ADHD Shiny Object Syndrome Is Killing Your Projects

Presented by Understood.org

You get a new idea and immediately want to drop everything else.

This episode builds on Wednesday’s research around ideation bias in ADHD. The research suggests people with ADHD prefer the idea phase and are more likely to move on before execution is complete.

We break down how this creates the “never-ending pivot” and why projects keep getting abandoned halfway through.

You’ll learn how to use minimum viable product thinking to actually finish things, even if your brain keeps pulling you toward the next idea.

What We Cover:

• Why ADHD brains prefer ideation over execution
• How constant pivots destroy momentum without you noticing
• Turning new ideas into small, testable outputs instead of full pivots
• Finishing projects without suppressing creativity
• How to make ideas small enough to complete before switching

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_00 0:00

If you're not embarrassed by your product you've launched too late, this idea of minimum viable product. If you're not embarrassed with what you're doing, it's already too late. 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 are going to be jumping in to a concept that came from the business world, but I think is going to be helpful for you, obviously, as ADHD founders, but also just as people with ADHD in general. And this is the concept of minimum viable product. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about what it is, where it came from, what it means. We're going to share a few stories of our own about where we've used the idea of minimum viable product. And then in the next episode, we're going to be getting into a little bit about some of the research behind why people with ADHD might particularly struggle with this and some strategies that we can use to help it.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Yeah, I've been looking forward to doing some business concept episodes. So yeah, this is reversing the format a little bit, doing the research on the second episode.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Do you want to start by telling us what does minimum viable product mean?

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Yeah, so it's a concept that was originally coined by Frank Robinson 2001.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Not that long ago.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Yeah, but also 25 years, I guess.

unknown 1:26

Oh god.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Steve Blank popularized it in 2005, four steps to an up to the epiphany. But Eric Rise sort of brought it to the mainstream in 2011 with um the lean startup. Yeah. So it's a little bit of the history. And his definition is it's the version of a new product that allows the team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. We're going to explore a bunch of similar concepts and sort of adjacent like family of concepts. I think the thing that we took from it most of all is the minimum viable part. Like that's the part that's really useful for I think ADHD is not just about the minimum required to the minimum viable for learning does this work, but also the minimum viable for launching something sooner as well. So we'll we'll get into that, but yeah, just lampshading early.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

If you don't make a product, it's okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Yeah, we're not we're not sticking rigidly. Yeah, one, it's not just about products, and two, we're not rigidly sticking to this lean startup definition of there has to be validated learning. Like we're going to really focus in on the minimum viable part of it.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

I'd like to start by just talking about where we first heard about the concept of minimum viable product. But to give people a sense of kind of why this concept is so important to us specifically. Because Robbie and I, we actually had a business before this. We ran a vegan, frozen food, whole food business, believe it or not. And uh that was, you know, the thing that we first started doing when we first met. And as part of that, back when I was actually doing my PhD and Robbie was uh working full-time on the business, we had the opportunity to go to a business class. It was eight weeks, I think it was, Robbie.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Yeah, eight, ten, something like that.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

Yeah. Shout out to the New Zealand government having that for us. It was very, very helpful. And one of the things that they talked about, I don't know if they talked about it as much as it was just in the room. It was incredibly, incredibly helpful and incredibly practical. It was for people who basically wanted to start a business today, tomorrow. And there was a bunch of posters on the wall that we would stare at because we have ADHD while people were talking. And one of the ones that really caught my eye and that we would say to each other all the time was you know, if you're not embarrassed by your product, you've launched too late. This idea of minimum viable product. If you're not embarrassed with what you're doing, it's already too late. And we would sort of say this to each other. In fact, we we found those images and we put them on the wall in our apartment.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

I think minimum viable product was a concept they like specifically taught as well. Because I think it really stuck with us. It's sort of it's been such a useful heuristic for just reducing scope, not getting carried away, and also making sure that you're testing it against reality as early as possible. So you're you're actually getting feedback earlier in the process.

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Yeah, I I mean I remember all kinds of things, you know, about that. I I remember with the actual business we were running, people came to our kitchen because we had like a kitchen for for selling frozen food. They were saying to us, Oh, you know, where did you find like$30,000 worth of uh of kitchen, you know, product? And the answer is we didn't because that's not how much it cost, because most of it was it was found, it was it was thick in hand.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

It was found. I was gonna say we didn't find we did.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

We found a very expensive item. I can't.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

No, it was just a trolley. I mean, okay, it is it is expensive when you buy it new, but yeah, it's just a stainless steel trolley. I just looked at it, it was all rusty, and I was like, that just scrubs off. That's like that's super easy to face. Yeah, no, a lot of it was picked up in auction with like minor repairs needed, like a full sort of I can't remember, like hooded dishwasher and and sort of commercial oven.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

The dishwasher really reminds me of this because we went, you found a dishwasher, got it from an auction. It wasn't working, it needed specific parts. Obviously, buying those specific parts was going to be really expensive, but there was another dishwasher that was for sale on Travie. And I remember going to this commercial kitchen picking up this broken dishwasher, and then you tried to figure out if that dishwasher had the parts of the other dishwasher.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Frankenstein them together, and it actually worked.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

You ended up with a working dish. I mean, you almost sh you almost electrocuted yourself.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

I don't know if this is a general rule, but I do feel like I need to stay away from electricity and heavy machinery. I think this might be like advice to ADD.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Seriously. The entire business that we ran, which was our first business that we'd ever run, was I mean, outside of, I think I sold some artwork and you know, that kind of thing. The first the first one that had a premises. It was all about the minimum viable product. What could we do at minimum that would get us across the line that was embarrassing and sort of like that idea? If we want to talk about concept creep of everything you want is on the other side of cringe, you know, allowing yourself to be embarrassed with your minimum viable product, knowing that it is in fact you on the road to succeeding in business, which ultimately is true. It's what it was.

SPEAKER_01 6:40

Yeah, it was definitely a lot of learning. Not what I would recommend in hindsight as a first business like industry to get into.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Let's take on the food industry.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

Yeah. But that's okay. We didn't know what we were doing. We learned a lot in the process, including yeah, at that course. And so obviously, when you're talking about that business, you're talking about, I guess, just bootstrapping in general, not having a lot of capital at the start. You're doing a lot of things that are sort of minimum viable. Like, how can we string this together? We don't have the runway or the bandwidth for the most professional solution.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

All the resources. Yeah. There were a lot of moments where I remember, I remember actually being in that workplace.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

In fact, on the topic of minimum viable products, um, we have our co-star Ember has joined us. Yep. Four months old.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

Okay, so I wanted to mention with the original business we were running, the food business. The property, I had a memory as we were talking about this. The the first property that we were at with it, remember the front part of the property? Everyone would always say, You guys need to make it look prettier at the front. Like put some plants up. You know, we wanted to buy those like really expensive big pots and have plants and have an outdoor space. But in reality, it just had a sign that I think we'd printed from from our local place.

SPEAKER_01 7:55

Yeah, I think it was professionally printed because it had to be big enough, but it still got sunfaded over time. It it yeah, it really made me think. So I've walked past businesses before and kind of gone like, wow, they should really clean up their their frontage. They should like that's getting really sunfaded. Why haven't they? And you sort of get enough respect for it, is the right word, once you've done it, where you're like, yeah, it's just it's not their top priority right now.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

Their top priority is cash flow and figuring out how to keep the people who are buying the food or doing the thing to keep them doing it, basically.

SPEAKER_01 8:24

There's a thousand would-be nices that they're planning on getting around to, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:28

And I think when you don't run a business, you don't realize that until until you do. And it's one of the reasons why the I like running businesses. They're they're good examples of exercising this sort of minimum viable product way of thinking, along with some other concepts we'll probably talk about.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

Well, they're also some personal development program.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

Yeah, that's what Dan Martel says. It's uh it's very true. I say it to myself a lot these days. This matters because often people's idea of we're not ready to sell yet. I don't know what to sell you, I don't know what to do to sell or scale or whatever it is, is the excuse that can stop us from really going for it. Speaking of Dan Martell, he's the one who also says if somebody doesn't pay you for a product, you don't have a business, you just have a hobby.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Yeah, you have an expensive hobby.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

