Many founders and innovators mix up what an MVP is, and how to build them.
Sounds simple, and actually, it is, but there are many variations of MVPs, and most importantly you need the right iterative mindset to build MVPs.
Some think the era of prototypes and MVPs is over due to NoCode Tools, like the folks at Bubble.
They are absolutely wrong. I’m a fan of NoCode myself but the concept of iterative development using MVPs and prototypes is a decision-making and resource allocation strategy and not a technical constraint.
MVPs apply to any method of development, NoCode included.
Some think the term should not even be used anymore, since the real purpose of MVPs is learning so they should be called experiments, which technically they are.
A tool to validate your idea and test with early adopters.
The most popular misconception is that everything needs to be perfect and planned before the "big launch".
Most high achievers suffer from perfectionism and they are stuck in a world of unrealized potential but grandiose dreams left unchecked can kill their ideas before they can ever sprout.
In reality, the early beginnings of the biggest startups we use today were very humble and went through dozens of iterations and multiple launch attempts before finding product-market fit.
“If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.” — Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn
That doesn't mean you can ignore quality. It means that compared to your vision and what you're trying to achieve you start small. In fact so small that your friends might mock you.
And if you think that's just a Startup/VC cliche, many great thinkers understood the power of getting started and improving incrementally.
"The secret of getting ahead is getting started"
- Mark Twain
"What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can."
– Arthur Ashe
🚀 Remember, taking that first step is the most crucial part of any journey. In the startup world, you have not started until you at least have an MVP, till that point, it's just ideas and talk.
When you have something people can gather around, that can generate excitement, you have elevated your potential to create demand and community.
The MVP is a living evolving essence of your materialized vision but it is not your child. It's your creation, do not fall in love with it. You will have to kill it. Cherish its memory, and learn from it, but there will be many of them, and all of them will die to give birth to the next iteration, entirely new concepts and a more mature product your customers actually need.
What kills most startups according to Instagram Co-Founder Kevin Systrom:
“The lack of a dark moment. Because you keep going and you keep going and you go sideways. And you’re not going up, you’re not going down, you’re just going sideways. You get a trickle of users in; you’re working on something that excites people, but not that much. And the hardest part of going from Burbn to Instagram was actually realizing that we had to do something new. And making that decision was one of the hardest parts of my entrepreneurial career.”
The way to learn, and deliver value faster.
Vision is what drives you, but your speed of learning and executing is your only advantage.
Between chapters of iteration, the path is full of "unknown unknowns" that must be discovered to lead to the next clue. Your path is through misty and silent uncharted marshes but only after navigating your way through the fog, can you come up with better ways, ways that nobody else could have found without your persistence, to listen with care, instead of rushing and forcing conclusions.
"Lost'
Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows Where you are.
You must let it find you.”
― David Wagoner
If you're seeking anything worthy of discovery, your territory is uncharted. Your only compass is your heart and gut. You're a child again seeking the thrill of adventure, discovery, beauty, purpose, and goodness.
This is a hard pill to swallow when one is used to a linear way of getting things done. Seeing the process linearly in the journey of a startup only works backward, seeing ahead is only possible from a bird's eye view. Well, more of a third-eye view. You have to become a shaman seeking solitude from the noise of customs. You are on a journey to conjure meaning and heal the world with your gift, that right now, can only be seen and felt by you.
There is good news for founders in all this craziness. After adjusting your mindset to this extreme focused agility you realize why big corporations suck at innovation and where you have an edge over them. Their internal processes and incentives slow down decision-making.
- Employees are comfortable in their positions and are afraid to make mistakes.
- Employees just don't have the incentive to have the risk tolerance of a founder whose life's balance hangs by their promise to fulfill their inner potential.
- Employees fear losing their lifestyle which hangs on their next wrong choice.
Founders have that shard, that itch in their minds that hurts their souls in every other scenario other than being part of an adventure of their own venture. On a glorious day, for all of us with such drive, it just snaps and there is no going back.
As a founder, you are free to fail and experiment. Every failure to you is a way to solve half of your next puzzle. Instead of trapping yourself in a rat race, you'd much rather be stuck in the OODA Loop. You're still just a monkey flying through space on a giant rock at the speed of 27,000km/h but at least you get to wake up every day with your perspective renewed.
So there you are. Small, humble, and agile. Like a little mouse, you can afford to go places elephants can't fit in, go as fast as they will never be able to, speak your mind freely, and crush the age-old assumptions of the elephants in the room. You are David vs Goliath. That is the power of MVPs when used properly.
The proper way to measure the success of your MVPs is not in cash earned, not even value generated to customers, but in lessons learned. That's not to say those are not important, but you should value learning more at this stage, as that's the foundation of building something valuable customers will eventually pay for.
You're #1 advantage over big guys is speed, embrace your urgency and scrappiness because it won't last forever. You can afford to start scrappy without branding, perfect design, and huge amounts of research. Big guys can't because they are supposed to make big bets only.
At this stage, your only competitor is who you were yesterday.
MVP Playbook
The idea is simple, start with the smallest useful unit and add value incrementally.
- Low-Fidelity Minimum Viable Product: AHigh-Fidelity Minimum Viable Product: Make a very simple product that solves a single problem well.
