Previously on Startup I founded a startup called notvine.com where you can share 6.1 second videos
I then brought in three of my friends to help me build the most innovative video platform, and I met up with Arya
We secretly hate each other and constantly compare our dick size.
Oh me? I just sold another company
I'm just relaxing now. Trying to figure out what you do next
Yeah, uh I'm excited but
I'm also afraid
It's just getting really hard
You know managing all these relationships at once
It's..it's getting too hard
What excites you about the relationship you have with your employees?
Wait, what? No, I was talking about my tinder relationship. God you never listen to me
But to be honest, I just can't get Arya off my mind
Who's Arya?
Oh he's just some startup founder. Uh we recently played chess-
He's 'just' a startup founder?
I think he means more to you than that
We used to be best friends
But then things changed
Things really changed
Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship with Joma?
You know we were friends then
Best friends even
How'd you guys meet?
He was in the study room struggling with a simple assignment
But I knew he was smarter than that
He came up to me offering his help
Thank God cause I just couldn't focus. I was about to give up
Something else was consuming him. I could see that he was pretty broken at the time
So I thought I could bring him under my wing
I gave him a better place to stay, better resources, better contacts, a better life
Nobody wanted to give him a chance, but I saw the potential in him
He was kind to me
extremely kind
I didn't deserve it
He let me stay with him in his apartment
He gave me my own room
He even got me all the textbooks I needed for school
He really took me out of the dumps
You know
He even guided me through my academic career
Without him, I would have been lost.
He's the reason why I am...who I am today
From algorithms to statistics to cryptocurrencies
He taught me everything
He made sure I knew the right things
He made sure I succeeded
He would have been nothing without me. All those internships.
He got those through me...except Microsoft. That was more him
That's thoughtful
I wanted the best for him. I really did
I did everything I could for him
until the incident
What happened?
I should have known
I feel so stupid looking back
I just couldn't face the truth
I don't know. I mean...he just changed
He used to be kind and warm, but...
I think one day I just realized that he wasn't the selfless person I thought he was
He even kicked me out of the house. I mean I appreciate everything he's done for me
But I mean come on man where the fuck was I supposed to go. He knew I had nothing
You know I should have known...people like him, they don't hang out with people like me
How did you feel?
- It was humiliating - It was humiliating
I miss Arya, I really do
Even if he had exterior motives to bring me in
I was really happy
I still don't know what he wanted from me, but obviously I didn't have it anymore
That's why he just pushed me away
I didn't ask why I mean, I didn't deserve his kindness
But things just got worse
And that's where he crossed the line
I've never confronted him about it because it just wouldn't matter
I don't want his apology
I just wanted to break him
While making him feel the pain that I felt
Until he's completely broken
I'll make him regret everything that he did
Alright guys, so...today I paid a consultant to make this video for us
It's gonna tell us you know how to think about MVPs, so
What's the MVP? You mean like LeBron?
- Wait what's a LeBron? - Oh he's the MVP
Alright whatever. Alright, let's just play the video
So the biggest problem that startups run into is
Creating something that nobody wants to buy
This wastes years of work and thousands of dollars only to leave you broke and unemployed
Just like a college degree
So to stop this from happening
I thought I'd go over the concept of an MVP, and how this can help you grow your company
So what is an MVP? This often gets confused with most valuable player
But I think that comparison is kind of unfair because
If you're trying to start a startup, chances are you have zero athletic ability
Instead MVP here means minimum viable product
A rough version of your idea that takes a minimal amount of effort
But it's still good enough that users can get a taste of the full product
Similar to how dating someone is sort of a taste
Of what marriage will be like and in my case I've been told it taste like insecurity and an absentee father
Now the reason you want to build an MVP is because it lets you learn what your customers
like and don't like as quickly as possible
This is a pretty important concept because 90% of startups fail because they have no clue what their customers want
Like this one time I was sitting at
McDonald's and thought of a really good app idea.
It involved the dating app where girls would choose guys based only on their personality and
Finally give nice guys a fighting chance, but then I asked myself
"Would I date someone based only on their personality?"
