Honestly I don't know why people keep trying to do this kind of thing: reinventing email. Email works fine and nothing has been able to replace it (e.g., Google Wave, Mailbox, etc). I think the reason is that email works fine for most people. And if it isn't, a new tool to help you manage it isn't going to fix your problems. It'll probably just create new ones.
The answer to "my inbox is crazy" is to work through your inbox - if there's too much for you to work through then you need to do less. That's it.
I'm not sure I necessarily agree. Inbox by Google (and before that Mailbox to some extent) has drastically improved my email workflow. Being able to "snooze" emails and get a notification about them when you're likely to be able to take action on them was a novel idea that moved the email space forward.
I refuse to believe that we've exhausted the list of designs we can try to continue to improve email. And considering how pervasive email is, even marginal improvements can have profound effects.
And I hate to sound like a wet blanket on a new tool/thing. Just an honest reaction to yet another email aid app. I'm sure there will be people who use this and find it useful.
I'm just trying to make the point that at some point all the lifehacks/efficiency-improvements in the world will not fix the problem of being over-burdened.
No tool will ever solve the problem of being over-burdened, as becoming more efficient just means doing more in the same amount of time.
Being over-burdened is a personal / social problem, and the only solution is not taking on / expecting more than is realistic... easier said than done!
Efficient use of time is it's own goal, and is orthogonal to the overall load.
> We thought we were taking the minimum viable product approach because we had only spent two weeks on it. Right? Where we had made a very early prototype and put it out there.
> But, if you think about it, going back to the definition of the minimum viable product, which is the minimum features that are required to learn what customers want, we had spent way too much time on it.
> What we should have done, and what we did for a lot of features thereafter, is started with a landing page that promised people that product. Then we should have taken out the AdWords we were planning to take out, drive traffic to that landing page, and offer people to buy the experience that we are talking about.
> What we would have found out if we were doing that experiment is 0% of people would have clicked through, which means it doesn’t matter what is on the second page.
I agree with you. My interpretation of MVP is weighted by my interpretation of the words Product, and Minimal. A product should be something which really solves a real world problem, and is built with the appropriate level of quality. Good enough is not good enough, the bar should be very high. Minimal in this context therefore applies only to the scope if the problem(s) being solved, not to the effort put into execution or the level of quality.
Put another way, I won't call something a product unless it's something I'm proud of and something that I believe solves a problem in a way which approaches the best way (at least in my opinion at the time, there are obviously always improvements to make based on feedback). If it's minimal, this just means the scope of the problem it solves is very small, so that not too much effort has to be expended building it, even though what it does do it does at a high level of quality.
Anything which falls outside this is to me not an MVP, because it's not a product, it's a prototype of a product or a way of testing an idea the product may eventually be built to implement 'properly'. It's rarely something you're proud of, or would be comfortable charging for. When you'd be comfortable charging for it, that's probably the point where it becomes a product.
I think there might be two valuable ideas, that are somewhat at odds, lets call your model the MVP - Minimal Viable Product, and the other one MVC - Minimal Viable Commodity.
The Minimal Viable Commodity is the minimal thing that you could successfully market. It can often be an idea+web page with an email form. It is the sales/business persons idea of an MVP: The technical aspects are entirely uninteresting - it's the business case that's being tested/evaluated.
Consider the case of a product idea for translating in some special domain, eg: contents declarations for food stuffs. The MVC is a web page with a form to submit the text. What happens after that (spend a week gathering samples, manually translating, whatever) isn't part of the MVC. It's market research. Maybe you manually translate the things and deliver results back.
The MVP for machine translation of the same idea is considerably more involved. Even just connecting some machine learning legos and training on a few million samples is much more (technical) work, than setting up a static web page.
I think both ideas are good -- but it can get confusing when both concepts are termed MVP.
> The technical aspects are entirely uninteresting - it's the business case that's being tested/evaluated.
I find a lot of these tests provide junk data though because it is obvious the site has no product and is just fishing for information. People have wiser up a fair bit and will just hit the back button.
Yes, I think the point of the story was about being business minded rather than indulging your own programming interests and prowess. Or in other words, the feature creep that you add yourself. This is advice is well timed for me ;)
The answer to "my inbox is crazy" is to work through your inbox - if there's too much for you to work through then you need to do less. That's it.