cool, a cool thing you got going there.
Josh: [00:18:01] Yeah. As much ideation. I haven’t thought much of a plan. I don’t really, I just kind of want to, it’s an experiment. It’s a thought experiment. It’s I don’t know who’s going to pay for it. I did sneakily put it under a sub domain. It’s like Josh bot or Josh dot referral, rock.com. So at least it has like a thing, but whatever, it’s a, it’s an I frame in the form that pops up from the type form.
So. But I’m gathering stats on it. I’ll share the stats with you. Maybe I’ll post them in our our Twitter feed. But
Nate: [00:18:33] Huh? Well, there you go. You’re just fiddling around with something on the side to see if it grows.
Josh: [00:18:38] Yeah. Yeah. So so Nate, I guess I’m kind of barring a little bit more on this topic of MVPs. Do you have some other examples that you’ve seen sort of out in the wild that are, that are doing this other than just in our own little echo chamber here?
Nate: [00:18:52] Yeah. So. I looked at a couple that are from way back. So like companies that everybody knows, like, like Groupon they started out with just a WordPress site and they would email people PDFs of their deals. So like, you know, like right now, Groupon is this whole. Big site of deals and you can click on the little button to see your deal code and whatnot, but they just started out by like manually sending people PDFs.
Like anybody could do that nowadays. I’ve got a couple other interesting ones, too. Zynga, the, the people who made Farmville. Yeah. So they, they started out, they made this really crappy game of poker like that, like basically any, any starting out developer could make. And it was really poor quality.
And that was what got them into the app store to for Facebook in order to build up Farmville and they build up Farmville on top of that. So that I have one, one last one, which was Zappos. So they’re the, they’re the people who sell shoes. Right? You can buy shoes online from them. And when they first started, the, the founder would just put product listings on the, on a website and he didn’t have any products like in the warehouse and he didn’t have shipping and receiving at any of that.
So he would get orders and he would just go to the store. Like he would go to, you know, sport check we have in Canada or Nike or whatever, and he would go buy the stuff manually and, you know, box it up in his living room and send it off. And you think of all the automation that these companies have now, that’s like, this is like the simplest possible way that they could deliver value.
Josh: [00:20:34] right. Yeah. Interesting. A quick note on Zappos. I don’t know if you know that he died this past
Nate: [00:20:42] No way.
Josh: [00:20:43] yeah. Rest in peace, Tony Shay. He’s definitely a big person in the startup culture startup ecosystem, and also one of the earlier ones big on, on culture. I think he had a, he had a whole philosophy on it’s like a flat hierarchy type of thing.
Nate: [00:20:59] Yeah. And, and the, with that they’re able to achieve really good customer service. Like I remember there’s heat, a dare that he put out to someone that he was with to call Zappos the shoe company and order a pizza and, you know, see if it would come and sure enough, you know, they, they did.
Josh: [00:21:18] Yeah, I think they were the early ones that made this like a free return type of thing, at least in those early days in the internet, even if it cost them an arm, mental leg. At that point. Now it’s ubiquitous with just about, I mean, everything I order on Amazon, I look for that free return thing. Cause I’m like, well, if I don’t need this or want this, how do I, I want to be able to easily manage that.
So
Nate: [00:21:39] yeah. Wow. What a legend.
Josh: [00:21:41] I think I, I think ProductHunt. Yeah, something like this. I believe they had a, I believe they had a like a, they were using some newsletter software first. Before I knew it. So it was all done over email as a like, Hey, here’s, here’s some interesting product types of things. So it was, I think some sort of like listserv type of software was, was the early, was the early impetus for, for product hunt too.
Nate: [00:22:05] yeah. I actually had a a good one that I was going to bring up earlier. I did a little startup idea with a friend and we actually did a MVP, which was his idea and it was a really good one. We were doing this video conferencing engagement kind of tool, and we ended up making that whole MVP without any code.
We, I think we strung together Zapier and I couple like automated emails from there. And we like, we’re pulling all the strings behind the scene. Like it was like a big puppet game. And it actually was
Josh: [00:22:41] I feel like we need to lean into that one and another episode.
Nate: [00:22:44] totally, totally.
Josh: [00:22:45] Cool. So another thing I wanted to talk a little bit about with this MVP is, so we talked a lot about, some good business use cases, but when does it start to become unethical? Do you think, like when does it get scammy? Like if you were to do these things and then you, you know, Zappos, could’ve just as easily like.
