Tuesday Email: What is a minimum viable product?

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action.

I've spent fifteen years perfecting the handshake.

Not literally—though mine's firm enough. I mean the whole ritual: the in-person meeting, the subtle confidence that comes from being in control of the room. In wealth management, we're taught that trust lives in physical space. You see the client. They see you. Everyone relaxes.

March 2020 deleted the playbook.

Offices closed.

Markets cratered.

Clients panicked.

And I faced a math problem with no good answer: 200 relationships, zero physical access, and a phone that couldn't ring fast enough.

The old system, which involved scheduling meetings, waiting your turn, and trusting the process, was designed for stability, not crisis.

We needed a new move, fast. But here's what stopped me cold: What if I got it wrong?

In our business, "wrong" doesn't mean a bad quarter. It means broken trust. It means a client questioning whether you understand them.

We're not wired to experiment; we're wired to be certain. But certainty was a luxury I no longer had.

So I ran an experiment I would've rejected six months earlier.

I sent 200 clients an invite to our first "Zoominar"—a group video call where I'd share market updates and field questions—no private meetings. No handshakes. No control over who speaks when. Everything I'd been trained to avoid.

The night before, I couldn't sleep. I kept imagining the silence. The confused faces. The passive-aggressive emails: "I expected a personal touch."

Then I did something I still can't fully explain: I added a slide with a photo of my kids.

Not for strategy.

Not because some marketing guru told me to "humanize the brand."

I added it because I was scared, and hiding behind data felt dishonest. If I were asking clients to trust me in uncertain times, I needed to show up as uncertain, too.

The response floored me. Attendance was through the roof. Engaged faces throughout. But the moment that changed everything lasted five seconds: when that photo appeared on screen, I watched the grid of faces shift. People leaned in. A few smiled. In the chat, someone wrote: "Thanks for sharing that."

That's when I realized I'd been wrong about something fundamental.

I thought trust required control. It turns out that trust requires honesty about what you don't control.

Here's what Silicon Valley figured out that wealth management hasn't: perfection is the enemy of learning.

Tech companies don't launch products they think are right—they launch versions they think might be right, then listen to what breaks.

They run experiments on small groups. They measure. They iterate. They accept that the only way to know if something works is to test it in the wild, not in conference rooms.

We do the opposite. We workshop. We deliberate. We wait until we're certain, because the cost of being wrong feels existential.

However, here's the trap: while we're pursuing certainty, the world is constantly changing. Clients evolve. New tools emerge. And our confidence in "how things have always worked" becomes the very thing that blinds us.

The paradigm shift isn't technology. It's humility.

COVID forced that humility on me.

The Zoominar wasn't genius—it was a necessity.

But it taught me something I should've learned years ago: I can innovate the same way I did at my tech company. The constraint isn't the industry. It's the fear of being wrong.

So here's the uncomfortable truth about Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) in our business: MVPs aren't about launching flawed ideas. They're about admitting you don't already know the answer.

An MVP is a controlled experiment. It's testing a hypothesis on a small group before rolling it out broadly. It's the comedian trying out new material at a small club before the Netflix special, not bombing on stage, but reading the room to understand what actually lands.

But here's why we resist it: we've built our reputations on being right.

Suggesting an experiment feels like admitting doubt. And in a business built on trust, doubt feels like a dangerous thing.

Except it's not. You know what's dangerous? Making decisions that impact 200 clients based on what you assume they want, without ever testing it.

Think about a dartboard.

The bullseye is your core service—investment management, financial planning, the things that directly touch client money. You don't experiment there first. But the outer rings? Client communication workflows. Reporting formats. Meeting structures. Technology platforms. These are the practice zones.

Start there.

Run small tests.

Document everything.

Tell clients what you're doing and why. Treat it like the controlled experiment it is, just as scientists test substances that could harm people. Identify the exact data used. The exact technologies. The exact group. Then measure what happens.

Not to prove you're right. To learn if you're wrong.

I don't know how much our industry will be disrupted by what's coming.

Nobody does.

My guess? It'll be more than the conservatives hope and less than the extremists predict. But the specifics don't matter. What matters is this: the only way to navigate uncertainty is to get comfortable being uncertain.

That's what MVPs train you for. Not prediction. Adaptation.

Test your gut against reality.

Run experiments that teach you what clients actually want, not what they say they want.

Build the muscle of learning faster than the market changes around you.

Because in a world where the playbook keeps getting deleted, the competitive advantage isn't knowing the answers.

It's knowing how to find them.

The best is ahead!

-Matt