We've got this value hypothesis about Trent, the technician. And, we've reviewed here the question the thing that we're solving for with Lean Startup and the use of these explicit demand or value hypotheses is, how do we figure out if this is a true or a false with a minimum of time and money and effort? Which definitely does not mean completely building this thing out, hopefully. And So, how do we do that? Well, that's what this body of work around Lean Startup is really about. If you're familiar with Lean Startup, you probably seen this build measure learn process. And the idea actually is that you start here with learn, you then build something ideally not a product and then you measure the results. And, what you're working towards is a situation where you get into a definitive true or false. And for our purposes here, we're taking a more kind of expansive view of how this fits into everything else we might be doing. I like to use this old standby the scientific method to kind of unpack this process a little further and a little more specifically for our purpose. In science, we start out with some kind of idea. And, really the idea that we're starting out with in this discipline, in this approach with hypothesis-driven development is a validated persona and problem hypothesis. So we know who this person is and what is on there A list. And that is an extremely powerful way to make sure that you brought the right focus to this particular area. Ask any practicing scientist the best way to get an interesting, useful experimental result and they'll probably tell you, go into the experiment with a well-researched, well-thought-out hypothesis that you're going to test. And so, then we make sure that our hypothesis is explicit. Meaning that it's declared in a way where we can test it and we can look at a result and say it's a true or false, a positive or negative. And that's what we've done with the declaration of the value hypothesis in our example so far and what you'll learn to get in the habit of doing. Then, and this is really where the kind of action and and I will say the hard part is experimental design. We have to think about, in this case, how we can creatively pair away the question of demand, of value, of motivation and test it on a standalone basis without actually building out the whole product and seeing if people use it and pay for it or not. Not that's really where the action is with Lean Startup. And that's really where this idea of the MVP or the minimum viable product comes into play. We run our experiment and what we're driving towards is a definitive moment where we either say in the parlance of Lean Startup area creases book. A pivotal or persevere moment where we either say, hey, this idea is not a winner. We're going to pivot and do something else or hey, this idea looks good. Let's persevere and let's take the next step of investing in this and seeing if it's a winner or not. One of the most critical things in doing this in formulating a good value or demand hypothesis is to decouple this question of demand from usability. And for that, I really like BJ Fogg's fog curve. The idea here is that we have ability which is just the inverse of usability on the the x-axis here, and we have motivation on the y-axis. And out here, we're getting action on the part of the user and here we're getting in action. And, if you can imagine a point here, this would be like a cure for cancer. Even if it's really hard to use or gad or whatever, I'm extremely motivated have it because I don't want to die. And if you can imagine something down here, this is a stick of gum, that if I happen to have it maybe it's enjoyable. But if it's a lot of trouble, I'm not going to do it or posting a photo to Facebook or something like that. And so, the the questions of motivation or demand and usability they're related but they're not the same thing. And our job with Lean Startup and testing our value or demand hypothesis is to, first of all, declare a nice clear hypothesis where we pair away as many questions of usability so that we can test this independently. And that's what will enable us to use really surgical, really focused MVPs that we can run in a week or so. And, some of the most famous examples of successful MVPs, most of them, in fact, are things you can run in just around a week.
