the personalization and transactional wireframes — no user profiles, shopping carts, or user reviews. The MVP’s experience simply didn’t need it. The product went from fat to lean; it was going to do a lot less but do it well. That was crucial, because we didn’t have the time or the resources to build out the original feature-heavy version. We also had the common two-sided marketplace issue of the chicken and the egg. Without users to trade “stuff,” who would come to trade with them? Thus, the age-old question: what came first, the trader or the tradee? Here’s where Jared made the experiment more intense. He insisted that everybody on the team (investors, developers, designers, all of us) had to test this by coming up with goods or services to trade until each of us had completed a successful trade. I had not planned on getting my hands this dirty! I didn’t have any old couches or personal computers that I wanted (or needed) to trade. So I chose to trade on my UX skills. (See Figure 7-8.) My trade-of-the-day offer was two hours of my UX consulting time over Skype in exchange for either a) open to offers or b) the highly specific task of converting some old Flash animations of mine into YouTube videos. Figure 7-8. My own TradeYa on TradeYa It was scary yet fun. Moreover, it was truly like our original value proposition, a dating site for your shit. Within 24 hours, I accepted a trade offer from Edward, a digital consultant out of Portland. This was when I wholeheartedly connected the dots. I had firsthand experience that the value proposition and UX weren’t quite like eBay; rather, it was much closer to OkCupid. The trade was successful. Edward put my animated cartoon series on YouTube, and I schooled him on how