Creating and developing a product can be a daunting task for most business owners. A minimum viable product (MVP) allows customers to provide feedback for future development. Thus, developers can avoid lengthy and unnecessary work. However, how can we go beyond turning this idea into a reality and make it a running and successful venture?
Join us in this episode as I sit down with Allie Reitz, the Founder and CEO of MEEP, to explore the essential steps in building a minimum viable product (MVP). We delve into the world of automation and discuss the significance of creating a functional and captivating website that fosters efficient connections with people.
Tune in to this episode and learn actionable strategies from the expert!
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Building a Minimum Viable Product and Efficient Website Development with Allie Reitz
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I’m going to talk to you today about a common situation, maybe you’re in it, maybe you’ve been in it, maybe you know someone in it. You found your idea after all this digging in, that idea that’s at that perfect intersection of what the world needs, what you’re good at, and the idea that’s going to bring your life to where you want to bring it, but the question is how do you actually make that idea become a reality? That’s a whole ‘nother daunting task after all this personal reflection that can sometimes actually deter people from really doing anything because it is long, it is drawn out to go from, okay, I have this idea, to, now I’m doing it, now people are buying it, or now people are engaging with that. And that’s where my guest today, Allie Reitz, and her organization, Meep, come into play.
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Allie, welcome to the program.
How it’s going?
It’s going pretty well today. How’s it going for you?
So good. I was outside most of the morning so I’m feeling very good now looking at my computer.
Well, that’s amazing because one of the things that inspires a lot of people to pursue any of these paths is the ability to live the life they want and you decided this morning, “I wanna be outside because,” to give a little detail about the Colorado weather today, it was a very sunny morning, and the afternoon is probably going to have a high chance of rain in most places so that’s a great way to orient your day.
Yes, I’m very glad I did it.
So at Meep, you specialize in having someone go from, you talk about from zero to traction, from zero to where you’re actually getting there. How does that process really work? When someone comes in, I assume most people that come in are, as I’ve described, people that already have that idea, they’ve already searched and they figured out what they want to physically do but now, of course, how to get it from, “It’s this thing in my head, I think, oh, it’d be really cool to do this for these people,” to where you’re actually getting these people to engage with you.
Totally. Like you said, it’s a long process, right? And what’s in your head is probably not what you’re going to start with because what’s in your head is probably the big, fancy, shiny, awesome version that’s going to be version 10 or 20 down the line. It’s going to be —- one way that I like to describe it or analogy that I like to use is from Jeff Patton in his book called User Story Mapping. He describes it really simply, which I love. It’s like if you’re wanting to solve the problem for people, that is, getting them from point A to point B, and your idea of the solution is a car, you’re not going to start with a wheel because that doesn’t necessarily solve that problem for them right out of the gate and your first objective is to kind of validate that assumption that you can solve that problem for them. So his analogy is, you start with a skateboard. It still gets people from point A to point B. It’s a lot more janky than a car, much, much simpler, much easier to fix and change and add things to but it’s still getting them from point A to point B and the early adopters of it will recognize that and maybe tolerate some of the maybe wind whistling by their ears while they’re getting from point A to point B. And so that’s what we do for people and that’s how we kind of guide founders through that process from going, “This is the huge vision in my head,” which looks like a shiny convertible car, and that’s important.
But then, what I believe it really takes to be an entrepreneur is to hold that vision but also step back from it and start from scratch and say, “If I really wanna solve this problem for people, what is the smallest version of that that I can build so that I can start listening to those people that I’m building it for and start learning from them?” So what we do is first we help them map out that user journey. What happens in that big-pie-in-the-sky vision from the time they hear about it to the time they tell their friend about it? And all those things that happen in between. And then we say, okay, what are our near-term goals? Because when you’re starting something from the beginning, it’s easy to think big vision, “How’s this gonna scale? What are these big numbers?”
Yeah, all those things.