You have an expensive hobby, and minimum viable product is often the framework that can kind of push you into action when you find yourself stuck in a hyperfocus.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Yeah, and I think also, yeah, as we said earlier, it doesn't have to be a product, obviously. And in fact, I think Josh Kaufman, the personal MBA, I believe popularized and formularized the formalized, sorry, the minimum viable offer as a variant of this.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Which is really important if you're like a SaaS company, for example.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

And so he defined it as an offer that provides the smallest number of benefits necessary to make a sale.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

What can you do that other people will pay you for? You would be surprised how small that thing can be. Often, actually, people will overcomplicate their product unnecessarily. And this is one of the reasons why minimum viable product is such a great idea, because if you don't do it, you'll often find yourself adding features that no one's gonna care about to your business.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Yeah, and so minimum minimum viable product is the smallest thing we can do to find out whether this idea is worth pursuing. Whereas, yeah, the minimum viable offer is the minimum required to make a sale. Um I think that's sort of similar to pre-sales more broadly.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

Which is again very popular in like SaaS companies. A really good example of pre-sales is the um AI robots that live in your house. I think those are on pre-sale right now. Yeah, the ones where people are gonna watch through the eyes of the robot.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

Kickstarter is kind of an example of this quite often, is that you haven't fully finished the product behind the scenes, but you're testing the market and you're testing it in a way that's actually you're using price as the signal. People actually willing to pay for this because there's a lot of problems that people say they want a solution to.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Oh my gosh. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

And obviously, they complain about it enough that the person thinks, I'm gonna go solve this problem. And then when you actually try to sell it, you realize, yeah, that that pain point isn't real enough for them. There's something else that's competing that's like near enough that even though they're not happy with it and they like to complain about it a lot, they're not going to pay for you know Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

And ultimately, you know, I mean, we there's plenty of examples. You guys can think of your own lives and and the people who, you know, are frustrated with something, but it's not enough of a pain point to become a minimum viable offer for them. So that's why, you know, there's other concepts like minimum viable test. So if you're testing something, what is the minimum viable test that you can do to make that happen? It actually reminds me of one of my clients and a former guest on this podcast, Jacqueline, who works in the chem as a chemistry professor. I imagine she probably does a lot of these. What is the minimum viable test you can do to measure this particular chemistry experiment? Because those chemicals are expensive.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

Yeah, just from like a cost savings point of view. Yeah, okay. Not where my mind would have gone first, but okay, the smallest test possible. Okay, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

There's also the fastest path to cash, which I love as a statement. What is the fastest path to cash? I'm totally gonna say that.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Build the smallest thing, like skip the building unless required.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

Yeah, and there's a really good example of something uh that we did in our business that we'll talk about in a little bit where the fastest path to cash was really important. Fail fast, fail cheap.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Yeah, yeah. So fail fast, fail cheap. I think that's a meta thing, or maybe it's I again I didn't look up the history for all these terms. It's probably probably not originating there. Sticking around Silicon Valley somewhere. It's obviously um I heard it recently in in relation to them. Yeah, reducing the cost of reducing the cost per learning iteration.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

And then they've got if you're not embarrassed, uh when you launched, you waited too long, which is which I mentioned earlier, which yeah, we we put on our wall because uh that was what the other people did at business in the business classes, so we did the same thing. And then Voltaire's perfect is the enemy of the good, which is another phrase that people say around this concept a lot. All different pieces that essentially mean we as people need to focus on getting the minimum done in order to reach our goal.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

I think just to elaborate on that a little bit more, like perfectionism, it obviously can be a lot of things, and like one of the things it can be is you're you're scared of actioning it, and you so you keep delaying, you keep trying to, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

I mean I relate to that. I do outreach a lot, and when I first started doing it, it would take me like 40 minutes to send one message to one person. And I said to my mentor, I was like, How am I supposed to do this? He was like, It's not meant to take 40 minutes. Yeah, yeah. I was not doing minimum viable product in that case.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

I think the same thing applies with the podcast drafts. It's like I would like to spend infinite time making them completely foolproof, checking the etymology on everything, fact-checking multiple times.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Trust and believe that Robbie would like to spend infinite time on every single one of these episodes.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

It would be it would be cowardice.

