Stop Hunting the Eierlegende Wollmilchsau!

We were enjoying Oktoberfest recently and it brought to mind that this is a great time to remind everyone to beware the temptation to hunt down or create an eierlegende Wollmilchsau, the mythical German egg-laying wool-providing milk-producing sow. A graphic way of describing the tendency to want to deliver all things to all people. 

This is something we see often with tech start-ups. You’ve got great technology, now you have to get it to market. The danger is in trying to deliver everything on the first go around to every potential customer for every conceivable application.

Stop! Trying to deliver everything to everybody is the antithesis of what you need to do to get your product out on a timely basis and to begin generating revenue.

Instead, see if you can isolate/find/identify a reduced subset of customers, determine a reduced set of features that come closest to delivering what that customer set needs, and build the minimum viable product (MVP) to get your product out the door, and take it from there. Allow your customers and the market to confirm what your next step should be. 

To our friends and colleagues in Germany, we hope you had an enjoyable Oktoberfest! And to our friends and colleagues in America, yeah, that usually starts in September.

Image courtesy of de:User:Pixelrausch, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons