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These days, I'm beating the drum that a MVP is not necessarily a V1 of a product idea. If you consider the goal is to learn whether you can have a business or

by toumhi 13y ago

These days, I'm beating the drum that a MVP is not necessarily a V1 of a product idea. If you consider the goal is to learn whether you can have a business or not, you start thinking less in terms of your product and more in terms of what is the underlying problem, customer segment, market conditions, discoverability etc etc Also, instead of thinking as idea -> MVP -> product, it can help to think of MVPs as a series of experiments, rather than a monolithic product designed to verify all assumptions. I blogged about this process that we could have followed at my company, instead of burning cash and months of work building something nobody wanted: http://www.sparklewise.com/minimal-valuable-experiments/ http://www.sparklewise.com/minimal-valuable-experiments/

beat 13y ago
I'm currently putting together MVPs of the difficult UI aspects of my system, because those are the parts I'm worried about. The back end is actually pretty straightforward. The UI stuff is the stuff I want to get in front of users for review. After that, I need to do some technical MVP for proof of concept, to prove to myself that my assumptions about certain data patterns are actually correct. The important thing, though, is to get to where I have working code I can show others to get feedback, even if that code isn't anywhere near complete as a marketable product.
- stdbrouw 13y ago
  Testing your UI is what most people would call prototyping, though. You've already decided on what you want to build, just not what the interface to what you're building should be exactly. An MVP is for deciding what to build or whether to continue to build.
  - marcamillion 13y ago
    Or more importantly, what version of what you build will your customer pay for/use - i.e. what will add value such that it would change their behavior.
- Bjartr 13y ago
  An MVP will tell you if it's even worth doing that UI design in the first place. If you can get people on your site going "I'd pay for this if only it didn't suck to use" then you have an MVP that's validated you have a market. If you have a great to use product and can't get people to stick around on the site, you've wasted a lot of effort.
  - beat 13y ago
    A UI is the M in the MVP. The back end would be a fair bit of work for nothing very exotic. I can test certain assumptions about the front end using public data without all that effort. Technically, it's probably a demo, not a true MVP, but it should tell me a lot about what works and what doesn't, and it shouldn't be too hard to expand into a true MVP afterward.

by toumhi 13y ago

beat 13y ago

I'm currently putting together MVPs of the difficult UI aspects of my system, because those are the parts I'm worried about. The back end is actually pretty straightforward. The UI stuff is the stuff I want to get in front of users for review. After that, I need to do some technical MVP for proof of concept, to prove to myself that my assumptions about certain data patterns are actually correct. The important thing, though, is to get to where I have working code I can show others to get feedback, even if that code isn't anywhere near complete as a marketable product.

stdbrouw 13y ago
Testing your UI is what most people would call prototyping, though. You've already decided on what you want to build, just not what the interface to what you're building should be exactly. An MVP is for deciding what to build or whether to continue to build.
- marcamillion 13y ago
  Or more importantly, what version of what you build will your customer pay for/use - i.e. what will add value such that it would change their behavior.
Bjartr 13y ago
An MVP will tell you if it's even worth doing that UI design in the first place. If you can get people on your site going "I'd pay for this if only it didn't suck to use" then you have an MVP that's validated you have a market. If you have a great to use product and can't get people to stick around on the site, you've wasted a lot of effort.
- beat 13y ago
  A UI is the M in the MVP. The back end would be a fair bit of work for nothing very exotic. I can test certain assumptions about the front end using public data without all that effort. Technically, it's probably a demo, not a true MVP, but it should tell me a lot about what works and what doesn't, and it shouldn't be too hard to expand into a true MVP afterward.