Why ADHD Brains Overbuild Before Starting

Presented by Understood.org

You spend weeks building something before anyone ever sees it.

Not because it needs to be that big. Because once you start, it keeps expanding until it feels impossible to finish.

This is where minimum viable product actually matters. Not as a business concept, but as a way to stop overbuilding everything and start testing things earlier.

ADHD makes it easy to over-scope, get pulled into the wrong details, and delay real feedback. So instead of finding out what works, you stay stuck refining something in isolation.

This episode breaks down why that happens and how minimum viable thinking helps you start smaller, move faster, and avoid getting trapped in the build phase.

On Friday, we’ll show you how to apply this in real situations so you can actually ship things without burning out.

What We Cover

• Why ADHD leads to overbuilding instead of testing
• The pattern of expanding a task before it ever gets real feedback
• How minimum viable thinking cuts through overthinking
• Why starting smaller makes it easier to stay in motion
• How to recognize when you’re building instead of progressing

If you're enjoying ADHD Skills Lab, you may also enjoy Understood.org’s new podcast, Sorry, I Missed This.

Listen here: https://lnk.to/sorryimissedthisPS!theadhdskillslab

 P.S. Losing work because the admin layer around your business can't keep up with you? Invisible Systems is a 90-day done-for-you sprint where I (Skye) extract the processes from your head, build the operating layer, and find the right person to run it. Six spots left at the founding price, book a call at invisiblesystem.co

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We are, as a general rule, gonna be like, I could break down that big project that I wanna do and I could do it in pieces now, et cetera, et cetera. But we're not necessarily gonna do that. We we tend towards like the thing that's on fire right now. If I send the email to my client right now, I'm gonna get the thing that I want, you know, I'm gonna keep my business going. Put off even doing the minimum viable because they're just kind of treading water on the thing that's keeping the business alive. People can do that for years. Hello everybody, and welcome to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab brought to you by understood.org, the leading nonprofit helping millions of people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. Today we're gonna be talking about some of the research behind an interesting business strategy, minimum viable product, and how this relates to and is particularly helpful to people who have ADHD. And as always, I am joined by my wonderful co-founder and husband, Robert Waterson, and you know, special audio appearance may be coming from our little daughter Ember, who is here with us today.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Last time we talked about we want to want to go through three different sort of ADHD founder specific scenarios where that concept is particularly helpful. Then we'll jump into some papers to sort of explain why this these scenarios happen to ADHD founders more. The first one's misallocated hyperfocus. So that's sort of the classic minimum viable product scenario where you go way too deep before you actually check in with reality, before you actually test anything.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Okay. So what does that look like? So if I'm a if I'm a business owner and I'm misallocating my hyperfocus, I mean, actually, no, I know exactly what that looks like. I do that literally multiple times a week.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

It's every time you forgot to say, what's the minimum viable product here? And you've gotten too enthusiastic about a new idea, you've scoped it completely. So, like, what would this look like if it was finished a year from now? And then you've sort of made that the scope of your project as the first pass of it, instead of going, what's the minimum thing we could do here to test it, launch it, and see if anyone even wanted it.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

Okay, I don't do that. I'll I'll I'll make it a denim. I don't do that every week, but I'm tempted to do that every week. And I feel like the AI makes it so much easier now to do that. And like I feel like when you're talking about misallocated hyperfocus, AI, for all its benefits, is always ready to give me like the 12-month plan.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Yeah, I think the other trap at the moment as well is thinking that AI might be able to help you do something larger scoped as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Because it thinks it can, it's pretty confident it can.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Yeah, no, I managed to catch myself this week. Only sort of half a day into testing, testing whether or not it can sort of easily handle a dynamic web page. And the answer is no. I'm I've got the same feeling that when I tried vibe coding, where I was like, this is I'm gonna, I'm just gonna burn time on this. Eventually it's just all gonna break because it doesn't have that sort of consistently consistency layer.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

So, what's the second one?

