Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Explained

Summary:

Minimum Viable Product is a concept developed by Steve Blank and Eric Reiss. It’s very simple. If you’re going to make a product make sure it’s something people have actually paid for. End of explanation.

If you’ve heard of the lean startup that’s the basic idea. The lean startup was designed to help entrepreneurs fail quickly, often and cheaply. Create a bare bones of your product, sell it to customers, if they give you money, you might have something.

Of course it doesn’t guarantee success, however, it’s much better than going with your gut and investing a lot in an unproven idea.

It can also prevent a lot of unnecessary debating.

Founders can either create an MVP to test their differing opinions or they can argue unproductively until they test it anyway.

How does it work?

Step 1:

Think of the project or solution you’re building and its purpose

Step 2

Be clear and spell out all the assumptions you and your business partners have about how it’s going to work. This includes how your target audience will react to the project. Very important. Sometimes you and your partners might differ in opinion without even knowing it.

Step 3

Build the simplest and cheapest version of your product or solution

Step 4

Test it amongst people you believe to be your target audience

Step 5

Measure results against expected results in step 2. This includes getting people to pay for it. People are very different when they have to pay for something versus when they are giving free advice.

Step 6

Find out the reasons why it succeeded or failed. What parts went well? What didn’t? Why did we fail to meet expectations set in the second step.

Step 7

Based on realizations, revise and try again.

In conclusion MVP’s are nothing more than critical scientific thinking in action.

If something is legit, it should withstand real world tests. Including this piece. Take it, apply it under the conditions stated from said advice and see if it really works.

For example,

Kofi and Jenny realized that transporting food could be expensive due to bad roads and traffic.

They recently saw Amazon delivering items using drones and thought it would be a good idea.

Here were some of their assumptions:

Drones are cheaper because;

Drones can get there faster
Drones won’t get into frequent accidents
Drones don’t need fuel
Drones let you ensure that all packages are delivered
Social media and Google ads were cheap but effective strategies

Customers won’t have a problem with drones.

They decided to use two drones, spread the word amongst family and friends and setup a website , social media and google ads.

This is what happened;

Their drones kept crashing with flying animals.
Rain and strong winds can affect delivery time
People still prefer packages to be delivered by a human being

Upon revision they decided to;

Check weather forecasts to prevent weather conditions from affecting delivery time
Enter shops and convince them of the benefits of drone delivery systems
They are currently still working on preventing birds from confusing drones with real predator birds.

I hope this explanation has been helpful.

Thank you.