4 ms·

This article really vibes with me in general and is just a great piece of content. I was a little disappointed in the examples though, running a course is an M

This article really vibes with me in general and is just a great piece of content. I was a little disappointed in the examples though, running a course is an MVP and delivering a meal is an MVP. MVPs don't need to be software, in these cases, the software is actually definitively not a minimal approach, proven with a non software example of the MVP. So is a test viable? I have asked people to pay for things I hadn't built yet and didn't intend to build if they wouldn't prepay, is that an MVT and not an MVP? Are waitlists and crowdfunding campaigns MVTs?

tailspin2019 5y ago
> running a course is an MVP and delivering a meal is an MVP. Yes I too was hoping for something a bit more radically different to my existing definition of what an MVP is. I definitely agree that it's easy to over engineer MVPs - I'm guilty of that myself, a lot, but many/most of the "MVT's" described here really just sound like non over-engineered MVPs. Nevertheless, the article is still useful as a reminder to really pair it down to the absolute bare essentials at the beginning. So essentially what we end up with is a "minimal viable MVP"! I was curious to see no mention of doing any kind of research via some sort of survey - to not necessarily canvass potential customers on whether they'd buy the product, but more around the problem space, what problems they currently have etc. To me this seems like quite a low-hanging fruit to help validate ideas?
JackFr 5y ago
As Sprig was shuttered after 4 years and $56 million in funding, it doesn't seem like it was a good test. Being able to cook meals and deliver them doesn't seem like a test. Thousands of restaurants do that every day, and national chains do it at scale. The test needed to be is there a market at the price point necessary to sustain the kind of meal he envisioned and I guess the answer to that was no. What would have been enlightening in the article are examples of negative tests -- something one of the firms he was involved with tested and failed at, which led them to reevaluate.
- cameroncairns 5y ago
  Further down in the article he mentions a failed test for a tour marketplace where locals will show you around, but I agree that I would have liked to have seen more negative result examples than just the one.
p0ckets 5y ago
Paying someone to plan a trip for you is definitely not a product, so not a MVP. Running a course is closer to a full-fledged product (more than a MVP) for a company that sells courses to students, but Maven is a platform for creating courses... By the definitions laid out in the article waitlists and crowdfunding campaigns would be MVTs to address marketing or "building something people don’t want" risk.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

tailspin2019 5y ago

> running a course is an MVP and delivering a meal is an MVP. Yes I too was hoping for something a bit more radically different to my existing definition of what an MVP is. I definitely agree that it's easy to over engineer MVPs - I'm guilty of that myself, a lot, but many/most of the "MVT's" described here really just sound like non over-engineered MVPs. Nevertheless, the article is still useful as a reminder to really pair it down to the absolute bare essentials at the beginning. So essentially what we end up with is a "minimal viable MVP"! I was curious to see no mention of doing any kind of research via some sort of survey - to not necessarily canvass potential customers on whether they'd buy the product, but more around the problem space, what problems they currently have etc. To me this seems like quite a low-hanging fruit to help validate ideas?

JackFr 5y ago

As Sprig was shuttered after 4 years and $56 million in funding, it doesn't seem like it was a good test. Being able to cook meals and deliver them doesn't seem like a test. Thousands of restaurants do that every day, and national chains do it at scale. The test needed to be is there a market at the price point necessary to sustain the kind of meal he envisioned and I guess the answer to that was no. What would have been enlightening in the article are examples of negative tests -- something one of the firms he was involved with tested and failed at, which led them to reevaluate.

cameroncairns 5y ago
Further down in the article he mentions a failed test for a tour marketplace where locals will show you around, but I agree that I would have liked to have seen more negative result examples than just the one.

p0ckets 5y ago

Paying someone to plan a trip for you is definitely not a product, so not a MVP. Running a course is closer to a full-fledged product (more than a MVP) for a company that sells courses to students, but Maven is a platform for creating courses... By the definitions laid out in the article waitlists and crowdfunding campaigns would be MVTs to address marketing or "building something people don’t want" risk.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]