The Idea Maze: How MyMBA Helped Build The Tech Progressive
The idea maze is an idea by Balaji Srinivasan about the struggle of founding a company. (Chris Dixon writes a nice summary here).
The main takeaway is that building a company isn’t about having one big idea. Instead, there are many possible paths that branch out from this first idea. The difficult part is taking a step back and navigating the correct path.
Since the summer of 2020, I’ve run six cohort-based educational programs. Four of these cohorts were part of MyMBA. Two were part of The Tech Progressive.
In this post, I’ll walk you through the idea maze that led me from MyMBA to The Tech Progressive. While I plan to continue to run a version of MyMBA, The Tech Progressive uncovered some important information that will guide me as I continue to build in this space.
The story begins with struggles at MyMBA. While MyMBA Members’ loved the MyMBA experience, we struggled on the demand side. Among other issues, our message and branding was unclear. We had to get focused.
To improve, I asked a friend who works full-time in Product Management to help me understand MyMBA and the benefits we were providing to our “users.”
We both knew that there was something there with MyMBA. People were paying for the product. People were getting clear value, writing great testimonials, and telling their friends about the experience. But, how could we focus in on the main value proposition to clarify our messaging and increase demand?
Through months of customer interviews, we learned that two parts of the MyMBA experience were the most valuable to MyMBA Members:
Writing
Connecting with others
These two areas stood above the additional bells and whistles that we attached to the experience (taking Coursera courses, meeting with business leaders, workshops, and additional exercises).
Our core insight was the following: the main benefit we provided was creating an environment of like-minded, supportive people that helped our “users” to write (and ultimately experience the downstream benefits of writing like career growth, learning, self-discovery, opportunity creation, network building, etc.).
In line with focusing on writing and connecting, we were also struggling with another problem with MyMBA - the audience was too broad. Again, the program didn’t have enough focus, and this was hurting our messaging. We decided we needed to get specific. But where should we focus in on?
Asymmetric bets are one of the core ideas I’ve learned from reading Nassim Taleb’s work. The basic idea is to take many low risk, high reward bets with the hopes that one bet has high returns.
As such, while building MyMBA, I was taking side bets, following my interests, and conducting experiments.
One of these bets was a website I started called bestofbalalji.com. This was a quick exercise where I compiled some of the best writing from Balaji Srinivasan.
The result was this tweet:
From running this experiment, I learned that there was interest in topics that Balaji was discussing (far more interest than MBA-related topics).
This experiment gave me the information I needed to gain additional focus.
Rather than painting a broad brush as a MBA alternative, we would focus our writing and learning on Balaji-related topics (web3, longevity, startup cities, etc.). The result: The Tech Progressive.
The Tech Progressive combined our two key insights:
Focus on the writing and community. We made the program really simple. From our website, “Join our community and publish a new technologically progressive essay every day for 7 days. Limit each essay to 500 words.”
Find a tighter niche. Learning from the positive feedback around the Balaji related content, we named it The Tech Progressive and focused our writing on tech progressive topics: web3, longevity, startup cities, etc.
To launch The Tech Progressive, we used materials and best practices learned from MyMBA.
We ran two cohorts of The Tech Progressive at the end of 2021, and it was a huge success. We published over 135 essays in just two months. Read some here.
We will continue to run The Tech Progressive and a version of MyMBA going into 2022.
In addition, we’ve gained more information through running The Tech Progressive that will help to guide us further through the idea maze (more to come!).
In summary, the idea maze is about navigation. When I started MyMBA, I knew that the original idea wouldn’t be the winner.
But, it offered a place to start. I learned a ton from running four cohorts of MyMBA, and this helped to build The Tech Progressive.
Similarly, The Tech Progressive is moving further in the right direction. But, I know that there will be additional iterations and paths to take down the maze of ideas.
Great summary!
Have loved seeing the evolution of MyMBA to Tech Progressive! Also, the Tech Progressive website looks awesome! Keep crushing it Grant!👊