How Seeds Become Trees

The WEquil Path to Equilibrium

As many of you may already know, the mission of WEquil is to help people achieve equilibrium, the point at which your unique strengths and interests are aligned with the wants and needs of the world. The best way we know of how to get to this point is outlined in what we call the WEquil Path and throughout the WEquil Path you can leverage all three WEquil Pillars to achieve equilibrium.

Minimum Viable Projects with WEquil School

The first step in the WEquil Path to Equilibrium is your Minimum Viable Project. This is because you do not want to invest too much of your capital since this is just an MVP. After creating your MVP, socialize it to see how much value it is adding to people. Creating an MVP is a process for accelerated learning and retention we use at WEquil.School. The process begins with a topic of interest. There are three steps to create a Minimum Viable Project:

1. Find Seeds

2. Plant Seed

3. Grow Seed

One of the best ways to find seeds is by asking questions like “What are you interested in?”, “What do you do for fun?” and “What are your strengths?”. From there you can get a pretty good idea of projects you or somebody else would enjoy doing. Planting the seed is digging deeper and asking the question “why” is a great way to do that. The first step to growing your seed is creating an MVP and an easy way to get started with that is with the five paragraph framework. You should shoot for a C- because you can’t know which seeds are going to be good, or what seed might be better. Because of this you shouldn’t invest so much time and energy into growing a seed when you don’t know what type of tree it will become.

This is why socializing your project is so important. After growing your seed a little bit, get feedback from people to see if your project is adding value. If this is the case, then you may want to use more of your capital and proceed to the next step. An important thing to note is that some seeds may do better as MVP’s and may not be worthwhile to continue investing in, or you may find another seed that you believe is more worthwhile.

Growing and Iterating Your Seed With WEquil Capital

If you've done the first step, socialized your MVP, and people find value in your idea, you should iterate and invest more capital in growing the seed. Socialize your new and improved version to see if investing more capital made a significant impact on how much value it adds to people. You should constantly be aware that there are seeds you haven’t discovered, that may be way better than the one you are currently growing. This allows you to constantly be on the lookout for opportunities and aware of the opportunity cost.

By socializing your project not only are you understanding how to improve what you are creating, but you are learning about what people find valuable. This is extremely important because once you know how to provide value to people, now all you need to focus on is filtering for the best ideas. Using this information will help you decide whether to move onto step three of the WEquil Process.

Creating a Product with WEquil Startups

If your seed has grown through steps one and two and you want to invest even more capital to create a product or service, then you can move onto step three. Make sure to keep iterating through this process, you can always learn more about how to improve your product by talking to users. Not all seeds should go onto step three and may be better off as an MVP. The purpose of growing your seed into a product is that you believe it can be profitable and if you invest more capital into it, the value it adds to people will grow significantly.

For example: If your chart is looking like this, it probably isn’t worthwhile for you to continue growing your seed. This is because you are investing a lot of capital, but it isn’t improving the value of your product very much.

Know that your time and capital are valuable so if investing capital isn’t improving the value you are adding in a significant way, then maybe you should look for the next best seed to grow.

The ideal case scenario is something like the chart below, where even just investing a little bit more capital into improving your product, you are increasing its value tremendously.

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Helping people reach equilibrium is WEquil’s Mission, and we believe the way to get there is by developing your specific knowledge through the WEquil Process. By continuously growing seeds that build off your unique strengths and interests you come to a point where you are irreplaceable.