With Theatrical-At-Home, we very quickly built a minimum viable product for one film and 50–100 partners.
It’s possible to scale to around 5–10 films and a couple hundred partners.
But what if it was to grow to 100 films, 10 distributors and 1,000s of partners?
Then the MVP requirements change.
Products are built to solve problems. Sometimes the best products are built under fire, because the functionality is necessary now, and the MVP feature-set is achieved with focus and efficiency. But that doesn’t mean that the product will last. It is likely, that at some point, it will need well thought out architecture to withstand scale.
Now that I have the pressure off, I am faced with an ever growing list of features I would “like to have” but are not necessarily mandatory.
I just need to get our streaming service through the next 8 weeks, and then I can take it offline (or grow it if I want to.) Over these weeks, I would like to scale our partners and sales so that moving into digital, we can reach more people, use it for market tests, and add more partners. It’s not quite where I want it to be to support this.
No product on the market does everything we need right now — but more products are coming on line every week. The innovation and problem-solving is amazing.
I am continually on the look out for the best products that will meet our needs in the current climate and that also fit within our budget.
At the end of the day, I have always wanted control of the distribution process. I hunger for this option. That doesn’t mean I must build it all myself. I can put the pieces together with other existing technology — and possibly even influence the development of that technology.
Product development… Maybe the best thing to do is to focus on my most immediate needs for the next 6 weeks and then later look for long-term solutions.
What I am finding is that as we add partners and agree to new events, that urgency is what drives product & feature development — the same way our promise to stream on 3/20 drove three days of intense streaming platform creation.
I often follow shiny objects, and it’s so tempting for me to start from scratch building something with all the bells and whistles but which might not serve any purpose.
I will attempt to focus on solving immediate problems and growing our sales channel — and then later look at long-term solutions as the industry learns what is needed.
♡ Annie
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash