Dear reader, thank you so much for your visit. Perhaps you discovered Howard Greenstein’s article over at the Inc. Start-up Tool Kit, which came on suddenly and led me to rapidly deploy this very modest website. Whether you found me by accident or on purpose, welcome. My name is Bob Gilbreath, and this is the home of my new research service, the Minimum Viable Concept Test, or MVC Test for short. In the weeks and months ahead I will use this space to share more information about this new tool for startup founders and investors. But for now, let me share a brief summary… I have spent my entire career working to create and understand new products and services. This journey started in the late ’90s when I became a brand marketer at Procter & Gamble. I was lucky enough to get placed within the group that created successes such as Febreze and Swiffer–along with a lot more failures that you likely never saw. During this time I learned the art and science of understanding people’s unmet needs, creating solutions, and presenting them in a compelling way. After many fits and starts, we gradually developed and discovered tools that brought more rigor to the new product development process. We improved our hit rate and created new-to-the-world categories, adding billions of dollars in revenue and improving the lives of people around the world. Flash forward a few years and I found myself on the investor side of the table, evaluating and assisting consumer digital startups. I quickly discovered that too many investors and founders were making some of the same mistakes that we committed in new product innovation at P&G. The most obvious issue is that new ideas are frequently assessed via gut opinion or “the focus group of one.” These personal opinions frequently cause investors to make bad bets or miss potential winners. I yearned for concept testing and volume forecasting tools like the ones we used routinely at P&G. Alas, I found a few do-it-yourself surveys, but nothing with the level of rigor and insight that is needed to make million-dollar bets. So I decided to make one myself–along with a great deal of input from my group of advisors with experience across research, startups, and investment groups. The result is the Minimum Viable Concept Test. Until now, I have been in stealth mode, working with a handful of investors and entrepreneurs to validate the methodology and prove value. The results have been fantastic. Now I am beginning to reach out to other partners and look forward to sharing further details in this space and at SXSW in a few weeks. In the meantime, if you’re curious to learn more, drop me a line. +Bob Gilbreath