Jeff Bollinger

Minimum Viable Product

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a fundamental component to Eric Ries' Lean Startup methodology.  Eric gives a great definition in his March 2009 interview with Venture Hacks.  Here's my take on MVP and why it's so effective.

MVP is the concept of completing the minimal amount of work in order to prove two things:

1. People want your product
2. There's a business model

You're trying to learn whether or not your assumptions about the world needing your product are true.  The focus is learning.   Not profitability, scalability or defensibility.  Those things come once you've proven that early indicators or measurements support you have a market and model.  The disciple of differentiating features between your market/model and other objectives is where the true value of this process lies.  The process forces you to think objectively about how each feature is going to help you better understand your product's viability in order of importance.  Very often this process is skipped leading to wasted effort on features that do nothing to prove or disprove your assumptions.

For example, you decide to include the ability for users to "remember my login".  You end up spending 1 day of development and testing to complete this functionality.  However, after the first release  to market you realize that users are simply not signing up for your product at the rate you assumed.  You then move into your second iteration focusing in on the sign up process.  In retrospect the one day spent developing the “remember my login” functionality did nothing to better understand the market or model.  It was a great feature, users loved it, but that didn't matter.  Users didn't even like the idea of the product enough to sign up to use the great feature.

So you’re probably thinking, ok fine, eliminate that feature, but what if the signup rates were spectacular and user retention was horrible due to the missing feature?  I'd say that's an excellent problem to have.  You've learned your priority #1 assumption is holding true, now it’s time to focus on retention or whatever your secondary assumptions might be.

Ok, fine.  But what if those individuals I converted into users never come back?  They might not.  That’s ok.  Odds are with your limited test marketing budget you still have the majority of the world’s population left convert into a user.

But what if I receive bad press from those initial users?  Any press at all is a good thing.  Its feedback.  Receiving no feedback is worse.  You don't have a clue why users hate your product.  Great example of this is Twitter.  Twitter received a massive amount of bad press regarding the stability of their platform in their early days and even still today.  I didn't really matter.  Users still used their product because they loved it.  They had the MVP nailed.

This concept can be extremely difficult to do, but the results are worth it.  Removing all kinds of stuff you really think is cool is painful.  It may even completely change the makeup of the product.  But that’s the point.  The increased level of pain up front pays dividends in the long run by getting your product to market faster allowing you to learn and iterate towards a product people love.