But if we kind of step back and we do a little bit of a shrink test and we say, “Okay, I’m standing here in six months. What feels like success to me?” I can give an example of like my friend Mike wanted to build a platform that helps small businesses reduce their carbon footprint. And so we mapped out this big vision of this cool software platform and then we stepped back and we said, “Okay, what are our near-term goals here?” and we did this shrink test. It was like, well, in six months, does it feel successful if we help 10 small businesses reduce their carbon footprint by 20 percent? What about two small businesses reducing their carbon footprint by 30 percent? And that’s kind of what we ended up with, which then allows us to kind of draw a line and say, “Okay, what of this huge vision is actually necessary to get to those near-term goals? How can we do this once and prove that it’s a thing?” and his MVP ended up being something. We didn’t have to build anything to test it out.
Let’s just say consulting is your MVP, right? And then, of course, that could turn into later building a platform or whatever else you want to build. You still have to build like a web page, you still have to build something and that’s like another major component of what you do as well is helping build those web pages through those like low-code and no-code solutions, right?
Yeah. There’s always some kind of infrastructure that you need to support what you’re doing, especially to do that next step.
Step one, do the thing. Solve the problem for someone or for yourself. Step two is now can you do that again because that’s a big assumption right there. Share on XYeah, that’s another assumption there.
I’ve seen a lot of founders have awesome ideas because they had an experience that solved the problem for themselves and it happened once and it’s hard to recreate that, to recreate the problem and the solution and have it come out right. And so step two is repeat it.
Yeah.
And then where what you’re talking about comes in is step one, you learn from the process of repeating it and then you learn from the process of creating a process for repetition. When you do it the third time, that’s where all that infrastructure comes in, where you say, “How can we systematize what we just did? We repeated it and here’s all the things that we had to do to repeat it and, now, how can we automate those things?” And that’s where that scalability starts to come in of, “Well, now let me try to do this for 10 people, and what does that look like and where does the infrastructure have to change?” And that’s where it becomes from consulting into a website —
A product, yeah. And how often do people have to either make significant changes to their offering based on, because that first MVP, you’re learning, you’re testing a hypothesis about what you think is going to work or even completely abandon the idea, which is sad but I’m sure it does happen.
Well, it happens a lot. It happened to me and it happened to every founder. The cool thing is like at Meep, we consider that a success. We’ve done the thing, we’ve solved the problem for people, we’ve listened to the data that comes back. One manifestation of success is, well, we learned that it’s not valuable for people and then we come back to the drawing board, and that’s the definition of an entrepreneur, not necessarily just barreling through and saying, “Well, what if we did this? What if we did this?” but actually listening to the people you’re building for coming back and saying, “Well, if I really want to actually solve this problem for people, do I have to make some hard decisions about what can I take out of what I have built? What is not necessary in here?” and not building for building’s sake.
Yeah. I know a lot of that happens.
Totally. And like the statistics are the most successful companies have either pivoted once or twice.
Yeah.
No more or no less.
Interesting. So, there’s a balance between being like, “This is what I’m building and I’m gonna keep ramming it no matter what,” and the people that change their mind every 15 minutes, like, “Oh, maybe it could be this, maybe it could be that, maybe I’ll make a book, maybe I’ll make a new version of football to be played in Indonesia,” and so on.
Yes, exactly. Having a healthy perspective on it and not necessarily second guessing yourself too much where you can trust the information is what’s coming back to you from your customers. That’s the real deal and there’s no sugarcoating the data.
Definitely. Now, one of the interesting stories a lot of people who are trying to build things look at is Steve Jobs and one of the things is he built a product, for better or worse, I have my own opinions about it, but he built a product that people didn’t say they wanted, no one was telling him, “Oh, I want a little handheld, small computery thingy we’re not only get my phone calls but I can look on the internet at any given moment of the day,” he figured out that people wanted that. So, what do you have to supplement the data? Because there’s a difference between the actual words or the actual survey responses the customers are saying versus what the underlying need is and what you can infer and how you can make these inferences like Steve Jobs did.
I love that. It was like what Harrison Ford said, “If I were to ask the people, they would have told me they needed a faster horse.”
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
The cool part about being an entrepreneur is that you have this vision that no one else can really see and you’re starting to introduce that to the world and I think making sure, and this is part of our why of Meep, we believe that these visions coming through entrepreneurs are coming through from the universe and they’re amazing and cool and our job at Meep is to make sure they come through in the most pure form of what they want to be as possible and they don’t get muddied up and confused based on the translation process from the —
Yeah, for sure.