SPEAKER_00 14:08

It's an interesting idea. I guess it comes back to that idea of everything you want is on the other side of cringe, which I think is related to this concept. And you know, it's I wouldn't necessarily call it cowardice, but I would say you're not willing to I think that comes from, by the way, everything you want is on the other side of fear.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Sort of a a social variant of that.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Okay, and I and I feel like like all of this is about being the kind of person or or building up the sort of muscle of being the kind of person who is able to just do things, do things that are messy, do things that are cringy, do things that are the minimum that they need to be to get across the line. And a lot of times with ADHD, people really struggle with that. I mean, I've worked with so many clients, business owners and non-business owners actually, because this is technically a business owner's concept, but it's actually very relevant to a lot of people where perfectionism is a big part of this conversation, you know. We know there's a link between ADHD and perfectionism, and I think that we really do see that, you know, identified here where it might hold us back a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

I don't think I've listed that in the scenarios, but that would be another scenario that we could have listed in terms of where this shows up as a sort of founder struggle. There's another there's another one about reps, but yeah, there's another one of these sort of meme ideas of doing your reps in public. It was actually someone you spoke to recently, I think. Doing your reps in public and sort of starting sooner and putting out that imperfect product.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

You know that on the ADHD Skills Lab, we are all about systems that work. But what about those systems in our personal lives? When you have ADHD, managing life every day can feel overwhelming, especially if you're a woman managing work, family, and everything else. That's why I want to share a podcast called Sorry I Missed This. Host Kate Osborne dives into how we can find strategies for our closest relationships and daily routines that respect our unique wiring. Whether you're single, partnered, or navigating family life, it's a mastercast in thriving and being understood with an ADHD brain. I've been listening to Sorry I Miss This and their episode on how menopause and hormones can impact ADHD symptoms in women. And I found it really interesting the way they were describing that PMDD, you know, that's something that you will find out might happen once a month and it feels more regular, whereas perimenopause is something that you really, you know, have less control over when it's gonna happen, as well as the struggles that you could have around estrogen and dopamine regulation as well. All of this was a really interesting conversation that allows us to adjust our strategies with maybe a bit more precision, but definitely far less self-criticism. To listen to sorry, I missed this, search for sorry, I missed this in your podcast app. That's sorry, I miss this. I think in terms then of you know why people with ADHD struggle with this. So if we think then of okay, you have ADHD and you're like, right, I'm down with this idea of minimum viable product. Maybe you've heard about it, maybe you haven't, but you're like, that's it. I want to be the man in the arena, I wanna, you know, fail hard, fail fast, like all of that stuff. Uh I'm I'm sold. But I have ADHD and I feel like maybe that's affecting how easy it is to do this. You wouldn't be wrong. There are a couple of reasons why this can be particularly difficult when it comes to ADHD.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Yeah, so I've got three scenarios that aren't they're not completely minimum viable product. I mean, the first one is so like misallocated hyperfocus is sort of the classic MVP would help with scenario where you've gone way too deep before actually testing it with reality.

SPEAKER_00 17:48

You and AI these days, you and AI have chatted up a storm.

SPEAKER_01 17:52

You've been working on something for three weeks or longer, and you haven't actually stopped and thought, and and the scope keeps expanding, and you haven't actually stopped and thought, what's the minimum deliverable here where I can actually see if anyone wants this?

SPEAKER_00 18:06

With relation to the perfectionism idea and this uh hyperfocus, sometimes I've noticed that when I have with clients, they'll have a situation where they won't get back to people. So they'll say, um, their minimum viable product will be like, I should just respond to somebody's message saying, Thanks, it was great to see you too, looking forward to seeing you at the next thing. And then they don't do it, and then they go, Okay, well, now I haven't done the minimum viable product. I have to give them this really amazing thing, and they hyper focus and focus on this idea of like better and better, and they put it off for ages.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

Yeah, and the longer you put it off, the more you feel like you need to apologize for the delay.

SPEAKER_00 18:46

Yeah, and you've got to give them a novel because you didn't do it right. Like that's kind of in that zone, I think, of of minimum viable product. Like minimum viable messaging is maybe the way we hey, we've coined that one, guys.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

Yeah, and that's that's not hyper focused, though. That's that's what like perfectionism or like perfectionism is it is right.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

It's yeah, I definitely think ADHD and perfectionism can be related to the idea of minimal viable.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

And there's a feedback loop there between you didn't get to the thing, you probably sort of optimistically thought you were gonna get have time to do the emails at the end of the day. It keeps getting put off, or you've forgotten because of working memory, and then and then it gets to the point where you feel like you have to overdeliver now to make up for it.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Yeah, all of these things can be a big thing, big struggle when it comes to the idea of putting things out there. What about the project that never activates?

