I was in a meeting this morning with the team at Legal Guide Philippines. Team initiatives. The kind of conversation where you find out whether people are waiting for instructions or actually building something.
I try to put employees inside the projects. Not as extras. So they know why we're doing it, they have a hand in it, and they feel some responsibility if it works or it doesn't. Buy-in is not a speech. It's a name on a thing that can fail in public.
Three of our liaison officers came in with their own projects. All aimed at people outside Legal Guide Philippines — possible clients, people who need help and don't know us yet.
Transferring land titles.
Applying for a business registration.
Renewing a business registration.
I liked the ideas. We decided to develop them.
I started teaching them the marketing underneath. Landing pages. Copywriting. Scriptwriting. Lead magnets. How you get someone's attention, how you say what the thing is worth, how you move them from "ah, I have that problem" to the next step.
They weren't just being told, "Please do this." They were getting a look at how the machinery works. I hope they appreciate that. I think they do.
Then we hit the glitch.
When the boss becomes the problem
The original plan was for every lead magnet to be a mini course. That sounded complete. It also meant videos.
Curriculum. Scripts. Lighting. Recording dates. Editing. Revisions. Upload. Post-production. And a lot of that required me or my partner.
Three projects. Two lawyers with cameras. We were going to get bogged down taping all of it at the same time.
They had already done what they were supposed to do. We were about to become the delay.
I didn't want that job. A team that can move without you is a team. A team that waits for your calendar is a queue.
That's when I remembered something I'd read in Eric Ries' The Lean Startup. Minimum viable product. MVP.
What that actually means
Ries didn't use MVP as a license to ship something cheap. He put it inside a loop he called Build-Measure-Learn.
You build something.
You put it in front of people.
You see what happens.
You learn.
Then you decide what to build next.
The point is not "the smallest object you can throw out the door." It's the version that teaches you the most with the least unnecessary work.
Viable still matters. The thing has to work. It has to solve a problem. Someone has to want to use it. It just doesn't need every feature you imagined for version five.
Stop trying to predict the whole product from inside the conference room. Put something useful out and start learning.
That solved our problem.
We didn't really need a course. Not yet.
I started asking what the lead magnet was even for.
Did someone transferring a title need studio lighting? Did someone applying for a registration need a full curriculum and a learning platform? Or did they need the information, in a form we could actually send?
Once you ask it that way, version one is obvious.
Distill what's valuable into a downloadable PDF.
No filming this month. No production calendar blocking three projects. No waiting for two people to record three courses before anyone outside the office sees a page.
The information is still there. People can still use it. The team can still distribute it. And instead of another six months for a fully formed first version, we can roll these out in days.
This is not me skipping the videos.
The courses are not dead. Taping later is still on the table. Videos stay in the plan — deferred, not dropped. If the PDFs work — if people download them, use them, ask for more — then we film. We'll film with better material, because we'll already know which parts mattered and which parts nobody opened.
We put off the big chunk so we could ship the useful chunk. When the cameras come out, they'll be pointed at something the market already voted for. That's a better use of everyone's time, including the officers who built these in the first place.
The first versions go live at offer.legalguide.ph. Title transfer. New registration. Renewal. If you're in the middle of one of those, download what you need. That's version one. Not the course. The thing we can put in your hands this week.
You get to ship
There's a big difference between a plan and a thing that exists.
A perfect product six months from now helps nobody today. A simpler one next week can already start doing work — reaching people, testing the campaign, seeing if the idea holds.
You cannot measure what hasn't been built. You cannot learn from customers who haven't used anything. That's the loop in ordinary clothes.
There's another benefit that's easy to skip.
Momentum.
A team changes when something goes live. Downloads happen. Questions arrive. The project stops living in a shared drive.
Compare that with six months of preparation nobody outside the office has seen. Long cycles drain even a good idea. Sometimes you ship version one because the work needs to become real.
Then reality talks back
This part matters more than speed.
Once people use the file, they tell you things a meeting cannot. They stay on one section. They get lost in another. They ask the question you assumed nobody would ask. The piece you thought was essential turns out to be decoration. The line you almost cut is the one they keep.
I'd rather make those mistakes early, while the object is still small.
Imagine waiting six months, building the complete thing exactly as first imagined, then finding out the audience didn't want it. You didn't only lose the months. You spent them getting very good at building the wrong thing.
Ries' point is blunt: learning from use beats a beautiful plan that never left the building.
Small mistakes are cheaper. They're easier to correct. And because you've invested less, it's easier to change direction when the evidence says so.
Version two shows up sooner
After version one is out, version two can be built from what happened instead of what we guessed.
We'll learn from these PDFs on our side — how painful they are to prepare and update, how we store them, where the process stalls. And on their side — did people read them, what was missing, what they ignored, what questions came after.
Then 1.1. Then 2.
If the program is working, that's when we tape. Not as a rescue. As the next version. A mini course made after we've seen which lessons people actually needed is a different object from three courses we filmed because that was the first plan.
The first plan is a stack of assumptions. The job is not to execute that plan faithfully. The job is to test the risky ones soon enough that you can turn before you've spent the year on the wrong road.
Don't make the destination the entry fee
This is where projects freeze.
We picture the finished object and accidentally treat that picture as the requirement for starting. The site with fifty pages. The course with twelve modules. The channel with a studio. The business with an office, a roster, branding, automation.
Some of that may belong later. Almost none of it has to exist before the idea can start teaching you.
What has to exist for this to deliver value — and teach us something — now?
A course can begin as a PDF. A platform can begin as a spreadsheet. A process can stay manual until you know which part is worth automating.
You're not abandoning the larger picture. You're taking the shortest path to finding out whether that picture deserves the rest of the year. And if it does, the heavy work — the taping, the edit, the platform — lands later, on better ground.
Minimum is not an excuse to be sloppy
People hear minimum and think the lesson is: do less work.
That's not it.
The aim is to stop producing things you don't yet know you need. Different job.
The PDFs still have to be useful. The writing still has to be clear. The information still has to be accurate. They still have to help someone move a title, file a first registration, or get a renewal done. If they don't, they aren't viable.
What we cut was not value. We moved the expensive production to a point where it can be done better. After we've learned. Not instead of learning.
Perfection is a very expensive way to hide
It's easy to tell yourself you're improving the work when you're only postponing the moment the world gets to judge it.
Another polish. Another meeting. Another piece of equipment. Another plan. At some point preparation starts feeling like production, and nothing has left the building.
Is this useful enough to ship?
If yes, ship it. Listen. Change it.
Version one will not be the best version. It isn't supposed to be. Its job is to teach you what version two should become.
If you wait to be perfect, you might miss the bus. And the thing you finally ship may no longer be the thing anyone needed.
If you want to see what version one looks like in our case: offer.legalguide.ph. Download what you need. Tell us what's missing. That's the point of sending it now.
Book mentioned
Eric Ries, The Lean Startup. Minimum viable product, validated learning, Build-Measure-Learn: ship the smallest version that still works, see what people do with it, then decide what version two should be.