Alexander Salter: “By his own admission, Matthew Hennessey is an unlikely author of an economics book. He has no experience in business, accounting, or finance. Until fairly recently, he was quite intimidated by the dismal science. Yet he’s managed to become the Wall Street Journal’s deputy op-ed editor, so he likely knows a thing or two about markets. Over the course of 200 entertaining pages, he proves it. Visible Hand is the elementary economics book we’ve been waiting for. I don’t mean it’s an Econ 101 text of the kind college freshmen wearily slog through. It’s something much more important: an everyman’s introduction to how property rights, prices, and profits and losses make the world go ‘round. I hope we can get copies of this book in the hands of every high school senior in the country.”
Leif Abraham: “Canonical advice for builders is to start by building an MVP or “Minimum Viable Product.” We try and get our teams to focus on a different first step, creating a “Minimum Marketable Product” or MMP. What’s the difference? A lot of the time, builders confuse MVPs with prototypes and/or focus solely on the feature set. MMPs get away from this framing by including several other factors in the process. When you’re building an MMP you have to take into account factors like design, branding, and positioning. The result is that MMPs are actually sellable. They’re compelling enough to attract real customers. Moreover, because of the extra care that goes into an MMP, they create a good first impression. I believe it’s extremely hard to change someone’s opinion of a product after that first encounter.”