— brain to being in the world, yeah. So making sure that the skateboard version of your car is in alignment with that vision and mission of that problem you’re solving with the car and making sure that you simplify the message enough so that people understand what you’re trying to do without muddying it up, which is really hard to do when there’s so many opportunities and ideas flying at you.
I assume that’s like where you first interact with your customers is, “I have an idea and I’m trying to figure it out.” What are the biggest pitfalls that someone can fall into in the whole process of, “Okay, now, I want to get the idea out there,” is it too much input from people, tailoring it too much to the crowd, or being too rigid with your messaging? Anything else?
I think there’s as many pitfalls as there are types of people in the world.
So a lot.
Right. As there are number of people in the world because everyone is different. I recently met a data engineer who’s been building this really cool thing and he’s so into the thing that he hasn’t talked to any customers yet. You can be on that end of the spectrum. And you could go to the other end of the spectrum where you’re just talking about it and you never end up doing it.
Yeah. I mean, that’s very important for self-awareness because if you’re constantly taking in information from whoever just posted whatever online, you’re not really looking into yourself for sure.
Exactly, yeah. And really doing that self-reflection and saying, “Okay, what are my strengths?” And if you Google this, there’s so many articles out there and — more screen time.
Well, it’s intentional so it’s fine.
Yes. Yeah, oh, yeah, I have an answer that I’m looking for so I’m going to go self-fulfilling prophecy on the internet. Not necessarily trying to improve the things you know you have weaknesses around and finding people out there who are really good at these things and not trying to do it all, that’s the difference between being successful and still being in your garage, in your cave, or still being just talking about it. It’s saying, “I know that I need help,” and it takes a village.
So do you often encounter people that don’t have that self-awareness, that you’d say, “Okay, I know, you have this idea and you’re really kind of thrilled about it but there’s a little bit more of your self-awareness journey that you need to undergo before you actually start doing things”?
Being an entrepreneur is that journey.
Yeah.
It’s so clear. The more founders I talk to and the more people in the startup world, it’s like that’s our life lesson that we’re supposed to learn is just what they call in yoga philosophy or like the observer, to step back from yourself and watch yourself objectively and be like, “It’s okay, you’re doing so good,” and to hold yourself like you would a friend or a child. “You’re doing great.” Now, I don’t know why I don’t have this.
Yeah.
And one of the ways that we work with our founders on that is we’re involved a lot on the strategy side and it almost ends up being coaching type stuff. Sometimes we’re like, “Okay, what’s really the root of this blocker that we keep running into? Are we not necessarily good salespeople?”
Yep. Some people aren’t.
Some people aren’t. And if you’re trying to go out and sell it and the first two rejections you get trigger some real emotional response in you, that might be sign that you might need to go find someone who’s experienced in sales and doesn’t have that reaction every time because you’re going to burn yourself out so fast.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. One of the tools that we use is we do a vision-mission session with our founders and I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Simon Sinek video where he draws the circle —
The three circles? Yeah, the golden — whatever, I don’t remember exactly —
Golden circle — yeah. But it’s like why, how, what. Getting clear on that why and the how is so important because then, when you go talk to people and you go find these people to help you, you’re speaking from your real reasoning for doing it if you’re finding people who connect on that level with what you’re doing so really understanding that why helps you to say, “Okay, I’m really passionate about this.”
Yeah, or you realize you’re not. I mean…
Yeah, yeah.
It can happen, right?
Totally. Or you realize the reason you saw you were doing it or the reason you were telling people you’re doing it isn’t necessarily the real reason you’re doing it and if you continue down that path, you’ll find yourself two years from now over here and your actual vision and passion for it, your why, is over here and you’re like, “Why don’t I care about my business anymore?” or, “Why do I have the wrong people?” For instance, this developer guy, he’s building this really cool platform that’s going to have a social impact and he’s talking about it like, you know, “I’m building it for this underserved group of people.”
Yeah.
