Lessons from a Journey of Innovation
TABLE OF CONTENTS
WEEK ZERO
A big part of our culture at Never Settle is learning how to live outside the box while
developing new products. We have found that the further outside the box we journey the
more creative we get. This has led us to explore what we like to call internal experiments.
We integrate the successful ones into our culture, and absorb the failures by learning
from them and moving on. 40 Hours A Week – No More No Less and Leap Week are
examples of successful crazy internal experiments that we have completed in the past
which are now part of our internal culture.
We’re continually looking at how we can get better at bringing new products to market,
and last September we began looking at this concept from Inc Magazine about taking
new products From Idea to Market in Less Than One Month. This must have seeped into
our team’s subconscious, waiting for the right moment to sprout, because one fateful
weekend in the middle of August 2014 two of our core team members independently had
the same idea. One of them was just thinking his normal radical thoughts, and the other
was pondering a way to solve our need for retail shipping automation by integrating
WordPress with Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) through a new custom plugin. In the second
case, it got our lead architect’s gears turning on the possibilities:
At the next core team meeting our lead designer mentioned that over the weekend a crazy
idea had lodged itself in his brain. When our lead architect replied that he had an epic
idea burning a hole in his mind too, everyone wondered: “what if they were the same?”
We decided they should write their ideas down independently and then show them on the
count of 3; this is basically what they each revealed:
This is exactly how the 12 Products in 12 Weeks (12x12) project was born. Yes, looking
back, that was pure insanity. We knew that we could learn a TON from repetitive small
batch cycles. However, we also had enough realism to understand that while a year would
be way too much to start with, 12 weeks had the possibility of being doable, especially if
we remained disciplined to follow the
MVP approach. The Minimum Viable
Product (MVP) concept originated with
Frank Robinson and was popularized
by Eric Ries through his Lean Startup
book and his other Lean method
evangelism efforts. The principle of the
MVP is a core component of how we
approach product development at
Never Settle. It was therefore central to
this idea of releasing a product per
week for 12 weeks, and will show up in
its acronym form quite a few times in
this book.
The more the team talked about it, the more we especially liked the idea of creating an
intentional story to inform, inspire, and document what can otherwise be a rather
mundane and slow or even haphazard process of engineering new products. Suddenly,
stretching towards Never Settle’s long-term company goal of becoming a product-based
business rather than a services-based business felt attainable in a more tangible and
practical way than it ever had before. And it was clear that there would be a lot of beneficial
side effects to the process:
➲ It would force intentionality around content. Blogging is something that we always
want to do more of but never seem to find the time to do enough of. This campaign
would require - at minimum - two blog posts a week: one for the actual product and
the other announcing the news about the release.
➲ It would open new conversations with existing and potential customers. Each
product would create additional exposure for Never Settle among new user
demographics and the project would provide tangible, valuable material for more
frequent newsletters.
➲ It would improve our overall SEO footprint. All the content generated for each
product would be naturally keyword-rich and relevant to our industry, target
audience, and product space.
➲ It would generate focus in the Never Settle Story. It would help create the story
that we want to pursue.
➲ It would challenge ALL of our assumptions about wanting to be a product based
company, what types of products we think we can make successful, and our ability
to execute them.
Our original Leap of Faith Assumptions about the benefits of and reasons for doing this
crazy experiment were:
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To hold ourselves accountable to pursuing our innovation core value
To create concentrated focus on new product creation and foster creative MVP’s
To improve as a product-oriented company via small batch production benefits
To generate momentum for new products by rooting them in an interesting story
To push our limits and leverage the refining power of risk
As we reach the finish line of this innovation marathon it is incredible to look back and
see what we have accomplished, built, and launched by pushing our own limits:
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4 Premium WordPress Plugins
4 Free WordPress Plugins
1 Free Lean Experiment Tool
1 Daily Deal Website
1 Mobile App
1 Royalty Free Music and Audio Package
1 Business eBook
Throughout the entire process, we also had to keep on top of our normal client work and
run the company - all under 40 hours a week per person. But maybe even more amazing
is what we’ve learned along the way. And somewhere between Week 4 and Week 5 we
knew that we had to bundle our learning into a nice little package and share it with anyone
else looking for inspiration and a little bit of crazy to kickstart a fresh perspective on rapid,
lean product development. And that’s how the idea for Product #12 was originally
conceived, and you are reading it.