Minimum Viable Product

Introduction

• A minimum viable product is the version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort 
          - Eric Ries, "The Lean Startup"

Common misconceptions?

An MVP is NOT:

• A cheaper alternative

• A landing page; MVPs can exist in other forms too

• Solely for technology development

Features of MVP

• MVPs refine the solution

• The goal of MVP is to build the smallest feature set

• An experiment to validate the hypothesis

• A minimalist user interface

• Usually discarded to buid the real product

Advantages?

• Avoid features noone will use

• Maximize the learning per dollar spent

Ways to create MVPs

Way 1:

Establish what has to be learnt about the potential customer’s needs

Explanation:

What is the root cause of the problem? 

What is the major pain associated with the problem?

What will they gain as a result of the solutions? 

Where did they look for solutions in the past? 

Why did they look there? Why were they still looking for a solution?

 

Way 2:

Identify the metrics linked to point 1 i.e. what exactly do you need to learn from the customer.

 Explanation: 

These measures will help you identify milestones and distinguish whether your learning is validated

Way 3:

Start off with a single or a few customers (although this may seem unprofitable, such an approach creates the opportunity for validated learning, and will help you to profile target customers, figure out what to build and allow you to differentiate your service or product from that of competitors)

  Way 4:

Pre -launch, create or join a community for those with the same need to engage potential customers (these are not the early adopters you’ve already engaged with, these are members of the majority crowd -those who share the problem you solve and may most likely choose to buy your solution some time in the future)

Way 5:

Test your hypotheses using different messages, different MVPs and targeted to different customer segments (the wider the range of tests the more likely you are to determine the most appropriate / profitable business model fit)

 

Examples

   Twitter

We all know Twitter is huge now. It has grown from a small little apartment startup to one of the biggest social media giants. The company went IPO last year and stock prices continue to soar. Did you know that Twitter started off with a simple sketch? After the sketch, they put together a simple splash screen and was still able to acquire new users because it was something new to everyone. Here is a picture of the early day sketch.

 

  

 Grockit

Grockit was founded in 2007 to enable social learning, specifically test preparation (SAT, LSAT, etc). The company used agile development to get a product out quickly and continues to use this method in continuous deployment. On a typical day, Grockit’s online learning platform hosts 1,000 cross national border interactions and supports users spanning 150 countries. Grockit actually gathered potential customer’s problems before they actually moved any further. They build their minimum viable product after creating a sign up form that asked potential customers what they want. This not only allowed them to build a minimum viable product email list but also allowed them to build a product that customers actually want. 

DropBox

  

Dropbox currently has over 4 million registered users. The cloud storing startup started off with a splash page as their minimum viable product. The splash page had a short demo video and a box to collect emails. Eric Ries was known for bringing alive the MVP concept, and the founders of Dropbox was a big fan of Eric’s blog. The founders of Dropbox followed the concept throughly and launched Dropbox. Within 15 months Dropbox went from 100,000 registered users to over 4,000,000. 

LinkedIn 

Linkedin wasn’t one of those startups that reached fame on the first day they started. The company started off with a simple page where you could login and invite your friends to join Linkedin as well. The page was not fancy at all but yet it had some strong call to action buttons that attracted users to invite their friends

Groupon

 Groupon is the bread and butter of minimum viable products. Groupon started off writing coupons to people who purchased them, then slowly moved up to using a file manager program to create coupons and personally emailing their customers with it. As the customer database grew, the startup upgraded to WordPress. From then on, Groupon has became one of the biggest daily deal websites in the United States. The startup moved slowly and cautiously, leading them to success.  

  

There you have it! 5 Perfect Examples of a minimum viable product. Don’t wait, go create your own minimum viable product today!