Last week’s sentence promised one thing. This week you decide what that one thing is made of, and, more usefully, what it is not. The second list is longer, and it is the one that protects you.
The failure this week guards against is quiet. Nobody decides to build too much. It happens one reasonable addition at a time. A quoting tool for sign shops needs a price list, obviously. The price list needs materials, and materials have suppliers, and suppliers change prices, so the tool should track that. Customers need to receive the quote, so it needs email, and once there is email there should be a record of what was sent, and now there is a customer database, and it is eleven months later and the sign shop owner has still not seen anything. Every step was sensible. The whole was a year.
The way out is to start from the sentence and ask what the least the thing can be and still make that sentence true. Quotes while the customer is on the phone. The least version of that might be a spreadsheet the owner fills in during the call that produces a clean quote she can read back, and a way to send it as a PDF. That is a week of work, not a year, and it makes the sentence true. Whether it is enough is a question for the customer, not for you, and you will ask her next week. This week you only need the smallest true version written down.
Then write the list of what it will not do. Be specific and be generous with it. It will not store customers. It will not track jobs after the quote is accepted. It will not know about suppliers. It will not have accounts for employees, because the owner does the quoting. It will not integrate with anything. It will not have a mobile app. Each line on this list is a thing you are choosing not to spend months on, and each one is also a thing you can add later if the first version earns it. Write the list where you will see it, because the pressure to cross things off it starts the day you show anyone the product.
Two kinds of things belong on that list for reasons beyond time. The first is anything that would make the business depend on you being available. A quote tool that needs you to set up each new customer’s price list by hand is a service business wearing software as a costume, and it will eat your evenings once it works. If setup is needed, it has to be something the owner can do herself in twenty minutes with no help, or it goes on the not list until you have figured out how. The second is anything that grows in effort with each customer. If every shop that signs up creates an hour of work for you every month, ten shops is a job and a hundred is impossible. That is the constraint every idea we send is chosen for, and it is the easiest one to lose during the build.
It helps to think about what you will not build in terms of who it disappoints. A version without a customer database disappoints the owner who wanted one system for everything. That owner is not your first customer. Your first customer is the one for whom the quote alone is worth paying for, and there are fewer of her than of the owner who wants everything, but she is the one who buys a product that exists, and the other one buys a product that never ships.
Some people find it easier to decide what to build by writing the page that sells it before writing any code. A single page, in the customer’s words, saying what it does, what it costs, and how to start. Anything you would not put on that page, you do not build. Anything you would be embarrassed to charge for, you do not build yet. The page is not a trick to sell early. It is a way of making the not list concrete, because a page has room for one clear promise and not much else.
Next week, before any of this becomes real, you talk to five of them. The smallest version and the not list are what you bring to those conversations, and they will change. That is what the conversations are for.
The guide before this one: Say it in one sentence they would repeat. Next in the series: Talk to five of them before you build anything. The worksheet for this week: worksheet 4, one page of questions to answer on paper.