And at the same time, he hasn’t really gone and talk to those people. He’s been nerding out on building the cool thing, which is an amazing, proprietary software in itself and so asking that hard question and say, “Am I building this for those people or am I building this to innovate technology wise?” and that’s totally fine but recognizing that that’s your why can save you so much heartache in the long run where you were forcing yourself to go and be this philanthropist and go in that direction when really you just want to nerd out with the cool innovation people. And that’s awesome.
I think society has like a script that it tells a lot of people what you’re supposed to want, what you’re supposed to be about, what you’re supposed to be motivated by, and not everyone is motivated by those things, not everyone’s about those things, and so it seems like there’s a level of self-acceptance that people need to have when they come up with their why, like the world says you should be wanting to help people when maybe you just want to build more cool shit, which people need to like, I don’t know, be confident in a way. I’m just saying it’s okay that this is what I want even if that is not what those other people say I should want.
At the end of the day, the secret sauce of your startup is you. You can build all kinds of stuff.
What really makes it different and what’s really going to connect with people is that Why, is that unique thing that shines to come through you and nobody else can take that away. Share on XThere could be five people with that same why across the world and there’s an abundance of — there’s more than enough to go around and it’s all good.
One thing I always say is I’ve actually interviewed and been on other very similar podcasts to mine with a very similar idea of trying to encourage people to live their best lives and we don’t see each other necessarily as rivals, we see each other as both being on the same journey and part of it sometimes is that sometimes what you’re offering resonates with a different group of people than what one of the similar products is offering, for one reason or another, sometimes reasons you can’t even really articulate in words in your head but just like, okay, that other product just resonates more with those five people or those 50 million people, whatever you want to call it.
Yeah. It would kind of suck if you’re resonating with five and they’re resonating with 50 million but…
Yeah.
That’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Yeah, there’s like this ultimate level of maybe a little bit more detached thinking that says like, well, even if it’s just 50 versus 50 million, it’s still significant for the universe. But then again, everyone still gotta eat, right?
Exactly. Yeah, and that’s another great point. It’s like there’s this combination of, “Yes, this is my calling and this is what’s coming through me,” and, “This is a way to do it that’s sustainable but there’s this Venn diagram that kind of shows that this is what I do, this is what the world needs, this is what can actually make me money.”
Yeah, you want that intersection of those three things, like what you’re good at, what you enjoy doing, what the world actually will pay for.
Yes, exactly. Yes. And we talk a lot about that with my clients too of like how are we going to monetize this in a way that’s in alignment with the why and the mission because you’re monetizing in a way that incentivizes you to build value for this other set of stakeholders or customers when your real vision and mission is with these people over here, you end up away from your why too so it’s, yeah, finding that being really intentional at the beginning to set yourself on the right path, or like from Wild, did you ever read that book?
From Cheryl Strayed?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think her mom says but it’s like put yourself in the way of beauty. I love that phrase. It’s like set yourself up in the direction where you know it’s going to be aligned.
And then did you have a similar story yourself with kind of finding the intersection of what the world wants, what you want, what energize you when you decided to pursue Meep?
Yes. Yeah. Actually, I made that mistake with my startup that I had and I wanted to connect yoga teachers with local businesses to make the yoga classes more accessible so it’s not in a yoga studio, which is kind of scary for people to walk into, but what I built was a ticketing platform and that incentivized me to have the people sign up for the classes rather than incentivizing me to help the teachers connect with the spaces, and so —
Oh, yeah.
Right? Like building, building, building, and I ended up far away from the actual vision and mission for it. So, with Meep, I’m being very intentional around like what I want to do is help the vision come through the founder in its most pure form that it can, in its simplest purest form. The founders are looking for it so that’s good.
So Meep is almost a result of the lessons you learned from your first business and I think it’s a good attitude to point out for anyone listening out there that’s looking into starting their first business that even if your first business doesn’t work or maybe it doesn’t work but maybe it’s what informs the next one or the next one after that, that eventually is the one that does the thing that you feel like you’re supposed to be doing in life.
Yeah, that comes back full circle to what we were talking about before. It is considered success to us if we find out that this isn’t a viable business, because the world needs entrepreneurs and —
Yeah, for sure.