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Yeah, so this one is kind of the idea of a large scope project that keeps getting sidelined. Again, this is more of a minimum viable than a minimum viable product. So again, we're not testing, we're not testing this against reality, but this is more of a like minimum shippable product, I guess. Or minimum like deliverable. We're so we're talking about scaling down, scaling down the scope of that project, and that's gonna help for a bunch of reasons, which we won't get into now. Yeah, that's one of the other scenarios where I think ADHD people in particular are gonna have this problem where these more urgent things come up and it's the now versus not now idea, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:11

The time blindness. You're you're planning on getting. I mean, can you give me an example of a project that always gets put off? I can think of a dozen, like the book that someone was planning on writing, the business that someone was planning on starting altogether.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

Yeah, I think any of those apply, it's it's about if you can reduce the scope on that, it's gonna allow for actual momentum, actual, actual moving forward on the thing in these sort of incremental units.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

It actually reminds me of of this podcast, Robbie. Because I think when we first started, like we started kind of out the gate because we got, you know, understood, sponsored us, which was amazing. But I remember you saying, like, we should have had more time to prepare for this. And I wonder now that we're having this conversation, whether it would have become that project that never fully activated.

SPEAKER_01 20:55

No, because even if we had two more weeks, we're only talking about two weeks extra time just to get ahead so that if we're sick, we've got more recordings on the bank. We're trying to catch up.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

Yeah, yeah. But it feels like it could have that could have been one of those things, right? The podcast that you record and then you save save episodes, and you know, I've heard people say you shouldn't start a podcast until you're like a month ahead. And although I agree with that in theory, I think it's a danger in terms of minimum viable product. Because what if that month of stuff is really bad and nobody wants it?

SPEAKER_01 21:26

Are you just trying to justify my way of thinking? I don't think that applies.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

I think it does.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Okay, so okay, so you're saying do the month, and if people don't like it, now you haven't done two months.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Yeah, well, I guess I would say like be a week or two ahead, right? Like don't don't don't set it up to do nothing, but like start, put something out there, then bank it. I would recommend kind of starting and then banking rather than saying I have to start a podcast, record a whole month of episodes, and then I'll officially Start the podcast. If you're doing it like that, it can be easy to never start.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Or to overinvest in something that isn't gonna work, I think, is yeah. So yeah, okay, fair. I I think that's starting small, starting basic, starting budget, and starting bad as well.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

Just know whatever you start. If it's the first time you're doing it, it's probably gonna suck. If you go all the way to the beginning of my uh of this podcast and you listen to it, please don't. It's a long way away. And yeah, the edit, I'm sure that I'm sure the video. I mean, I don't even think we had video back then.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

Oh, all the way back. Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure probably not.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

Three years ago.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

I think it was just to be fair, that was more common. Well, and it takes time to set up all of the extra things. It's a lot of work involved in clipping and all that sort of stuff as well. So yeah, no, you're starting with the minimum viable and you're testing if it actually gets positive feedback, and then you're expanding based on that feedback, and often in the direction of that feedback.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

On that note, if you guys have any feedback for this for this episode, you can always DM me at unconventional organization on Instagram. Okay, so when should we not do this? So we had a few examples of that.

SPEAKER_01 23:03

Yeah, I think the most obvious example is luxury brands or brand sensitive products. So when the product is the polish, then overpolishing is less of a concern.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

Yeah, yeah. No one wants a Chanel handbag and they're just like, although, you know, deconstruction is a big thing right now in fashion. It's like this is a deconstructed version of this thing. So in some ways, they're sort of um retroactively minimum viable producting, so you can see the process. So maybe they would argue against measure twice, cut once.

SPEAKER_01 23:33

Yeah, so okay, so mixed in here is some just sort of the antithesis.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

You shouldn't minimum viable product a house.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

Yeah, yeah. There's definitely scenarios where like if the mistake is expensive or or irreversible, or like like medical critical safety domains, then yeah, obviously minimum viable thinking is inappropriate. I think also, yeah, technical debt that kills you later. So in programming, I definitely understand that's a it's a problem faced by big companies where they're sort of dealing with all of this this sort of debt of design design decisions that were made early on that make it harder and harder to maintain.

