Welcome to the Whitestone Advisors' Blog

By definition, to blog means to maintain a record of the activities, thoughts and beliefs of an individual or organization.  Yes, we’re doing all of that here, but we’re bringing you entrepreneurship, startup and small business/growth company news along the way.  In addition, we'll be answering your FAQs and creating a space to kick around ideas about business models, business messaging and business finance; all with a focus on crowdsourcing.  This is a place for you to see what's on our radar as we pride ourselves on being aware of current events.  If by some chance we miss something big, please feel free to post about it in the Whitestone Advisors’ Blog.

Our Startup's MVP is a prototype. Right?

With the big success of the Lean Startup movement the term MVP (Minimum Viable Product) has unfortunately become a synonym for prototype.  However, the real point of the MVP is to determine if your business idea is actually worth pursuing.   In this way it is really an experiment, should be a learning tool and is not a beta product as the name would suggest.

The MVP should be inexpensive and take a short time to design as the focus should be on collecting feedback from the crowd.  This data will allow you to begin to understand what customers actually need.  If you conduct more research and then leverage Lean Analytics (hopefully with our help) your team can course correct if necessary.  At the end of the day all startups need to learn faster and using a textbook MVP approach is a great first step.