— the world needs entrepreneurs to be happy and to be doing things that are sustainable and that they can actually make a living doing and have that awesome ripple effect in the world. And if it means that you learn and you move on and you maybe even join another startup and —
Learn from that, yeah.
Yeah, use everything you learned to help that awesome startup do amazing things or you start another company. It’s all success. It’s all just the next thing.
So you don’t think of your yoga ticketing thing as a failure, you think of it as like a success on a way to like a bigger success essentially?
Yeah. And if you like — the fail fast and forward people would argue that, yes, it is a failure and we can call it a failure and not be afraid to call it a failure because failure is just one part of the journey, is just one step on it.
I think that will be easier for a lot of people to comprehend if we weren’t given 17 years of education where we’re trained that the worst thing you could ever do at any course is fail it.
Yes. It’s still good. I missed one question on my driving test, which was two people come to a stop sign at the same time, who gets to go, you know? And the answer was, and I put like one of them waves, the other…
Yeah. Yeah.
I guess the answer is that the person to the right has the right of way and I will never forget that answer.
Yeah, because you remember the answer to that question on the driver’s test more than like —
Yeah.
I think I remember an episode of The Simpsons where Homer was taking a driver’s test and this question like, alcohol, (a), increases your ability to drive a car, (b), decreases your ability, something really basic like that and somehow he got it wrong because that’s how that show, the thing you’re remembering is the thing that you had to like adjust a little bit, I guess, the same way like when you think about why you built Meep and what you’re structuring, you’re basing it around like the system that you created with the first business and how the system incentivized you to start serving the wrong purpose or like the wrong metrics, in a way.
It becomes this living, breathing thing. If you let it come through and you let it be what it wants to be, it’s — Meep is already morphing and it hasn’t even been a year. We’re launching our first launch academy, which will help teach founders how to build their MVP themselves with no code tools, because that’s what people have been asking for. So, it’s like, wow, maybe Meep ends up being this more scalable national, international accelerator-ish program that helps founders build their own stuff and takes them through that zero to one process and it started as a freelance business with just me, now, it’s an agency-type deal with contractors working and then maybe it’ll look totally different in a couple of years, but letting it evolve how it wants to evolve I think is super important.
I think one of the things you see why businesses hit a wall because you start out, you have the system set up for a certain point, whichever, and it works for a little bit of growth, a little bit of growth, but then no matter what this is to manage, you’re eventually going to grow to a spot where you have to change some things up, you have to rethink some things, some people exit before that.
That sounds good.
I mean, if you get a good price tag on it because people who exit I notice they have usually like 6 to 12 months where they just kind of do whatever they want until the next idea comes.
And they spend all their money that they’ve made.
Yeah. Something like that. But, yeah, like that whole rethinking to the next level. So when you’re working with your clients, with your founders, do you often have this idea of like how much do you want to scale because some people are like, “I just wanna establish a lifestyle business where I can work 10 hours a week whenever I want from wherever I want because I’m gonna automate things,” versus the people that have this like big idea that, “I really want to have this big impact and I want it to grow, grow, grow because I want to change the world,” like a little non-clichéd phrase, but, yeah.
Yeah. I mean, you could argue that even the smaller, non-scalable brick and mortar businesses are changing the world/
Yeah, for sure.
And that is one of our big core values at Meep is we don’t just work with unicorn format startups, with the potential to become scaled billion-dollar companies, because we really do believe that any idea can change the world. It’s trying to come through, it’s trying to help solve problems for people, and then they turn into one storefront that does a thing and that’s totally cool. Anyway, it might turn into one product that gets manufactured and there’s a finite amount of those you can make.
Yeah, something…
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s not going to 100X or whatever everyone’s looking for.
Yeah, but there’s so much great information and studies out there now around this and showing that, actually, like the zebras versus unicorns are the ones that are going to last longer and be better for the planet and for people because they’re at this really nice sustainable growth rate and it could start wanting to be a solopreneur business, it could stay like that for 20 years and then, all of a sudden, you read the E-Myth and you go, woop, then you sell it big time. So there’s — like I’ve seen before, it’s a living, breathing thing and it’s going to take on whatever form that it’s meant to take on as long as you listen to the feedback that you’re getting and follow the growth, follow where energy is moving and things are happening and not let yourself get stuck in that stale place.
