Why You Should Build Your Product Like a Rube Goldberg Machine

Making the most complex things dead simple

A lot of great startup advice comes directly from parenting. And if I were the kind of parent who gave parenting advice, a lot of my parenting advice would probably come from startup.

I’ve been a parent for over 15 years and an entrepreneur for over 20. But even with all that experience, I don’t feel like you need to hear about how I talk to my kids about failure, so I don’t write about the parenting angle very often.

That said, every once in a while, a parenting scenario perfectly crystallizes a particular bit of startup advice, making the advice super easy to understand, remember, and follow. Especially when the anecdote involves me uttering the term “Minimum Viable Product” while helping one of my kids with a science project.

My goal isn’t to get you to build a Rube Goldberg machine, far from it. It’s to get you to make good decisions while you’re building your product.

Here’s what happened

My youngest got assigned a science project to build a Rube Goldberg machine, a device named after a cartoonist who drew up elaborate plans for systems that performed simple tasks in purposefully complicated ways.