What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

If you think a minimum viable product (MVP) is simply just a bad version of your first product, you are wrong. And sadly, a lot of people think that way. And there’s also a lot of people out there simply “think” that they need to build an MVP because they have to be lean, but they don’t know why and what that means, they just do it because “I want to start a startup, so I must build an MVP”. . . hmm

Firstly, let’s go literal. What does MVP mean? It means Minimum Viable Product. Obviously, it doesn’t mean the most valuable player. MVP is a concept from the lean startup framework. What is the essence of an MVP?

Is it the least amount of effort to sell your product, or launch your product and get a writeup on Techcrunch? No. Your MVP is using the least amount of effort and resources to get to the point of whether or not a customer will say yes, I’m interested in it.

How do you MVP?

To put it into perspective. Let’s say you are trying to build a new rollercoaster theme park. How would you MVP it? Do you just build one of the rides but not all 40 of them and test that out? Or would you build a miniature model that shows all of the rides, and including where the candy bar is and everything else?

Do you think that’s the absolute minimum you could do to get to a point where someone says yes or no, in a validated testable environment? Well, no. You can do a considerable amount less. You know, building 1 ride or building a miniature model could get to that point, absolutely.

But you could have spent a fraction of the time and resources and just build, for instance, a page, that illustrates what you are going to build and when you are opening and start taking pre-orders. That only takes a fraction of the effort to get a quick answer on whether people are interested or not.

How would you MVP Uber?

I’ll give you another example. How would you MVP Uber if you were Garret or Travis back when they first started? You would need a map view, right? You need real-time GPS tracking, you need an algorithm to calculate the nearest driver, the estimated arrival time, an estimated fare for the trip, you also need automatic credit card payment.

It definitely needs to be a mobile app, because users are using it on the go. And you need to at least have both the iOS and Android version right, otherwise you are missing out on a big chunk of the market. And wait, you also need a drivers app, so they can take orders and manage their trips.

And you’ll probably need a marketing website to promote yourself so users can sign up. And wait, we will need  one for the drivers as well. And after all that, you imagine the day when you launch, it’s gonna look like this 👇

Guess what Garret and Travis had when they first launch? 👇

This is all they have! Text us your address. And we’ll send you the nearest driver, and text you an estimated arrival time. The driver will text you again when he/she arrives. And when you hop in the car, don’t forget to tell your driver your destination. And it’s $15 minimum, the formula is there, you’ll have to work it out yourself. Sign up now.

If you have the same idea as Garret and Travis back then, and you both are working on the idea simultaneously. Let’s say you went on to build the full app before you launch, and they launch with that simple landing page.

By the time you finished building your app (and only if you don’t give up or run out of money in the middle), they would have captured the entire San Francisco market already, and ran hundreds of transactions manually.

They would have understood their customers a lot more than you. And because they already have transactions, they can attract drivers so much easier than you. They are also in the radar for VCs to invest in because they have traction, but you don’t. You only had an imaginary product, which no one has ever used.

The essence of MVP

The ultimate aim of running MVP experiments is to, as quickly as possible, find out that one single thing which motivates people to buy. And one key element to understand, is that, at different stage of your idea, your MVP comes in different shapes or form. An MVP is not a destination, it is an evolving process.

At a very infancy stage, it might just be a social media post, with a graphic and a headline. Because at this stage, you are just trying to see if people will actually click on it. And if they don’t, what’s the point of having built a product?

And as you nurture and develop the idea further, an MVP might look like a more beefed-up landing page encouraging people to put down their email in exchange for an early bird access to your solution. And as you go further, it might become an even more beefed-up landing page, showcasing more of your product features, with different pricing plans to test out the price point.

And if the idea survives all of that, your MVP might look like a stitch up of various tools, creating a semi-functional product where your early adopters would use, like the Uber example, they are just running their business on text messages.

Hopefully that gives you a good initial understanding of what MVP means.

Want to dig deeper? Eric Ries’ original definition of MVP might be a good starting point: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-product-guide.html