6 ms·
How do you determine the scope of your MVP?
Three months ago, together with my team of 3 partners, we started working on Followr.ai, a social media management system with AI. We set out to launch the MVP in two months. It has been three months already, and we still have several functionalities that we would have liked to launch in our MVP. However, on the other hand, I am very anxious to launch the product and have real users.
How do you determine the scope of your MVP before launching it? Is there a specific point where it goes beyond being an MVP and becomes something else?
- dylanhassinger 3y agowhatever u can launch in 1 month
- marquitosplaza 3y agoHaha, I believe we couldn't have launched this MVP in less than two months, unless we had released isolated features as micro-SaaS. That's also an option.
- grantmagdanz 3y agoI struggle with this question too. It's always tough since as the creator you always see the flaws in what you're building. Here are my 2c, hope it helps: 1. What is your core value prop? An MVP isn't a set of features necessarily, but it should solve a specific problem that you think your users have. 2. What do you still need to learn about your users? What is the shortest path to learning those things? If your product is like most others, it will almost certainly change once you get it into the hands of users. Optimize for learning, not "correctness". 3. What is stopping you from launching? For me, it's often a fear of failure. When it isn't, I rarely question whether I should launch or not. I know the product isn't ready. I then ask myself, what am I afraid of? Usually it's that either 1) no one will care or 2) people will care and the product won't be ready so people will churn. Taking those individually, I try to shift "no one caring" to actually relieve pressure. If no one cares, then what's there to be afraid of? As for 2, if the product isn't ready and people churn, there will be more users and you will learn a ton. I find it's helpful to think of launching an MVP as a learning opportunity. I mean this in the most genuine, helpful way: the most likely case is that people won't care and there is a ton of learning in that. One last thing: you may have already read this but PG has an essay called The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups that covers both launching too early and launching too late: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html I hope this was helpful, best of luck!
- marquitosplaza 3y agoHey there, Thank you very much for the help! We were just chatting among the partners in our daily meeting and we reviewed these 3 points that you mention. Clearly, the most valuable learning will come from our users, and the final product may change from our initial assumptions depending on their needs. Our biggest fear is the last you mentioned: that people care about the product, but expect more than what is available in the MVP, leading to churn. However, as you point out, new users will arrive and see a better product, as we learn and listen to our active users. I think we have all made up our minds Thank you very much for the help!