SPEAKER_00 2:44

The second scenario is when you have a larger scoped project that needs to be larger scoped, it's justified in being larger scoped because you've already, you've already sort of tested that it's the right thing to do, you know it's the right direction to go in. It's too long of a scope, and there are going to be things that catch fire in the meantime that take you and all the team in a different direction, and it's causing inefficiencies because that big project has to keep getting shelved and things are getting lost and and things are getting forgotten. And this is this is an example not of minimum viable product exactly. It's more of a like a variant of it. It's more to do with sort of incremental delivery and like shipping the minimum unit. And so it's like instead of having this large scoped project, break it into smaller pieces and actually get something done that isn't going to get lost when the next fire starts.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

So that's the I want to write a book versus I just want to put articles on Substack and eventually that will become the outline of a book. Yeah, it's a good example.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Yeah. So yeah. Instead of planning on sitting down and writing a book for the next year and then inevitably having things that you have to come and do and then getting distracted. And I guess in this case, your notes aren't all in one place, or you know, you've sort of you're losing things because you were working on it half on paper, half on digital, and and so you sit you're noticing all of this inefficiency and sort of the larger project is stalling, even though it is important, instead going, okay, well, what can I ship as a deliverable? Like, can I ship a single chapter and get that to the editor? Or can I ship it?

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Yeah, yeah, 100%. That one I think is is easy to do and also tricky because I think sometimes that project does need to be delayed. It's not the thing that needs to be done right now. So it's always tricky to figure out is it a minimum viable for now, or is it actually genuinely something that we need to delay?

SPEAKER_00 4:21

Yeah, and I would say this is a scenario where the larger project is legitimate and you are planning on like obviously you're not planning on shipping half a book, you're planning on delivering a whole book. But if you can break it into incremental deliveries, then you're going to lose a lot less time when those interruptions inevitably do occur.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

So, like if you were a SaaS founder and you were trying to create software, shipping software as in pieces as would be a really good minimum viable product, instead of saying we have to have the entire product ready from zero to one, like to sell. It's maybe like we can sell people a piece of the product and then another piece of the product.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Like if that's the core thing that you're doing with your business and that's all you're doing for the next year, then probably you would just get on with it. But if you're anticipating that, like, yeah, but every two months something goes wrong somewhere else in the business or some other department or something else, then then yeah, it makes sense again. I think also, yeah, generally that is a good principle. Like, what is the what's the minimum feature set that we can ship and then we'll release versions to add features to it? You don't want to be working on the entire scope all at once if interruptions are likely to occur. And then the third scenario we want to talk about was sort of the never-ending pivot that is, I think we've sort of discussed previously. A little bit similar to scenario B, but it's more like, yeah, you've got this moderately scoped. I think the example would be kind of client complaints. That's true, we do need to fix this. You scope too large of a fix, and it's sort of a weak signal, only deserves a small slash like minimum viable fix. So the scenario here is if you're being realistic or if you're looking back historically, you'll notice that these complaints come in about every month. Every time it happens, you pivot to that being the next most important thing that needs to be fixed now. And because you scoped a two-month or a three-month fix, the first one didn't get finished. And and actually, if you could have scoped just a two-week fix, I see.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

So you're not not caring about customer feedback, but you're scoping a big shift for what could have been fixed with just maybe a a small adjustment, at least minimum viably.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

Yeah, sort of what's the minimum viable response or the minimum viable fix, especially if it's responding to sort of a weak signal and again a little bit of self-awareness, but like you know you're gonna have something else that feels most urgent to fix next next month. And so this n this really needs to be a two or three-week fix. It can't be a two-month fix. You know, or or again, take that two-month fix, break it into parts.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

I think that's a tough one, the never-ending pivot. I think it's it's easy, it's a really complex one. Cause I was talking to Sharon Pope on the podcast this morning, and she talked about how when you're starting, when you're in the startup phase of building a business, it's expected that the business that you start with and the business that you end with are going to be two totally different businesses. Like you're getting and you're providing you're getting feedback, you know, what does the market want and you're being flexible and you are adjusting. A lot of the advice is about this idea of like don't get too precious about what you're building and let the market kind of take it where it wants to go. But I think you're right, there is a level of self-awareness there about let the market take it where it wants to go based on good data.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

Yeah, well, and that that's sort of the underlying idea of minimum viable product is when it's being strictly applied and not sort of more broadly generalized to minimal shippable unit or like, yeah, minimum viable in general. The minimum viable product concept itself was, I think, strictly talking about the getting the feedback, like to learn the lesson was sort of the core part of that. And so, yeah, in the in terms of pivoting based on market feedback and customer response, yeah, that's exactly where it applies. You don't want to be getting your first user feedback or customer feedback one year in or two years in. You want to be getting it as early as possible and then and then not being precious about the fact that it's pulling you in a different direction and following what your customers actually want you to solve.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Yeah, but not pulling, letting it pull you in too many different directions, like still having some kind of through line.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

I guess that would be the sort of antithesis, the the sort of trap. I think it is it's a separate idea though. Like this is about getting that feedback as early as possible. Obviously, there's a related issue of treating that feedback appropriately and not pivoting in a completely different direction every time someone introduces a new a new problem that they want you to solve. So this is about like we're trying to solve this core issue. That's I mean, that's almost more of a like a novelty bias or a shiny object syndrome type conversation, which we could definitely have. It is related.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Well, I actually remember this with you know the never-ending pivot and minimum viable product when we were running the food business, the our first business, we were selling frozen vegan food. And people would always ask us if we're doing salads. Like, can you do fresh salads?