Taking the orders and then never shipped the shoes or went and reordered stuff from a, like a carbon copy type of things from China and, you know, glued on other logos. Like, I feel like with this, with the tools out there today, even more so you can get pretty far with making things like, you know, a little getting on the shady side.
So where where’s the ethical line of what to, and the MVP. Is good. And when it starts to become a bit shady,
Nate: [00:23:43] Yeah, I can. Yeah. I think that the MVP can always be a good thing. If you are representing it properly. So when you talk to people like in your marketing and in your discussions I think you have to be, you have to be honest with what the state of things are, like sure. They don’t need to know all the technical jargon of what’s going on in the background, but you know, if you’re ordering Nike shoes online, then you better be getting Nike shoes in the mail.
Right.
Josh: [00:24:13] So do you think a good line would be, if they knew what was going on in the background, would you be embarrassed about it were almost like, like, be like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, would that, is that like a, probably a good line?
Nate: [00:24:25] Yeah, I think that’s a good way of thinking about it for anytime you’re you’re doing work, right? Like you, you need to be honest about what’s going on and I think there’s a, in your marketing, it’s important to point out the benefits and the good things about your software.
And it’s also, I think, good to dream too, and to have like dreamy kind of language, but I think as long as you’re not insinuating that your product is something more than it is, or. Leading someone to believe something that is not true. I think that’s where I would kind of draw it.
Josh: [00:24:58] Well, what do you think any of the examples we already talked about fall into that camp. I’m trying to think the, I don’t think Tony Shea probably would have been, like, if they found out he was going there, like, okay, Hey, I paid the price, I’m getting the thing. It’s all good. What about, what about some of the other ones?
Nate: [00:25:14] I think with Tony Shay, I think like one that he could have a trap that he could have fallen into where that would not have been good is if he, you know, sold his products online for less than he was purchasing them for and was going like way into that. And like, you know, wasn’t w wasn’t able to financially continue his business if he was running some sort of I think there’s, there’s some boundaries there on actually fulfilling a promise.
Josh: [00:25:41] But, yeah, but if he’s fulfilling the promise to the end user, that let’s say they have it, they say $50 and he goes and has to spend 70 to ship them. The thing, I don’t think the end user would care. Right. Is that what you’re saying? Like, I mean, I don’t, it may be a bad business practice. He’s going down a different hole, but I don’t think it’s an ethical or he’s not, he’s not It’s probably just a crappy business idea or the fact that he’s like, I can do this up until this point, then I can reach scale and then I can buy the shoes in bulk, but, but I’m burning through my, you know, $10,000 like savings, but that’s just, you know, a hack quote unquote, but not on ethical.
I
Nate: [00:26:23] No, I think you’re right. But I think there is a line there where if you are running downhill and losing money and you’re at the point where you’re accepting orders, that you know that you’re not going to be able to fulfill because of financial constraints. I think that’s where you start to get into unethical territory.
Josh: [00:26:42] I see what you mean. So yeah, I guess when you, when, like, if you’re promising two-day shipping and it started to like affect that type of thing, or just, I guess it’s the. The danger signs of like, when that, when you you’re promised cannot be fulfilled, that’s, that’s where you’re kind of looking at and the way they might, they way they might do that.
People like, Oh, if this is really held together by straw and string in the back may be, I don’t want to stay here. Or he might say two days and they come back and it’s like, Oh, it’s four days. But, but we’re, we’re getting it. We swear. And it’s like, now you’re starting to wane a bit. Okay.
Nate: [00:27:21] I think the, I think the hard thing with a lot of these problems is that people don’t start don’t usually start out trying to be unethical. They have a good idea and they’re just trying to make it work and they start to kind of tweak the edges of where they’re willing to be ethical in order to kind of, you know, just keep going.
Like, for instance, the shipping idea, if you aren’t able to keep your promise on shipping in two days and then You know, and that slowly happens over time that you, you know, continue to have the two day shipping, even though really it’s more like five day shipping now.
Josh: [00:27:56] right, right. Once they recognize that that’s the pattern. I mean, I get that it’s going to happen. They didn’t realize it. Somethings happened unintentionally, but once, once there’s intent kind of involved, I think that’s where. You’re right. It gets a little, it gets a little wonky. Like if he changed on his website, that’s going to be five days then.
Cool. Like, that’s fine. I did have a, another one that to ask you real quick on. So I know it’s a common way to validate ideas, but landing pages with ads and sign up like now, or early access. Where do you, where do you place that in this, in this spectrum?
