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1) MVP != half assed, cheap, shitty product. It is exactly what it says, a minimum viable product, keyword being viable. An MVP for a mission critical applicati
by thesash 15y ago
1) MVP != half assed, cheap, shitty product. It is exactly what it says, a minimum viable product, keyword being viable. An MVP for a mission critical application or a cutting edge piece of research isn't going to be cheap or easy, because it needs to be viable.
2) The cycle of expectations that your product needs to be as feature rich as your competition on day one leads to what Eric Ries calls the large batch death spiral where it always seems like a good idea to add that one last feature (I've been there, it's painful, and really difficult to pull out of).
3) RE: fear of ruining your reputation if your MVP isn't shiny enough-- good news: no one knows who you are when you launch, so you have nothing to lose. Don't launch your MVP in the press, court early adopters, listen to your customers, and focus on building value until your product kicks the competition's ass. If you hide from customers out of fear you take the biggest risk of all: building something no one wants. Even if you have the best product idea in the world, the only way to know if the features you add are having a positive impact is to measure the behavior of real, live, human users.
Unfortunately I think what we're seeing is the lean startup backlash where people use the terms but don't really take the time to understand what they mean. The Lean startup movement is a powerful set of lessons that can empower entrepreneurs and save us from wasting our time and effort building the wrong things and chasing the wrong metrics, but maybe some of the lessons just have to be learned painfully through experience.
- mindcrime 15y agoa minimum viable product, keyword being viable Absolutely, but I'll add this posit: What "viable" means is heavily context driven. If the goal is to learn about whether or not your specific take on things is valid, then what your MVP will need to look like will depend on the kind of market your pursuing, whether or not their are already existing players in your space, how radically different your approach is, etc. IOW... if you wanted to launch an MVP of a "Facebook Killer" and the "secret sauce" was something, like, oh... some gamification thing... badges or accomplishments related to making new friends, let's say. That's enough like Facebook (or g+, etc.) that the expectation for a potential user would be based around Facebook... your "secret sauce" is only an incremental improvement, so you'd almost have to roll out something as feature rich and visually polished as Facebook, in order to find out if you can compete. That sucks, but one that's why there are both pluses and minuses to entering an established market with an incremental improvement. :-) Now if your "secret sauce" is something world-changing and totally new, like say, "automatic Frombleglizzits when you Gwizztickum" (whatever that is), then you may ONLY need to build enough to make people understand what "automatic Frombleglizzits when you Gwizztickum" is, and then you can find out if that's compelling to them or not, in isolation. If it turns out it isn't, you would have wasted a tremendous amount of time building a complete Facebook clone just to find that out. You have more uncertainty in this case, but this is exactly where the Lean Startup approach helps... eliminating waste in the face of extreme uncertainty. good news: no one knows who you are when you launch, so you have nothing to lose. Exactly. Unfortunately I think what we're seeing is the lean startup backlash where people use the terms but don't really take the time to understand what they mean. Absolutely.
- stcredzero 15y agoWhat "viable" means is heavily context driven. TLDR: In established markets, viable != minimal.
- Idhackthat 15y agoAgreed.
- mindcrime 15y agoI think the "minimal" needs to be looked as as "relative to what you could conceivably build" not as "relative to the market." You always want to build the minimal thing you can, that enables you to get the validated learning that you're after. It's just that if there's an established market and existing players, you probably have to build up to that bar, in order to learn about the bit you intend to do differently. Or something like that... :-)
- r00fus 15y ago> TLDR: In established markets, viable != minimal. So it's not possible to target a niche with a specialized product that only has 20% of the competition's features, but does those 20% properly for that niche?
- stcredzero 15y agoIt's still possible. What I mean, is don't expect to be able to get away with something as skimpy as you would in a totally new market.
- thesash 15y ago100% agree that viable is context driven, but I kind of disagree with your example. If you want to compete with an established player, focus on the differentiating factor that you think is game-changing rather than competing on features, otherwise you'll never win. The early adopters that you want to court will be excited by what's different, not by a clone of something that already exists. By the time the product is ready for the prime time it will need those features, but by then the bleeding edge early adopters will have moved on to the next new thing. However, in cases like healthcare or finance, or certain B2B applications, viable may entail a much more mature product.