SPEAKER_00 8:54

And it's just a nightmare logistically.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Well, it was a nightmare logistically, and we just said that we were like, no, we don't. We did get a lot of feedback on it. Like now, looking back, I wonder if maybe we should have minimum viably tested that.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Looking back, the amount of things we would change that we yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

It was the first business, it was just a f an error. I mean, it was good learning, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

I think there's a lot of principles that we would apply now.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

But now I wonder, like, how hard is it to make salad?

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Yeah, and how much more are people willing to pay for it? And I think logistically it still would have been a challenge because you're talking about a much shorter, more perishable thing. I think again, like Amazon was built on books because they were so non-perishable. Um, so I think moving towards salad as the first thing that will probably be move in the wrong direction.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

And that's the thing, I guess, is like it's a it's a tricky one, and and maybe this is like a a disclaimer at the beginning of this conversation is there there is a trickiness to minimum viable, right? Like when you do something the minimum viable way, and when you decide, no, we're sticking with the product we have and we're just going deep on this, is a bit of an art to it. It comes with experience. We focus on productivity here at the ADHD Skills Lab, but our executive functioning challenges do not disappear at 5 p.m. In fact, they follow us home, affecting every aspect of our lives. That's why I'm recommending the podcast Sorry I Miss This from the team at understood.org. Hosted by Kate Osborne, it's a thoughtful look at life, love, and neurodiversity. Instead of masking, it looks at how to build a relationship and a life that actually works with your brain, not against it. I've been listening to Sorry I missed this and the discussion on decisions, decisions, ADHD, and the trap of analysis paralysis. This episode talked about how decision fatigue depletes our working memory, and by the end of the day, we can find ourselves really struggling to make decisions. This really resonated with me. I know so many of you guys talk to me all the time about decision making in ADHD, and it's something that I struggle with as well. Kate and Dr. Shrine provide a helpful perspective on how narrowing down your options can help protect your cognitive energy. To listen to sorry I missed this, search for sorry I missed this in your podcast app. That's sorry, I missed this.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

The breaking a project down into its smallest deliverable so that you get the feedback earlier is just a good thing relative to scoping it larger and delaying when you get that feedback. Obviously, what you then do with that feedback, and if you're too reactive to too small of a signal, is is sort of a separate issue.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

It's a separate issue. It's an issue, but it's definitely an issue, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:34

And I think we have novelty bias coming up as a founder struggle. I'm not scoping everything, I'm not scoping all the episodes in full at like at the start of the sort of founder struggle series.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

The minimum viable.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Yeah, but it does mean I get to the next episode and I go like, oh, okay, like, yeah, that would have been good to mention here. Like, I mean, that's actually what's happened with this next one I'm planning, which is sort of delegation versus perfectionism. And I'm like, oh, this is very related to the brief gap. And like in hindsight, maybe I would structure these episodes differently, but but it's good. It's um it doesn't have to be perfect first time.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

100%. That's exactly what we're talking about. So let's get into some research.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

Well, I guess and applied to that, the the idea would be if we found that these founder struggle episodes weren't doing very well, we'd want to pivot away from them. And having spent all that time fully scoping and fully outlining the entire series would be then some cost, like wasted effort.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

That's a really good point. So if you like these founder struggle episodes, let us know so we don't scope away from them. Let's get into the first paper, kind of showcasing why this is a particular struggle for ADHD as well. Because it's it's all very well to talk about minimum viable product and the importance of doing it in business, but we're a business and ADHD podcast, so we want to bring the ADHD research into it as well.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

So I think this paper is particularly applicable to the first misallocated hyperfocus scenario.