SPEAKER_00 24:02

But now we can just vibe code our way there.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

No, I think I think that one is an interesting trade-off because on the one hand, yes, there is this problem of like technical debt where you don't want to put in like shoddy foundations. On the other hand, I think minimum viable product is still going to be a useful concept there.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

Yeah, massively important concept in Silicon Valley. So clearly technical debt is sort of a trade-off rather than an absolute no.

SPEAKER_01 24:28

Yeah, in fact, I think in like clean coding principles, there is this idea of like not programming for things that are outside your scope, outside of scope. So like you sort of, if you're trying to make something infinitely flexible and the best foundation for every possible future, then it gets you can get completely carried away and never launch.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

Then we also have high switch cost customers. So if you're in enterprise sales, so really long cycles, it's not always the best idea to be like, this is what, but but even then, I don't know, like sometimes, you know, there's always a place for it.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

Yeah, and I think the last limitation that we'll note here is IP sort of imitation risk, where you might want to sort of hold back and do, but you even then you're still gonna do like a minimum viable prototype and sort of maybe test it behind sort of non-dicl non-disclosure agreements. You're not just gonna like go all the way through without any testing against markability, like without doing any market research.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

So I guess what we're saying here is even though we've just gone through exceptions, mostly they probably don't apply to you.

SPEAKER_01 25:25

Well, yeah, and I think also just for your everyday sort of ADHD founder, it's a really useful concept of just yeah, avoiding that sort of scope creep.

SPEAKER_00 25:32

Yeah. And I will say as well, like as part of minimum viable product, minimum viable promising, if you want another version of it. Minimum viable promising is what I would say.

SPEAKER_01 25:43

Look at that minimum viable messaging, minimum viable product promising with making all of it because Do you mean like setting yourself deadlines that are imposed on you? Yeah, you know I am.

SPEAKER_00 25:51

I'm tear I used to be so bad at this, it's still a struggle. But when you're doing something, you know, especially in business, not saying it'll be done by Friday, if you are not confident and like you've tested based on time and historical time that it actually is going to be done on Friday.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

If you know from our previous episodes that you're actually not that good at estimating how long something's gonna take and no one was imposing that timeline on you in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Exactly. Yeah, minimum viable, promising, because no one else cares. So don't do it to yourself.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

There's a couple more concepts that I wanted to touch on as well, related to the sort of MVP variants. Um, so like one of them is goes to automation. So you're planning to automate something, but just test it manually first. This kind of applies to AI, where you're thinking I should create a custom GBT, and you're like, no, just actually do it with prompts. This is gonna be a little bit repetitive, but like test that this is actually something you need to do on repeat that's gonna justify that automation step. And and this would apply as well to actual like client-facing systems. You can just have people on the back end do it um manually first and then automate it when that feature is well received.

SPEAKER_00 26:58

Like Amazon did it, and then those robots that are gonna be in your house soon are gonna do that as well, where they have people.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

I think the Amazon Go, I think was yeah, an example. This is an example, same idea, but yeah, Wizard of Oz, a minimum viable product, where sort of the man behind the curtain that you're not supposed to see. I think in this case it was people like watching on cameras and recording what they put into the cards.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

Yeah, so Amazon Go stores and their just walk out technology sparked a lot of controversies around overhyped AI claims and privacy surveillance. They basically had fake AI where they were heavily marketing it as an AI-powered cashless system. But in reality, in April 2024, they found out that it relied on a thousand workers manually reviewing and labeling video footage for most of the transactions, which I guess is why some of those I remember somebody went through and it didn't pick up and they just walked out with their shopping, going like, oh, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 27:55

Unless it's the controversy that shut it down.

SPEAKER_00 27:57

The tick and store formats ultimately failed to scale profitably and they began closing their underperforming stores. I don't know if this is a good example.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

I don't so okay, I I think it's a good example, regardless. Like obviously, the ideal example would be we're only gonna know about it because of the controversy. It's a good example of Wizard of Oz MVP, I think.

SPEAKER_00 28:16

Where they were like they obviously chose the Wizard of Oz MVP.