Nate: [00:28:35] Yeah. And there’s a really, yeah, cool example of this with Buffer Buffer, when they first started had like a little, little P landing page with a description of what buffer was and then pricing options. And you could actually click the buy now button. And then when you click the buy now button, it would take you to a page and said, ah, no, sorry, we don’t actually have this product yet.
Click here to be on a mailing list. And I think that like, Most of us have seen that before. And I don’t know that that’s necessarily unethical. I don’t think I would want to do that. Just cause it you’re kind of misleading somebody. But I think like getting early signups or putting ads that say, you know, here’s what we’re, here’s the product that we are envisioning.
Would you like to sign up for a newsletter to be a part of that when it comes out? I think that, like, that’s kind of where I think the landing pages should speak.
Josh: [00:29:24] okay. Yeah. I mean, I guess it’s all in that presentation. And what is the language that you are using there and being really careful about your language? There’s probably going to be a ton, a ton of gray area. Like what are you saying? And what are you not saying? But it’s probably a whole nother episode we can dive into with that, that style of thing.
Nate: [00:29:43] Yeah. I, one thing to, to go with that you had on our notes here about Kickstarter slash honest, and there’s some really good guidelines in there on like what to say and what not to say.
Josh: [00:29:57] Oh, yeah. Let’s, let’s, let’s go into a little bit of that. I mean, if anyone doesn’t know Kickstarter, right. It’s a site where mostly, I think it’s geared towards physical goods. So it’s like I could go in there and I can say, I want to I’m going to build this game and here’s my, here’s my idea. Here’s all this things and I can get crowdfunding.
I think they were the original. Crowdfunding movement site. And, but you can see where does that bleed the line? Obviously, Kickstarter wants to get everyone to, Hey, I want to fund Nate and he has this great like board game idea. And I want to, I want to, you want, you know, To give them the funds to help build it, fulfill this dream.
The first 10 people get like a signed copy, plus a stuffed animal version of Nate and all these other fun things. And you contribute this, but yeah. And then their business, they want people to do it. So, but at the same time, that sounds like a place that could be right, but for scams. So why don’t you talk a little bit more about what, what their policies are, how they deal with this?
Cause they’re right on that line.
Nate: [00:31:00] Yeah. And th they had a lot of examples that we kind of touched on already. Cause they, they have a great, like if you have a minute, go look out there, their site there it’s kickstarter.com/honest and.
Josh: [00:31:11] Put that in the show notes.
Nate: [00:31:12] Yeah. And basically what they’re showing there is like, just don’t misrepresent yourself. If you are planning to make a product, then say that you’re planning to you.
If you have something, show them exactly what you have and how far along you are. It’s okay to dream and to, to think big and just tell people about your dreams, but make sure that they know that that’s a dream and that’s not. What’s here right now today.
Josh: [00:31:37] Nice. Yeah, that, that’s definitely, that’s definitely interesting. I can see them having to help frame that. I think I saw something when I searched them a bit. There was something about, they were trying to get people that were posting projects to not even use the term. Like we are the best ABC or XYZ.
Just again, it’s just like that power of that language. It can be very easy to be misleading and you know, if it’s on the internet, it’s true. Right. So,
Nate: [00:32:03] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think it, it helps us to be a little more humble too. Right. It’s like, I’m going to try to build a better mouse trap. Not, I am the best mouse trap because that’s up for discussion still. Right.
Josh: [00:32:19] yeah, , that whole other side of this, I think it also is going to probably resonate strongly with, I think anyone that was listening to this podcast that is looking at building a business it’s, you’re also in it for yourself to a certain extent. And everyone here has also been a consumer.
So I think you can kind of gut check a little bit with yourself, but wrapping up with this MVP I think it’s a great tool in the tool set for. Essentially anyone to kind of get a little bit more signal get a little more improved, positive that maybe they’re going in the right direction. And, and, you know, we talked earlier about where we think it fits in this at.
Past ideation and into the validation, probably intermixing with customer interviews in that scope, but before you’re actually kind of maybe getting a server and there’s a database and there’s, there’s some other things. Yeah. Nate, what do you, what do you have to round us up on this topic?
Nate: [00:33:18] just don’t don’t code don’t code. You got to make some, make something small first.
Josh: [00:33:23] all right. Let’s see if Nate can stick to that and fight the urge. We know it’s hard. So thank you. .