SPEAKER_01 12:53

It could be said this paper is literally about the misallocated hyperfocus scenario. And basically, this paper is by Hopfield, Abergas, and Shaw from 2019, looking at hyperfocus in adult ADHD. And what they were specifically doing is they actually did two studies. They did a pilot study and a study with 162 adults, and they were looking at a understanding of hyperfocus as an empirical measure of ADHD in general. Because at the time the conversation was like it had very little empirical backing as a concept, so they were actually scoping out the concept of hyperfocus with relation to ADHD, which was really cool to read about. I really appreciated the effort that they went into to build this out for us because it was one of those concepts that was sort of floating around the internet up until that point.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Yeah, it's interesting that it was so recent.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Yeah, I had to double check that, but I but I think it's one of those things like you think about rejection sensitivity dysphoria, for example, RSD. People will be like, oh, RSD, like it's very colloquially known if you have ADHD. But in terms of research, the research does take a little while to catch up.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

Yeah, also to be fair, 2019, that would have been just when you were getting diagnosed yourself. So from from your point of view, it's one of the first things like the newest, most interesting thing you hear about it.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

Exactly. So basically, they were looking at six different dimensions of hyperfocus. So they had losing track of time, failing to notice the world, failing to attend to personal needs, difficulty stopping and switching, being totally engrossed, and then crucially for us, getting stuck on small details was an element of hyperfocus that they discussed. And they looked at it across three different settings. They looked at it across school hobbies and screen time. And what they found was the more severe your ADHD was, that was correlated with having higher overall hyperfocus uh scores. So more hyperfocus, more ADHD. So we, you know, what we know already, hyperfocus and ADHD are related. And ADHD adults scored higher, significantly higher, on all of these different elements compared to controls. So people with ADHD, the more ADHD symptoms they had, the more likely they were to get stuck on small details.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Yeah, and I'm just thinking the other the other components of hyperfocus I think are quite relevant too. Obviously, that's the one that sort of matches, you know, if you're thinking about the business as sort of the overall project, and you're sort of you've gotten hyperfixated on having the perfect CRM system or whatever, and you spent a month just making this perfect and you've sort of lost sight of the of the goal. I think also like difficulty stopping and switching and feeling totally engrossed. These are these are sort of similar, you can imagine how that applies to the sort of hyper focus in on some project or part of the like improving some part of the business that you find particularly engrossing and that you want to just go deep on this and fix it permanently and and fully scope it out and like and then I just don't have to come back to it again kind of thing, when there's probably a less fully engrossing, minimum viable, shippable improvements or um product that you can get to market earlier.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Yeah. And if you want help, by the way, getting out of hyperfocus, you could DM us hyperfocus on Instagram at unconventional organization with an S, and uh yeah, we'll help you out. We'll get you sort of with that.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

I mean, losing track of time, failing to notice the world, failing to attend to personal needs. Obviously, the personal needs thing is a little bit less relevant, but I think all of the five out of six of the dimensions all sort of apply to this idea of like getting way too hyper focused in on whatever this project is, even though it's if you took a step back and sort of went, do I actually need to spend a month on this, or do I actually need to ship every part of my vision for this improvement or product or whatever? Or is there something small that would still, you know, would still test that would either, you know, in the case of a product, test it, test it earlier, in the case of an offering, test it against, like, does do it does does anyone actually want this? Um, in the case of a fix or an improvement on the back end, like can we get 80% of the benefits with 20% of the work? 8020 is probably another principle actually that would have been relevant.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Yeah, well, 8020 is is very similar to minimum viable. It's like, what's the 20% that gives you 80%? I love 8020. We talk about it all the time in our business.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Yeah, it was interesting. Uh, one of the examples for getting stuck on small details was um spending too much time coming up with a better word instead of focusing on things a whole, I was like, man, called out. Like, is that it actually got me thinking? I was like, is that like is this related to what causes people to sort of get uh like lost in the context and not get to the point when they're talking or get to the story? I don't know, but I know that it was just a thought, so I don't actually know if it's related.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

No, but I think it is. I think it's interesting though, because I feel like although we both have ADHD, or I guess I have ADHD, you have ADD, although we both struggle with it, I would say that you get hyper-fixated on more on details more than I do, and I pivot more than you do. This is my hypothesis. This is not based on the research. My hypothesis is that there are different particular struggles for different types of ADHD. Because I would say you have different personalities as well.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

Like I think accuracy is kind of a hobby horse, like a like a particular, like it's a idiosyncratic thing to me. And so often, like, that's not quite the right word, is where I get like I stall on telling you something, and I have to catch myself and go, This is not I'm losing her, and this is not actually that important. And I don't I can go think about vocabulary later.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Yeah, because getting stuck like on small details is very much you, like I have learned from experience. Like, I can never ask you what would your favorite superpower be or something, because you just be like, Oh, and then you like half anymore.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

