No more crossing my fingers and hoping that customers would love the product after it was built. Now, I needed to insist that my clients let me conduct experiments along the way that tested the UX and the value proposition. Changing our process mid-project was very stressful. Plus, we were running out of funding, so Jared needed to bring in another round of investment. The investors wanted real evidence of a solid rationale for the potential success of our product. The big question Jared kept getting was, “Why would someone want to wait for a worthwhile trade for their old laptop when they could just sell it on Craig’s List and then spend the cash on whatever they wanted?” Jared and I needed to begin experimenting immediately with an MVP to show that our utopian vision wasn’t from Planet Utopia. The challenge was to isolate a slice of the UX that would truly test the essence of the value proposition. We also needed something technically feasible that the developers could build in less than one month. Jared was confident that his own extreme marketing abilities would drive enough people to the landing page. Still, we needed a place for them to land that would make immediate sense and not feel like an empty shopping mall. Because we didn’t want to wait for a month to learn if people followed through with the actual transaction in the offline world (which was outside of our online transactional funnel), the MVP also needed to yield immediate results for any successful trades. We needed to learn a lot from this experiment. The most important things we needed to learn was whether trades were more likely to happen if the person who wanted to trade something was open to a variety of commensurable offers versus a specific “want” item. Jared had a hunch that if we spotlighted just one trade per day and made it for something highly attractive to our hypothesized customer segments, we would have a higher guarantee of a successful transaction (a trade actually happening). The most difficult part to determine was how the experiment would work without any backend engineering. It required us to focus on the key experience that provided the most innovation. For TradeYa, it was the capability of being able to get something you wanted without having to pay money for it. We needed people to want to engage in the act of trading with strangers. To ensure that all trades actually went through without a hitch, Jared intended to manually facilitate them. This could be as easy as helping both parties with the swap logistics over email or coordinating a time for them to meet up in front of a 7- Eleven with Jared as a mediator. Over one weekend, Jared and I sat side by side