I'll let you decide
Now I'm sure you're wondering what an MVP looks like the answer to that
Depends on what you're trying to build so I thought it'd be helpful to show a few real-life examples
Let's say you wanted to build an app where people could store and share files online
You could do one of two things
One, quit your job and spend years trying to make the app yourself or two, hire someone to create a 30-second video of
What that app would look like and show it to investors for millions of dollars
While option 1 sounds attractive
The MVP here is too, and that's what Dropbox did
Well let's say you wanted to figure out if a girl or guy liked you
Your MVP here would be a small low pressure invite like
"Hey, I'm going out to dinner with friends. Do you want to come along?
We're grabbing pizza -smiley face-" And a few things can happen here
One, she won't respond to you. Two, she says something short like haha or lol. Or three, she says
"No, I thought I told you I'm not interested"
when this happens you might try to convince yourself
that she's still into you, but chances are...
she is into you so just wait a few days and try again
So by now you're probably wondering how to actually build an MVP
And that's exactly what I'm going to show you
Now the steps I'll be outlining might seem simple at first,
but there's a bit of math involved
So you'll need to pay close attention
And just before we start
I thought I should mention that these steps are approved by the International Board of start-up venture capitalists
Which means rest assured
It's coming from a source of authority so without further ado, here are the steps to building your first MVP
Step 1. Don't, we have enough startups already
So I hope that was helpful and best of luck in your startup journey
-Clapping-
John, no
Alright, so what do you guys think?
We need to start off by building our back-end infrastructure
We can leverage Amazon CDN's, load balancers and lambda's. Modularize our infrastructure by using micro services
so then we can set up elastic scaling AND save money.
I don't think we should do that.
It's the most cost efficient solution
Well, we don't even know if we're going to get that many users. It's a total overkill
Yes, it might save some capital
but development time is our most limited resource and we can't waste time thinking about
Scalability on an MVP
Right now our most limited resource is my patience with your shitty ideas
Why can't we just have a Facebook page and let people post their videos there and see if that grows
That's actually a really good and smart MVP,
BUT for the sake of this web series
we have to do something more complicated
Alright, so here's what we're gonna do
- Wait why do you have the final say? - Because I went to Waterloo
LOL
Alright, here's the plan. So as an MVP
we're just gonna make a purely consumption site
The reason why? Is because we want to validate if there's actually demand for our website
so that's why we're just gonna make a simple web app. What we'll do is that we'll pretend that
Invite only to be able to produce on our platform, but in reality we don't have a production side
but what we're really gonna do it is just that we're going to steal old Vine videos and post them on our website
That way the consumer side will think that we're producing videos using the mobile app which is invite only
For growth, we'll have a Facebook page, and we'll put only the best of the best vine videos there
And then we'll just boost the shit out of it with ad credits
Alright, so here's what we need. We need someone to build the whole web app, front and back-end
We don't have enough resource to separate them
That's why we need someone to own the whole full stack
- I'm on it - Alright
Who wants to write the crawler to get all the best vine videos
and then write pipelines to funnel them in website?
Got it
John can write the fake nine in page for a mobile website?
And also can you set up the CDN so it could surf videos faster?
And I'll manage the Facebook page and start growing it.
Alright, let's do it
Alright, what do you think of this?
- No, we can't launch that, it looks exactly like Vine.. - No, this is perfect
Alright guys, this is really good.
- Alright so next what we're gonna do- - Guys! I think you might wanna look at this
Oh shit
It's not good
What's poppin, so I hope you enjoyed this episode
I definitely had fun making it as I hope you guys had fun watching it
I just want to give a shout out to Matthew Cho he's my new cinematographer
he's amazing
so I want you guys to check out his stuff because um..
I don't know he's probably one of the best cinematographers
I've ever met, and yeah, he deserve a shout out
Second shout out. I want a shout out to The Sinful Engineer.
Thank you for giving me that clip about MVP. This guy's hilarious
Yes, you should check that out
I put his link on the description and also of course if you liked this video
And you haven't subscribed to my channel, subscribe now.
C'mon, what're you waiting for? And yeah
Thank you so much and see you on the next episode.
Peace!