In tech, MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) are talked about a lot.
An MVP is whatever product takes the least amount of work to build while allowing you to test demand.
Sometimes MVPs are technical, like perhaps a website made with Wix.
However, MVPS are often non-technical. In fact, usually you'd rather a non-technical MVP since almost always they require less work.
Consulting, for instance, has always been a great MVP. You hire yourself out as a consultant to manually solve a problem that you hope to eventually build a product for. Then you slowly make your job easier by building tech, until you have a product you can sell in your place.
Recently I realized that teaching is another great MVP, in fact it's basically just better than consulting in every way, if your goal is to eventually launch a product.
Here's an example: My friend has a company which helps people not procrastinate. At first, as an individual he helped himself and others not procrastinate. Then he made a course which sold these learnings to others, at a higher scale., then after seeing how 50+ people deal with procrastination, he has been building products to make solving those problems easier— with a captive audience of early adopters in his students and alumni.
By teaching a course you get many of the benefits of consulting— immediate revenue, test of willingness to pay, hands on learning about the problem/product, but you take a big step towards a product. You can't just fix problem for your customers as you would do while consulting. You need to codify the process through which the customer can fix the problem themselves.
5 years ago using an online course as an MVP this wasn't easy. Online learning was popular but still generally perceived as lower quality and less valuable than in-person. Launching an in person class in order to test a product idea probably wasn't worth the work and launching an online class probably wouldn't get you much traction. Today, however, thanks to Covid online learning is all the rage. Tools to help you market, enroll and run an online class get better every day, and customers are lining up (digitally) to take rad courses from the convenience of their home.
So my goal now is to transition as much of my consulting as possible into courses on the same topics. I want to bring my services to more people at once, while everyone, including me, still benefits in the same way. A product would eventually be good, but a course is a great first step.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gaynor.substack.com