So does that take some flexibility, right?
Uh-huh.
Because like I’m sure everyone has that big vision in your head, you can even picture like what you’re doing, where you’re doing it, who you’re doing it with, but sometimes that’s going to change a little bit based on some of that information you get, sometimes you realize, “Okay, this isn’t my core target,” maybe these people or maybe it needs to be presented a little bit this way or maybe it’s gonna grow or scale or whatever in like a different fashion than what you had envisioned. What’s that balance between being flexible but also still being true to that initial why that everyone has?
What’s that balance? That’s being an entrepreneur.
Yeah, that’s what that is is finding that balance, right?
Yeah, yeah. That’s the spirit. That’s the gift to say, “Okay, I’ve got this thing coming through me. I’m going to cherish it and keep it as pure as I can while listening to my customers and not being afraid to go back and start from scratch.” When I’m starting a company, whether it was my audio business or my startup or Meep, it’s like an exercise in patience and doing things over and over and over again, going back to the drawing board and that’s like such a great skill for an entrepreneur to have is like letting go of that ego and like that sunk-cost fallacy.
Oh, yeah.
“Oh, I put so much effort into that one thing,” I really believe in the power of like, as soon as you let that thing go that’s not working, where you’re not finding growth and you’re not seeing energy moving, when you let go of that, you’re creating this vacuum which is like, in Taoism, like the empty cup, which is even cooler than the full cup because it contains emptiness which is full of potential and there’s so many wonderful things that can then rush into that space that were just waiting for a space to rush into.
Yeah.
So having the courage to say no and move forward and step into an empty cup, an empty space full of unknowns, it’s so scary but it’s such a crucial skill for an entrepreneur to have to say, “Yes, I acknowledge that is not working, I’m letting it go and I’m stepping forward,” almost like Indiana Jones stepping forward and the thing appears under his foot.
Well, it’s interesting, it also reminds me of like one of the things that does keep a lot of us addicted to screens, addicted to mindless scrolling, mindless email, checking internet site, whatever, is that, sometimes, we don’t even know what we’re going to do right now. So sometimes you’re just sitting here, you just finished a task, maybe you’re like a little bit too exhausted to like think what am I going to do next so you’re like, “Okay, well, YouTube will always entertain me, Twitter will always entertain me,” but what would happen if you just said, “You know what, I’m done with what I just did. I just finished recording a podcast, and I’m just gonna sit here and do nothing for a minute and let whatever is going to come into my mind.”
That would be magical. Yeah. There’s magic in the spaces of transition. Can’t remember if it’s in The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks, or there’s a book called Effortless which is by the same guy as Essentialism but it’s like taking advantage of those transition spaces, like, “I finished a task, it’s time for another task,” not just moving straight into something but letting yourself just be and maybe taking like three deep breaths and just saying, “I’m just gonna be in this space.” And an even more practical version is like, “Okay, now, I have to drive to somewhere,” so not necessarily checking your phone the whole time you’re driving or something but just being in the driving and letting yourself have that transition. That’s so nice.
So your website is meepmeep.io. Is that correct?
Yes.
And is that the best way anyone listening could get a hold of you if they’re interested?
Yeah. There’s a bunch of buttons on there and that will all take you to schedule a meeting with me and I’d love to talk to you about your idea.
Amazing. And mind if I ask which no-code solution you used to build the website?
I use Wix. That’s one of our go-to ones for website. I’m a designer and I think that way, Wix is more like a design feeling.
Yeah. I guess they all have different like strengths and weaknesses and you probably know better than anyone else because someone could look at like all the different, you know, Weebly, GoDaddy, Squarespace, and you can all of a sudden just be like, “What do I do?”
Well, that’s a big part of what we do with founders is like making sure we do the thinking around refining the scope and the feature set what their first version is going to look like before we choose which tool to go use. Because there’s a reason you would go to Squarespace. There’s a reason you would go to Shopify for your website if that’s what makes sense for your business.