I mean, I think my AI, um, that whole like end of year recap thing that happened the first year of AI, it was like most likely to turn a like purchasing decision into a research project kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 18:50

Yes, yeah, you got that one. You got that one. And I'm, and we'll talk about it later, I'm more in the endless pivot. I'm more like, what about this? What about this? And what about this? And like the hyper focus of just planning a lot. Let's talk then about so we've talked about this paper and the hyperfixating on small details and how that's something that you're a lot more likely to do than I am, but I am more likely to do some of the other things here. One of the next ones is the idea of basically putting off taking action because you don't have time to do all of it now, which I would say is probably a lot of my clients. I've I I find this a lot with systems.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

That's interesting. So the the problem that I was talking about, which is losing the information because you're having to shelve it repeatedly, because you didn't just do it in bite-sized pieces, and this is sort of a different but similar failure mode of you're also having trouble starting because you know you don't have the runway for the whole thing.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

And this is an issue I see a lot with clients. One of the things I have to tell people when they start working with me is like, we are gonna go on a journey, and some of those things on the journey are not gonna be correct. Like, we're gonna do it, and some of it's gonna be broken, and then we're gonna fix it, and we're gonna keep going, and we're not gonna find the perfect system because the perfect system doesn't exist. We're gonna find a really good system that works really well. Let's talk about some of the research behind this. So, this is a paper on delay.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

Just a personal anecdote, yeah, pet peeve of my not being able to just find the right software, always having to compromise in some sort of part of the feature set, but like there's a limit to how long you can spend looking for a better and inevitably you switch softwares and it is just missing a different feature set.

SPEAKER_01 20:29

There's no perfect system, not today, not tomorrow. You know, it's it's it's never perfect, unfortunately. So there's two papers here. We've got paper that we talked about, I think it was last week, Jackson and McKillar from 2016, and then another paper from Marx Hacker, you cortezi and Sanooga Bach from 2021, and they're basically the same paper in that they're both a meta-analysis of delay aversion in ADHD, and they both find pretty much the same thing, which is nice, which is that people who have ADHD really want to they prefer short-term rewards now versus long-term rewards in the future. We have a tendency to avoid things that are, I guess, hard to do in the future. Like if there's something that's gonna be that's gonna take a really long time, but eventually you're gonna get a big reward. We as a general rule will have a tendency to be like, give me the marshmallow now. I don't want to wait for the two marshmallows.

SPEAKER_00 21:30

Yeah, I think I think the term was steeper future discounting. So, yeah, distant reward, like our ADHD brands devalue distant rewards more than neurotypicals.

SPEAKER_01 21:40

And interestingly, like one of these papers, the 2021 paper, found that when it was a real scenario versus an imagined scenario, we didn't then prefer the future rewards, but then the 2016 paper found that wasn't true. So the jury's out on that one. What that means essentially is it means that. where we are as a general rule gonna be like, well, I could like break down that big project that I want to do and I could do it in pieces now, et cetera, et cetera. But we're not necessarily going to do that. We we tend towards like the thing that's like on fire right now. Like we tend towards the if I talk to if I send the email to my client right now, I'm gonna get the thing that I want, you know, I'm gonna keep my business going. And this really is where you see people get stuck in treading water. So when it comes to minimum viable, it's like they put off even doing the minimum viable because they're just kind of treading water on the thing that's keeping the business alive. People can do that for years.

SPEAKER_00 22:40

Right. So it's the reason why the interrupting short-term project has more salience. It's also the reason why if you break down that low that longer project into minimum viable sort of deliverables they're gonna have more salience too.

SPEAKER_01 22:56

Exactly. Suddenly you're like oh I just have to do this like even with my own self, you know I I sometimes have a big project and I will get overwhelmed by it and then I have to remind myself like no break it down simplify it make it you need to send these three messages a day kind of situation. When it's that I can just tick it off and I've done it and the fact that it's moving towards a bigger goal doesn't matter. And obviously with AI now we can ask the AI to help us break things down to a certain extent sometimes it just helps us make it longer.