- Minimum Marketable Product. If your customers are not paying. Figure out what's missing that customers need so much they would be willing to pay for it (Minimum Marketable Feature)
- Minimum Lovable Product: Create an amazing user experience and improve the quality of your MMP so you can scale.
- Maximum Viable Product: This is the holy grail. From this point, your number one job is excelling at marketing, sales, and customer support, product updates come less often due to new technical advancements that can be integrated like AI, Blockchain, etc. When you're on the top and have captured your available market, growth will slow down, and that's a good problem that you only need to worry about much later in the process.
Problem Space vs Solution Space
Before getting into development you must understand the concepts of Problem and Solution Spaces.
You will fluctuate between them a lot, and you are supposed to. However not knowing in what space you are supposed to be in a given situation can derail your entire thought process in the wrong direction.
- When you're in Discovery Mode you are in Problem Space. This is not the time to brainstorm about possible solutions. It's time to find opportunities.
- When you're in Development Mode you are in Solution Space. This is not the time to brainstorm about additional features, empathize, and come up with business strategies. It's time to execute the opportunity that was already discovered.
You can do this in tandem so they feed each other, but be wary of not mixing the scope and context of your conversations and meetings. The Problem Space is the foundation as such it should be always ahead of the Solution Space.
Give these modes their separate time and space and it will help clear your mind.
Low Fidelity MVP VS High Fidelity MVP
Two categories emerged in the recent decade that describe two different stages of building MVPs and they have a different aim and many forms.
Low-fidelity MVPs are used in the very early stages of the discovery phase to see if the idea is even worth pursuing. They are very cost-effective as they require no actual development. These are usually simple mockups, a demo video, a landing page, a blog post, or a fake door feature in a landing page. You can think of these as small experiments, and do them frequently until you find your gold nugget that leads to your gold mine. You'll need great copywriting and creative skills.
High-fidelity MVPs require some design & development of an actual solution. Even if it's not automated it needs to at least look like one. Its purpose is to test the solution's early version with a real audience. The skills you need at this stage are designing the user experience and developing the solution.
In most cases, you can just start with a Low Fidelity MVP to test the need for the problem, and when you have enough objective evidence of the problem existing, continue with a Higher Fidelity MVP to test out your solutions.
🪫 Low-Fidelity MVPs
Discover if making the product is even worth a try. Get feedback and validate hypotheses with low investment and effort, without building a product.
Waitlist Landing Page
A basic web page to gauge interest, collect user data, and refine your unique value proposition.
Robinhood: Before its official launch, the popular stock trading app, managed to amass nearly 1 million users through their pre-launch waiting list strategy. Their approach allowed them to create buzz and attract a substantial user base even before the app was fully available.
Video Demo
Visual showcase of product features and functionality.
Drew Houston (YC W07) the founder of Dropbox created a compelling video showcasing their file synchronization and sharing solution. This video MVP attracted early adopters and investors, validating their idea before fully developing the product.
Fake Door
Presents users with a seemingly functional feature or product option to gauge interest before investing in development.
🔋 High-Fidelity MVPs
Find early adopters, and test the solution's early version. A basic solution with core features requires building a product and process that delivers value in some form.
Single Feature MVP
A minimal viable product focusing on one core feature to test its viability and gather feedback efficiently.
In 2006, a group of innovators—Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams came up with the simple idea to send messages to an online internal board that everyone could see. Originally designed for internal use at Odeo, a podcasting company co-founded by Evan Williams. The prototype allowed employees to send messages to each other and quickly realized they are onto something when their employees spent hundreds of dollars to send SMSs using twittr.
Wizard of Oz MVP
Simulates a fully functional product through manual backend operations, providing users with an authentic experience without complete automation.
Zappos, the online shoe retailer, started as a Wizard of Oz MVP. They posted pictures of shoes online and bought them from local stores when someone made a purchase. This validated the online demand for buying shoes before building a full-fledged e-commerce platform.
Concierge MVP
Offers personalized service manually behind the scenes, mimicking automation to validate demand and refine the user experience.
Airbnb: Before becoming a global hospitality giant, Airbnb's founders started as a Concierge MVP. The founders personally visited hosts’ homes, took photos, and helped create listings.
Piecemeal MVP
Build a solution using software and other tools that already exist. Rolls out the product gradually, adding features incrementally based on user feedback and market demand.
Andrew Mason, Founder of Groupon has shared their story on Mixergy:
"We took a WordPress Blog and we skinned it to say Groupon and then every day we would do a new post. It was totally ghetto. We would sell T-shirts on the first version of Groupon. We’d say in the write-up, “This T-shirt will come in the color red, size large If you want a different colour or size, email that to us.” We didn’t have a form to add that stuff. It was just so cobbled together.
It was enought to prove the concept and show that it was something that people really liked. The actual coupon generation that we were doing was all FileMaker. We would run a scrit that would email the coupon PDF to people. It got to the point where we’d sell 500 sushi coupons in a day, and we’d send 500 PDFs to people with Apple Mail at the same time. Really until July of the fist year it was just a scrambling to grab the tiger by the tail. It was trying to catch up and reasonably piece together a product."
Conclusion:
Building an MVP will be your first tangible step on your startup journey. Make sure your MVPs help you eliminate false assumptions about your customers so that every iteration you build next is more and more aligned with your customers' needs.