And so it’s not necessarily form versus function. You don’t start with the tool, you start with the function. What are you going to do with it? And then that’s how you make that decision. Share on XAnd is there ever a case where, not to go against one of the core principles of your business where you recommend like, “Okay, what you’re trying to do is complex enough that you should hire a developer”?
The only time when I truly believe that that’s necessary for the first version to prove your assumptions is when what you want to build is a proprietary software. If you’re innovating in that space, then it makes total sense to have developers using fully coded framework for what you’re doing. In general, I feel like a lot of startups, the software is just supporting that pure essence of the person and the why and there’s plenty of tools out there rather than reinventing the wheel. But if you’re building a wheel, then…
Yeah. And there’s definitely times, especially with like databases where you need backend developers, for sure. Well, it’s wonderful what you’re doing because I think a lot of people are inspired by wanting to build a business, whatever their idea is, whatever their why is, and for the vast majority, like building the prettiest looking website is probably not their core why. Otherwise, they would be front-end web developers. And so it’s wonderful. Thank you so much for describing your journey, how, your first idea that didn’t exactly provide what you wanted, I’m careful not to use the F word again.
You can say it. I’m so proud that I failed.
In the entrepreneurial world, it’s actually like a badge of honor, like, “I failed,” with startup, you might as well have like a bumper sticker that said, “I failed six times,” and it’s kind of like having hail-dented cars in the storm chasing community, it just really shows that you’ve like been roughed up a little bit by whatever you’re doing. So your first failed business but how the lessons you learned really inspired the business that you have now that you’re building traction with and also how we can all go about really kind of starting from like when we have the idea, starting to actually get moving on it because I think there’s a lot of resistance there. There’s a spot there that keeps a lot of people stuck where they are in life, that spot like, “Okay, I have this great idea but now what? Oh, my God, this is so daunting.” So one of the best things you can probably do is talk to people. Talk to people in general. Talk to your customers, talk to people that can help, contact Allie at that meepmeep site.
And talk to other founders because they’ve been through it before. And a lot of times, it’s not necessarily the daunting task. Entrepreneurs love hard stuff to do.
Yeah.
It’s more of the scary psychological aspect of, “Oh, shit. If I actually did this thing, then it’d be out there and then people would see it and people would do it and I might fail,” and that’s where a lot of that self-reflection work comes in, really ask yourself are you willing to put — because it’s you. You’re putting yourself out there and you can’t get around that.
You are, and I think also most people who build something had the experience of having an anxiety event about that. I mean, just because you like had one night where you’re like preparing to put yourself out there and you’re like, “I can’t sleep, I’m having trouble breathing,” doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not prepared to do it.
Just because you told someone about it and they didn’t like the idea doesn’t mean that it’s not a good idea. Share on XOne person’s opinion, right?
Yeah. Ooh, it’s so hard.
Exactly. Well, Allie, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes and telling the story and I’d also like to thank all the listeners out there for tuning in to this episode or any of the other 94 episodes before this and encouraging —
Keep going.
Yeah, we’re going to get to 100 pretty soon. Yeah, hop back on. And encourage you all to tune in to more episodes for more inspiring stories about people who’ve pursued their true passions in life and have some insights about how you could kind of overcome whatever barriers you’re trying to overcome and get into the life that you truly want because it’s there if you’re willing to overcome some things, look deep inside yourself, and put in some effort.
Thanks so much, Stephen. It’s been really fun. Thanks for having me.
Thank you and everybody have a wonderful day.
Important Links:
- Allie on Linkedin
- MEEP
- User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton
- Wild by Cheryl Strayed
- The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber
- The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks
- Effortless by Greg McKeown
About Allie Reitz
Allie is an experienced product pro, UX designer, and entreprenerd with a huge passion for the power of design thinking and no-code tools to fuel impact-driven startups. Allie is the founder and CEO of Meep, a Denver-based studio that jumps in alongside impact startups to move them from idea to traction through founder coaching, design thinking workshops, UX strategy, and no-code MVP development.