Emissare Part 2: Put up your jukes

I bought some boxing gloves recently. The gym in my apartment complex has a few punching bags, and since I will do anything to avoid traditional cardio, I figured some bag work might just be the ticket. For the last 6 months I've been throwing 3,000 punches per day, and I think I might be ready for prime time. Today I'm headed down to a boxing gym to spar for the first time. This might be the start of a new career...

UPDATE: Well, I got paired with a 12-year-old and he beat me up. It turns out I'm much less effective of a boxer when the bag punches back...

Yeah, okay, bit of a stretch using that meme, but let's roll with it. The point is, until you're testing your whole pipeline, you don't know if your product is usable/enjoyable/effective. One example that still puzzles me is the concept known as "air taxis". The pitch: instead of driving from A to B, fly there instead. Only you can't land an aircraft at A or B, so first install vertiports at C and D. Thus, you drive from A→C, fly from C→D, then drive from D→B. Companies are spending millions of dollars developing the technology for the C→D leg. Well, that's not entirely true. The tech has existed for decades and it's called a helicopter, but my engineering house is 95% glass, so I'll drop my stones on this one.

If you are an engineer and you want to build a business, the first thing you need to do is treat your engineering self like Hannibal Lecter and lock it in a dark room. Engineers want to do one thing, BUILD, and by doing so they eat up all your time and money. So if you have an idea for a product, first ask yourself, what's the quickest way to fake it? This notion has been dubbed the Minimum Viable Process, and I think it's underutilized (probably because "minimum viable product" is the real MVP as far as Google's concerned). For the sake of disambiguation, let's call it a Minimum Viable Method. For your MVM you're trying to build as little as possible, with the goal of simulating the customer experience. The downside to the MVM is the likely discovery that your idea is garbage, and why would anyone ever want to learn something that challenged their worldview?

Let's check back in with the air taxis. I wonder if any of these companies have tested putting users through the A-C-D-B route? You wouldn't even have to use helicopters for C→D, just do your testing in the middle of the night and drive C to D on empty streets. But at least simulate the process of driving from A to C, going up an elevator to the roof, getting checked in, and waiting for your departure. Then drive to D, repeat the whole roof process in reverse, and finally drive to B. Yes, you faked the most interesting and technologically challenging part, but at least you didn't have to wait 15+ years (and counting!) to see if anyone would actually use what you're building. I love aviation, and eVTOLs are very cool, but if you took my single-leg trip and made it 3 times as challenging and 20 times as expensive, I might not be too excited.

As for my future as Apollo Bleed, how would I create a boxing MVM? I'd stick my wife on the other side of that bag with two plastic baseball bats and let her go to town. I'd get used to defending myself, and she'd get revenge for the fact that I take 30 minutes to get ready for bed every night. If you visit talktoadrone.com you will always interact with our latest MVM. We've got all sorts of fake stuff behind the scenes. We're gradually replacing that fake stuff with slightly less fake stuff, and eventually it will all be real and we'll have our product. In the meantime, we're able to demonstrate what it's like to use our aircraft and find a lot of the pain points that have nothing to do with engineering.

Now, I'm not suggesting you launch a fake product with no clue how you're ever going to connect the dots. But I don't think there's any harm in fudging a few things, especially if it gets you closer to the finish line. So slap on those training wheels and hit the road. There's a lot more to riding a bike than just balance (Wasn't this post about boxing at one point?😕).

Don't forget about your footwork.

- Greg