It has become common practice to refer to a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) when referring to more agile and cost-effective delivery of a new service or product in a competitive market. It is quite understandable, yet unfortunate, that everyone’s view of what an MVP actually is varies based on their experience and all the other things one can think of.
A couple of seed-stage startups have approached me for the purpose of delivering the “MVP” and I can tell you that getting the MVP isn’t easy. Transforming an idea into a solution is the core of the Minimal Viable Product development process. The big question is: “How small is the Minimal”? The risk of deploying resources into an ocean of “But” and “If” along with the founder’s bias can drain you to the depths of nowhere.
Countless articles can be found in the knowledge pools over the web within innovation communities that define the same MVP concept with their own flavor, therefore they are different. In the last seven years, I have been a proponent of simplicity and the belief that “simplest is best”, so I define MVP in the same vein as Lean Startup. Before I bore you with any more self-taught unnecessary theories, let’s take a look at some minimum viable products that have helped startups grow and become highly successful businesses with millions of customers worldwide.
Facebook MVP
When it was launched, Facebook’s MVP (or Thefacebook) was used only to connect students by college or class and allow them to post messages to their boards. Facebook tapped into an idea that already existed in Friends Reunited and other platforms, but its simplicity and traction gained among college graduates made it unstoppable. Almost all of the features that followed were built on that success.
Stripe MVP
A little bit of story of “Stripe” before we jump into the MVP-
Back in November 2010, Today’s Stripe was a stealth-mode startup called (at the time) /dev/payments. The company was building a developer-focused payments API that would be as easy as writing to a device node. It seemed like a cool developer-y name, which jibed with what the company was building.
However, as it turned out, there were a few problems with the name “/dev/payments”. First of all, the state of Delaware doesn’t allow leading slashes in corporate names. So the founders ended up officially incorporating the indecipherable SLASHDEVSLASHFINANCE. Yes eventually landed on a more “Normal” name “Stripe”
Airbnb MVP
AirBnB solved one problem: when there was a conference in town, what should attendees do when all the hotels had already been booked up? As you can see in the right sidebar, they were initially focused on just the SXSW conference in 2008.
For hosts, creating a listing on AirBnB was an opportunity to make a little cash and get to know fellow conference attendees a little more personally.
For guests, this was an opportunity to find lodging with a fair price, and get a more personal view of the city, as opposed to a boring hotel room.
Tinder MVP
Whitney Wolfe, one of the cofounders, was a massive part of Tinder’s early growth. At first, instead of swiping, you would simply tap a “heart” or”x” to indicate your approval or disapproval. So there was extremely minimal technology that needed to be built.
Tinder pursued a college-by-college strategy, similar to Facebook. But, within that campus, they would strictly target “high-quality people” (groan). Yes, you guessed it. Both Whitney and the founders were members of Greek Life when they were in college, and they went after the top-tier fraternities and sororities first.
Twitter MVP
Twitter, a widely popular social media platform, took a completely different approach. After Apple released iTunes, a podcasting platform Odeo was going through tough times that forced them to organize hackathons in order to decide what to do next. During one of the hackathons they came up with an idea to create an SMS-based messaging platform. It was initially called “twttr” and was supposed to be for internal use only, but employees were spending hundreds of dollars on SMS to post to the platform. That showed to the founders of Odeo that the idea of “twttr” might be exactly what they were looking for.
How to plan an MVP
To plan a MVP atleast for me you have to believe in just one mantra- MVP will not be the “Perfect” version of your product.
Okay. So, the goal of a prelaunch startup is extremely simple. Step one, launch quickly even if you have to launch something bad- dont waste time, Just launch quickly. That’s it, that is the simplest approach to plan for a Minimal Viable Product. I have seen multiple startups get stuck to make it tight. The core objective of your MVP is to gather feedbacks and learnings about the problem you are trying to solve. And trust me it will never come with some divine power to you.
The user panel is the source of that divine power. Get anyone using your product. It doesn’t matter how you get people to use it; you just have to let them interact and see if they get value from it. A surprising number of founders give up before their product has even been used by a single user. It happens a lot. Please get beyond this stage. It’s very important.
Talk to your users, any of them, after you’ve launched this MVP, and get feedback. Founders are prone to making this mistake because in their heads they have an idea of what they want to build. They kind of feel that, if I haven’t built the full thing yet, getting feedback on the shitty initial thing is a waste of time. It won’t work because it’s not the full thing. That would take three years, $10 million, and a whole team, so feedback on this is useless.
The reality is that, in some ways, the full thing is this really awesome idea in your head that you should keep in your head, but it should be very, very flexible, because it might turn out the full thing that you wanna build isn’t what your customers want at all.
Finally, iterate. Founders often fall in love with what they’re building once they figure out how to do it. And so if it doesn’t work for a certain set of users, they start thinking, What can be done from here. This is the point they loose focus. If you see the MVP examples i have mentioned here, most of them was focusing to solve a single use case. Facebook- Networking within colleges, Stripe- Developer focused payment API, Airbnb- Where a traveller will stay in a city if all the hotels are already booked due to an event or conference. Twitter- SMS based messaging platform.
You just have to start. So, please make sure your MVP is not too special for you! It can be your first love but not necessarily your last! There are many people who get swept up in their visions. Any of the products I showed you before was not the original vision, but what ended up being. Please don’t get too attached to your MVP. You’re just at the beginning of the journey.
Written by
Nahin Ahmed Jisun, Senior Product Owner, Healthera, Cambridge, United Kingdom
