Minimum Viable Blog
The Part About Inaction And Counters To It
I love the phrase minimum viable. I love it for various reasons, but the simplest of these is that it helps me counter my particular experience of perfectionism.
Perfectionism is the enemy of most productive behavior. Some suffer from it worse than others. I have a particularly nasty strain of it: in the event that I believe I will not be able to do a near-perfect job, my first instinct is to not do the job at all. Since perfect work is mythological, and I know it is, a minor effort of thought is sometimes all it takes to decide not to do something I have cleverly convinced myself is impossible. Inaction is unbecoming and even tragic; it is widely held that inaction was Hamlet’s tragic flaw, for instance.
This is unacceptable. Things need to get done. Not only that, but I am fairly convinced that I personally have to do some of them. This is where minimum viable is such a help. It doesn’t have to be perfect (whatever “it” is) to be worth it. It just has to be barely good enough to serve whatever end it’s working toward. Now, it often ends up a lot better than “barely good enough,” but this criteria is a lot more practical than “as near to perfect as possible.”
This latter criteria is often default, unvoiced, unexamined. It may find its form as “the best I can do” or something similar; clinging to it is a good way to join Hamlet in his tragic flaw. He might’ve benefited from considering a minimum viable regicide plan and working from there; we could’ve been spared that whole play-within-a-play business. He clearly understood the problem when he said,
And thus the Native hue of Resolution
Is sicklied o'er, with the pale cast of Thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard their Currents turn awry,
And lose the name of Action…
When inaction is unacceptable (and/or likely to lead to unnecessary tragedy), minimum viable helps me keep “the name of Action.” I prefer to be a hero of the non-tragic variety whenever possible.
A related term I sometimes find useful is satisfice. My preferred definition holds that satisfice is “optimization that takes the cost of optimizing into account.” The fact that I prefer this definition reveals once again my latent perfectionism; a better definition might be “the art of the good enough.”
Minimum viable is an idea I use in support of actually satisficing instead of pretend-optimizing and then actually not doing anything. Satisfice is a process, and creating the minimum viable x can be an early step in that process.
Creating something with the intention of making a minimal first step also leads naturally to feedback and iteration, which are also often useful for satisfice; early “optimization” without feedback or with a very long feedback cycle is even more naïve than “optimization” that doesn’t account for its own cost.
So, I love the phrase minimum viable, owe Eric Ries a debt of gratitude for popularizing the term to the point that I encountered it, and this is my minimum viable blog launch.
The Part About Launching This Blog
My criteria for a minimum viable blog were simple:
- I should have sufficient control over it that effort invested into it is unlikely to be lost and change is easy.
- It should have visual characteristics that make it easy to read.
- It should be valuable to some person other than me.
- It should be something I can have running smoothly within a day or two of starting.
To satisfy these conditions, I opted to:
- register a domain name of my own (so that I can easily re-point it if my implementation needs to change)
- use wordpress.com, at least at first (fast, easy to make readable, easy to export from).
- use the the Blaskan theme, which I found by googling “wordpress.com theme readability” and settled on very quickly.
- compose posts in Editorially to allow me to compose quickly and comfortably in Markdown, collaborate easily with my co-author and reviewers, and produce additional remote and local copies of my work as a welcome side-effect of moving posts to WordPress.
- recruit my sister as co-author, which makes it more likely that the project will have ongoing value.
- use as launch material my lightning talk from CAST 2013 (it was very well received and I promised people I’d blog about it, so I know there’s some other person who this is valuable for, and since the logical framework and some of the language were already known to me, it was fast to write).
- explicitly choose a format with an note-dump at the end so all the ideas that crowd me as I’m trying to write can find minimum-viable-expression and leave me free to focus on what I mean to write.
As it stands now, here’s roughly the procedure I use to post content here:
- Create a document in Editorially and write a post there, sharing it with my co-author and working on it on and off over the course of a day or two, dumping ideas that don’t fit into the flow of the post to Points Of Articulation at the end.
- Export that document to HTML (and file the .html doc the export process creates in a backup folder), briefly review the markup in Notepad++, and copy/paste it into the Text view of the WordPress.com editor.
- Preview it, notice any glaring errors (especially in markdown-to-html-translation), correct in editorially if necessary (and re-export, re-preview).
- Publish it, then announce it by tweeting the link.
This is probably not, strictly speaking, the minimum viable blog-post procedure, but I have lost enough work to the whimsy of WYSIWYG editors in the past that it was the lightest procedure I felt comfortable with.
Points Of Articulation
- There will be a seperate post, soon, to explain more thoroughly what this Points Of Articulation section is for (probably in combination with an exploration of the name of the blog itself); for now, expect to see one in every post.
- Yes, I appreciate the irony of an elaborate Shakespeare reference in a post about executing a minimum viable blog launch. This illustrates again that action motivated or enabled by the idea of minimum viable are not always necessarily executed in full accordance with it, and that’s fine.
- Editorially is in closed beta. If you’d like an invite, are interested in blogging, and have met me, (the internet can count, here) ask.
- Jerry Weinberg wrote a book called Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing. I haven’t read it. I expect that it bears on the issues of perfection and satisfice, though, and this will be a good place for a link to the eventual review, when I get to it.
- I’ve pointed it out elsewhere but it bears repeating: the awesome idea for the name of this blog came originally from Aubrey, and I am very glad we have it.
- If you are interested in examining Hamlet’s tragic flaw from a variety of (hilarious) angles, I recommend To Be Or Not To Be by Ryan North. It’s a choosable-path-adventure-story parody of Hamlet. Shakespeare’s path through the story is marked; after a couple of instances of seeing The Bard choose things like “have a nap” over “go kill Claudius,” I developed a special appreciation for the raw scale of Hamlet’s tragic inaction.
- Satisfice is the name of James Bach’s site. His blog was my introduction to the term.
Articulated Thinking 
I think you are missing a fifth item in your minimum requirements. I grant you, you almost sort of cover it, but you don’t address the need to create a blog which is accessible to your audience, not to mention, you failed to address your audience. Even if it is articulate thinkers (the domain name), it should have been one of the criterion before choosing said name. Otherwise, I agree that a blog is simply a casting out of thoughts and that rather than making it perfect, write and seeing if they resonates. With little risk of failure since what is the worst? People don’t agree? People don’t read it? You wasted a few days learning a new tool? In any case, good luck!