SPEAKER_00 23:28

Yeah I guess we're almost touching on subtasking here. Well they're related I would say that one of the big problems ironically if we think about the marshmallow test which is what this is kind of based on right the the idea is we say okay do you want one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later and most of the time people with ADHD say I will take the one marshmallow now please I don't want to wait for the two marshmallows but if we say okay well do you want like a tiny bit of this two marshmallows later now and it's like just enough to keep us from eating this marshmallow does that make sense is that a study that's been done that's just your analogy what's the minimum amount of marshmallow that'd be an interesting variant on the marshmallow test and and how that applies to projects and minimum viable product is the longer away the finished result is the less I think the less motivated the ADHD founder or even ADHD team members are going to be by I guess two completed.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

Exactly let's move on to the third minimum viable product scenario.

SPEAKER_00 24:35

Right and the third one was the never ending pivot so basically the classic ADHD starting a bunch of projects and not finishing them because something else comes up that's more urgent or more interesting.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

This is the one I would say that I need the most support around like I am probably if I think about which one of these is the one that I have to be the most strict with myself about not doing it's this one. Because if I could start half a dozen projects and never finish them, that would just be my happy place.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

I mean I've definitely been there too.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

I think a lot of people with ADHD hair this is the using minimum viable product as an excuse.

SPEAKER_00 25:12

Well no minimum viable would be biting off something you can actually finish in a shorter scope. Yeah again like minimum viable product isn't a solution for chasing shiny objects it's it's just a you know potentially it's just a way of making it so that when you do that you get the thing done. You actually get something out of it.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

But like if you're gonna do it if you're gonna be the person who chases shiny objects make them small enough shiny objects that you can like hang them from a tree of like things that you got completed. Actually you know what we're gonna talk about Casey Neistat's video in a little while and I feel like this is going to be super relevant. Okay so this paper this is another callback. So basically a week ago we talked about the idea that people with ADHD prefer the ideation phase. So we referenced White and Shaw from 2011 where they actually asked people in a business setting you know there was different phases so execution ideation I think it was systemizing.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

I think there was developer and clarifier that was the one yeah because it was clarifying the problem ideating on solutions refining those solutions and then executing on them.

SPEAKER_01 26:21

And what they found was that people who have ADHD really like the ideation phase and prefer it to any other phase and like to stay in it.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Yeah and it was interesting because it was they were better at it but they also had a preference for it. So that was what they sort of that motivational part of it.

unknown 26:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:37

And so the minimum viable product issue there is going, okay, what is the how can we almost like how can we get through all of these phases as quickly as possible, right? Like how can we get from having an idea to shipping something small as quickly as possible so we can test it really with the market.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

Yeah so I think how this applies to scenario C is that like each each new piece of feedback, each new conversation each new problem is sort of this new thing where we can ideate we can come up with a solution we can get to that get to the part of that project where we're ideating we've like come up with a pretty good solution and then when it comes time to sort of develop it refine it down and execute on it we're sort of that's the point where we're putting into like the next problem that catches our interest like oh now we'll solve this.

SPEAKER_01 27:27

Yeah it's like once we have almost like once we've solved it in our head we don't necessarily feel the need to solve it in real life.

SPEAKER_00 27:33

Yeah and the minimum viable product sort of filter on this or minimum viable filter is sort of this new direction feels compelling but then we're questioning we're not saying should we not address this issue but we're saying like what is the smallest test that gives us a real signal back or that gives us a real improvement back.

SPEAKER_01 27:51

And it's funny you should say that because I am currently like right next to me on is my phone and on my phone is a conversation I've been having with Claude about a pivot that I want to make and the conversation is really about what is the minimum viable product. And one of the coolest things about AI right now is I can ask the AI to ask me questions say assume this doesn't work why wouldn't it work? Ask me questions to get a sense of what it is and then I can get manus to make a website and I can put that up as a landing page to see if people want it. So I can go especially in the world of AI now I can go from like idea to landing page with messaging for an I for a product and get a sense of whether it's gonna land within 24 hours compared to what it used to be.

SPEAKER_00 28:37

But that's also the dangerous thing which is why we should totally talk about shiny object syndrome because that's the thing that I struggle with the most is wanting to do all of the things because I kind of can now I think this is a good example of so I think in this case you've got this idea and you're basically saying that's cool. Don't get the team involved don't scope this into a larger project don't work out the pricing and exactly how the logistics of this would work definitely don't start hiring people to be the back end of it. Just have a chat with AI talk it through and get it to generate a landing page for this offering or publ or or product publish it and then if you throw it on social media or whatever advertise it and see if you get any positive feedback for it and then you can move forward.

SPEAKER_01 29:27

That's like the yeah that's the minimum viable product.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Yeah so we've obviously diverged from the you're responding to customer feedback example this is a this is an example of um you're having ideas for new product lines or new offerings and if you were fully scoping it you would start sort of a three month three month project to launch this new offering and then you'd have some new idea before then about some other service you could provide and you would pivot everyone away from that one. And so you're saying actually in this case pull that down what's the minimum thing I can do now to actually test if this off if this service, you know, and then and then we can implement it manually if say we do get five people who come and want that. Okay, great. We're just gonna manually sort of brute force it to start with while we build the back end now that we've got the signal.

SPEAKER_01 30:13

Yeah and while we're talking about it that let me just take you through a few of the things that I've learned about how to do this because I think it's relevant and kind of practical. Number one, because of AI now it's easier to go from ideation to execution in terms of a landing page like Manus can build landing pages for you based on Claude code, things like that. So it is possible to do that stuff now.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

So is that how you did it you had sorry no not did Claude prompt it or did Claude actually design the landing page?

SPEAKER_01 30:42

Claude asks me questions to create the prompt that Manus uses to create the landing page so I I never ask this is just personal preference but I never get Claude to build I never get Manis to do more than just execute. So I sort of get Claude to do my thinking and then Manis is the is the execution side of the bit the thing that I'm doing.

SPEAKER_00 31:03

Robby's trying to figure out why my website looked so much cooler than this I think partly I think AI is a lot better at delivering a static web page of like really beautifully displayed information than it is at taking sort of a database or a set of data and then dynamically sort of drawing a chart with it.

SPEAKER_01 31:22

Well to be to get you a sense of how that works so yeah I'll talk to AI I'll usually do like a dam artow shout out which is like assume this doesn't didn't work what would have gone wrong with this like assume a year from now this was a bad idea like why did it was it a bad idea so I can kind of pull out some of that stuff. And one of the biggest things that makes everything a bad idea is you price it too low. It's just a fact like if you're selling something for five dollars and you have to have like 5,000 people like it, your chances that you're gonna be able to even start testing if that's a good idea is pretty low. Not always but often so I'll usually go with like what's the high price version try and make it a landing page I say usually this is kind of my first time fully fleshing this idea out but I've been doing it with clients and stuff like that before.

SPEAKER_00 32:05

Yeah it's also a useful way of transmitting information in like a very user friendly way.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

Well we used to have to like build a landing page from scratch like you used to be the the the founder. I remember when we built this business it was like that's it we're gonna do it and I was just like on Wix just like building a website was which was pretty awful at the time but it was you know better than nothing. Now you can any idea you have can have a landing page pretty quickly. And that's the minimum viable product way to test it out. Go try it. So we've talked about the three different minimum viable product struggles. So that's the misallocated hyper focus the project that never activates because you're always pushing it off and the never ending pivot and we talked about some of the research behind how that why that was working why that why that was a struggle. So we know hyper focus is related to ADHD. Yeah why it's particularly why this business concept is particularly relevant to ADHD founders because these struggles are particular they're somewhat universal but they're particular to ADHD founders they're relevant to ADHD founders in particular yeah so yeah so the misallocated hyper focus we know we can get lost in the details the full project that never activates we know we can sort of keep focusing on the short term and avoid the long term even if the long term have small benefits and then the never ending pivots the idea that we just love the ideation process and we just ideate forever and we never actually minimum viable products ship something out. This is sort of areas that we wanted to flag where a minimum viable product can break down as a strategy because there's nothing is perfect. So one of them was and we're definitely this is just like a promo for our impulsivity shiny object syndrome episode really but this is impulsivity dressed as strategy. So we shipped it as a minimum viable product doesn't mean we don't think about it. So just because I might say okay I'm gonna make something I'm gonna put a landing page on the internet doesn't mean I didn't spend all day talking to AI and trying to figure out like what it was going to be and how it was going to look like you have to put some thought into it. You can't just throw a million things at the wall and be like it's a minimum viable product. I mean sometimes you'll have but not it's funny there's a for everything there's always one person who's like no I did it and now I'm a multi-millionaire and you're like okay fine. But overall it's not a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

Yeah I think the point here is just because you've scoped something very small doesn't mean it's worth your time to do it still. Yeah like you should still be thinking is it the appropriate time to be adding a new offering again like have we am I just avoiding doing the like you know chewing the glass that is my main offering that I know could work that I know I have to do things towards am I just indulging in distraction even if it is only like oh this is going to be done in a week so it's it's now it's minimum viable product it's like yeah but yeah but do we need another service offering?