SPEAKER_01 28:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where they chose not to actually fully implement the automatic the automation first because that would have been really expensive. And again, we'd have to look up if they shut down because of the controversy or because that it just wasn't that of a feature. Yeah, they yeah, but that's that's the point of minimum viable, right? Is you test it against reality and they go, This caught a lot of a lot of attention online, but it wasn't actually worth implementing, like the cost of it.

SPEAKER_00 28:42

Maybe a better example of this is those robots that are gonna be in people's houses where but they're currently just someone controlling them.

SPEAKER_01 28:50

Yeah, yeah. So they fall over, they throw their arms up, and they know I didn't know that. I think uh I can't remember what the company was, but yeah, recently I think they caught uh it falling over and behaving like a human when it did. Oh wow, which I mean it could be like a trained out of it, but I think it was a human product.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

There are robots that are going to be going into people's homes that are just are people behind the thing. So these are all some of the examples I want to go into our own examples of minimum viable product in our own business, specifically relating to the online course example, because I think this is a really important one. I think it this happens a lot, and it definitely happened to me, which is when we first decided a couple of years ago to run an online course. We decided, or I decided, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna record videos. So I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna record like 25 videos, and they're all gonna be really long and detailed and specific, and I'm gonna hire somebody to edit those videos and and all of that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

It was incredible, incredible amount of oh my gosh, no, all the problems.

SPEAKER_00 29:57

It was an incredible amount of work, so much work, so much editing, so much fiddly editing of and there was a sense of like it's all good because once we've done this, we don't have to do it again. And then as soon as it went out, and it was like a$16 product, and it was it was good, like people liked it, but it was immediately clear that there was some feedback, you know, hey, can you change this? Can you do this? Can you make this better? And and ultimately it was like just a basic prototype for what would ultimately become the now hybrid one-on-one community program that doesn't really rely on that kind of stuff anyway these days. It uses more GBTs, to that it was just gonna become a model for it. But it was so exhausting that when people didn't love it, I said to my mentor at the time, I was like, I don't know, this is this is too much. Like, I don't know if I can do this.

SPEAKER_01 30:51

Well, you hate recording solo.

SPEAKER_00 30:54

That is why Robbie is here having this conversation with me. Somebody said you should and I was like, you know what? I'm gonna ask my husband to um come out from behind the behind the scenes in this business. So shout out to Robbie for that. And so it was it was interesting later on when I was mentoring with Dan Martell to see how he ran a coaching business, and it was all Google Docs and pictures he'd drawn, was drawing as he was speaking, and you know, a giant group of people, but the value was so to the moment and so good. It encouraged me to start to see my own coaching as something that I could do live with people. And as a result, I've been able to record hundreds and hundreds of episodes and and recordings of of of um sessions that I'm doing with my community that is a sort of iterative, constant minimum viable product, if you will.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

Yeah, they're immediately hitting hitting reality and bouncing back with feedback, and as a result, much more valuable.

SPEAKER_00 31:59

That's the strange thing about minimum viable product, is if you you do minimum viable product and you iterate, you would be surprised that what you end up with, even if it's not as pretty as what you wanted, is much more valuable because it's much more related to what people actually want and need.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

Yeah, well, that's the that's the scenario we're trying to avoid, is like a highly polished thing no one wanted.

SPEAKER_00 32:23

What I learned was people don't want to look at me talking even with some graphics. They want an interactive experience about what is happening in the world right now.

SPEAKER_01 32:31

They also don't want an overwhelming number of courses that they feel like they haven't got through yet. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:36

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So all of these different ways, you know, ultimately I would say this is just an encouragement for you guys. We wanted to start talking about some of these business concepts because they are so interesting and so valuable. They've been so valuable to us. We know they'll be valuable to other business, you know, people starting out or wanting to start their own business, struggling with ADHD. Ultimately, this is about encouraging you guys to try things. To try things that are messy, that are not what you wanted them to be, that are embarrassing, that are cringe. Everything you want is probably on the other side of doing that. And even if what you're doing breaks, that's a good thing. That's the whole point. It's meant to break a little bit so that you can make those adjustments, so that you can figure out what people actually want, so that you can grow and scale and launch and grow again and all of that messiness that is a business. 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 us sound good, look good. We couldn't do it without you.