What is the secret a successful entrepreneurs knows?
Being a software engineer and tech consultant for over a decades gave me this understanding that successful entrepreneurs master one key lesson: what should be built at any stage of their business. This is critical in early stages of your startup since your startup is vulnerable the most and you are on the edge of complete uncertainty.
To begin with we should start to define MVP, a minimum viable product? an MVP helps entrepreneur start the process of learning as quickly as possible. It is not necessarily the smallest product imaginable though, it is simply the fastest way to get feedback from customers and test and validate fundamental business hypothesis, value and growth hypothesis, with the minimum amount of effort.
A MVP is imperative to an startup because money can be raised with a buggy and low-quality product but validated hypothesis.
A MVP is range in complexity from extremely simple smoke tests to actual early prototypes complete with problems and missing features. Coming up with a MVP to validate our projections or leap-of-faith questions to avoid the temptation of overbuild and overpromise is challenging.
The complexity of your MVP depends on the type of product you’re building, and different kinds of MVPs can range from vague Adwords tests to early prototypes. Once you have determined the hypotheses you need to test with your MVP, here are some of the testing techniques you can put to use to get reliable data from actual users and utilise it:
Explainer videos
Dropbox team created a 30-second video that visually demonstrated their product before even placing a working product into the hands of users.
The video was released to Dropbox’s target market on Hacker News in April 2007 and received thousands of comments and feedback from intrigued people. Through the use of a landing page, Dropbox captured over 70,000 email addresses of interested future customers.
The concierge MVP
Start serving your customer without building a software. AngelList was founded in 2010 by serial entrepreneur Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi. Using the traction from the Venture Hack blog on entrepreneur financing, Naval and Babak started a list of 25 investors with whom they would share interesting companies to invest in. They announced the list as “AngelList” in 2010, with the subscription of 50 investors.
SaaS and clouds
Instead of investing in scalable server technology, relying on cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Heroku and MongoDB, Facebook Connect, services like Chargify, Mixpanel, Mailchimp, Google Forms and LiveChat or even platforms like WordPress and Drupal are all great pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that is your MVP test. These services and platforms help you in the development process, speeding up the time it takes to get your MVP to market.
Ryan Hoover, the founder of ProductHunt, wanted to build a community for people who’d like to share their products and discuss with other members. But developing a fully-function web platform or app would require weeks if not months and Ryan wasn’t even sure if people wanted it. To test his idea, he decided to start with an MVP. Ryan used a tool called Linkydink — it allowed creating a group for link sharing among its members. Within first two weeks, Ryan’s 20-minute MVP attracted over 170 people who wanted to share their ideas or discover new products.
Groupon for example, began life as a customized WordPress website where the founders posted deals and emailed subscribers PDFs manually in the spirit of validating their market potential.
Landing pages
Buffer is this awesome little app that allows you to queue up your social media posts/tweets so that it can post them out for you according to the schedule you choose.
But before going & building it, Buffer’s founder, Joel Gascoigne, wanted to see if anyone would even want to use it. So he created a simple landing page (right) that described what Buffer “did.” If people were interested, they could click the Plans & Pricing button and be taken to a page that said “Hello! You caught us before we’re ready” leave your email address & we’ll let you know when we’re ready.
Leadpages, Unbounce, Instapage are among simplest and quickest landing page builders with built-in A/B testing.
Prototypes
Mockups, wireframes and prototypes can be used to demonstrate the product’s functionality in a way that mimics the actual usage. These prototypes MVPs can range from low-fidelity sketches to screenshot previews to more complicated “dummy” applications that demo the user experience.
Ad Campaigns
Perhaps counterintuitively, ad campaigns are a great way of running market validation surveys. Google and Facebook are platforms that allow you to drill down demographics to the particular target customer you’re trying to reach, and this lets you run a low-fidelity test to see which features or aspects of your product are most appealing to them.
Simple rule for all MVPs: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.
Modern production process rely on high quality as a way to boost efficiency. This means that we have to focus our energies exclusively on producing outcomes that the customers or early adopters perceive as valuable.
Resources: The Lean Startup: Eric Ries