SPEAKER_01 34:52

And in case you're wondering about what I'm talking about because I'm feeling slightly called out right now it is an adjustment to our current offering it is not a new offering wasn't even thinking of you but yeah okay and then the other issue is the test without a decision. So this is a huge one by the way guys when you work in marketing or you work with people in marketing I see this all the time everybody's like we're in a testing phase. Cool what's the test? How do we know when it's done? What are we just a months and months of testing phase for what? Like we're going to be famous at the end of it? Like no. So is it testing for shares? Is it testing for likes? And not everyone does this some people are amazing with data but just have the decision.

SPEAKER_00 35:31

It's kind of the scientific principle or scientific method in I think in marketing in particular it's very self-serving to be testing but not necessarily know what you're testing and not necessarily be able to be held account at the end of it. Whereas if you're doing a study you need an hypothesis at the a hypothesis at the start and then you don't get to just look at the results and go, oh actually this is an interesting finding that we found it's like no if that wasn't what you were testing for then you're just be hacking.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

If it's an exploratory study then we need to know it at the front of the system. So yeah testing without a decision very relevant doubly relevant if you're working in marketing minimum viable product is a new procrastination we need to validate this first. So ironically we still aren't doing it because we keep saying we need to validate it. This is a funny one I feel like this is just minimum viable product eating its own tail.

SPEAKER_00 36:18

Right. So you under the guise of breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces you're just doing the first bit which is like we have to validate it.

SPEAKER_01 36:26

We have to test it. So you're shipping something but you're not actually working towards the greater product being done.

SPEAKER_00 36:32

Yeah what you're staying stuck in like the almost the ideation phase or like the sort of the equivalent of that like the design phase and you're shipping different you're you're testing different ideas in the marketplace rather than committing to one and actually getting on with it.

SPEAKER_01 36:46

Like a good example of this is if you're like we have to come up with the perfect name for my book. And so you spent you know you're like I'm shipping different names and I'm asking for votes and I'm figuring it and it's like you're stuck doing that validating it testing it figuring it out.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

Yeah so not even minimum viral product really but just testing as an excuse for procrastination like you're you're getting stuck in the market research phase.

SPEAKER_01 37:08

Which kind of is the same as the testing without a decision. Like anytime somebody says the word testing to me it's like a red flag we we need to talk about what's going on.

SPEAKER_00 37:17

Yeah sorry just thinking about minimum viable product it's a failure mode when you're testing without a decision because you're running the experiment but you didn't have a clear success trigger like the whole point's it's supposed to be a test. And obviously in the case of marketing you're spending a month trying this and spending a month trying this and spending a month trying this it's supposed to be meeting some decision benchmark and then activating further action.

SPEAKER_01 37:40

Yeah it should be building towards something you should you should be gaining steam or building momentum or whatever you want to call it. You're building the engine you don't want to just like tinker with the engine.

SPEAKER_00 37:49

And that's kind of scenario C's failure mode it's it's a it's the ADHD ideation what if we went this way what if we went that way I love thinking of all the potential businesses I could create and I don't love actually executing on it would be like I like making landing pages and putting them out there but I'm never actually going right this one's working now we do the next step. Almost a gambling aspect where you're maybe we could find something that was even more popular though.

SPEAKER_01 38:12

Yeah yeah that's such a great way of putting it so let's go with the the three takeaways. So we've got minimum viable product is a test it's not a product so the deliverable is the learning so you know minimum viable offer what will someone actually pay for so you want to test it out like the landing page example once somebody wants to pay for it you should definitely do it and now you have a pilot test and now you're building an offer it has to build and then it addresses the three distinct ADHD struggles simultaneously so hyper focused misallocation having that compressed scope to a now window so kind of trying to bring things forward break things down bring things forward that's what we want to do and then having that easy way to avoid decision avoidance.

SPEAKER_00 38:56

So if we're stuck in the ideation mode kind of coming through and saying okay what is what is the minimum viable thing we can ship today in service of this I think the point it's trying to make is we're not trying to stay true to minimum viable product as a concept we're exploring all the concepts around it and we're going well this is how just the minimum viable component of that is really interesting over here and it's useful for ADHD people or founders over here. Yes like pure minimum viable product the idea of that was like the the core point of that concept is getting that signal back early like getting like testing something before you invest further effort into it.

SPEAKER_01 39:32

Okay guys go ship something thank you so much for listening to this episode of the ADHD skills lab. If you liked it leave us a five star review it helps other people learn more about us and thank you so much to our wonderful team for making it sound good, look good. Couldn't do it without you