The Minimum Viable Product [MVP] — Developing Business Like Raising A Baby
Will you invest or purchase a product by only seeing a 3-minute demonstration video of this product? Anyway, many people did have showed their interests in Dropbox after watched the 3-minute video by Drew Huston, who is the Co-founder & CEO of Dropbox (TechCruch, 2011). In this video, Drew just demonstrated all the functionalities of their basic thoughts of Dropbox but they have received thousands of feedbacks overnight. Based on those feedbacks, Drew and his partners improved the Dropbox and released the completed version in June 2007 (Wikipedia). As a result, Dropbox. Inc has been ranked as one of the most valuable startups in the US and also has become one of the most successful Minimum Viable Product examples.
But what is the Minimum Viable Product [MVP]? This is the biggest question of mine after reading Dropbox’s case study so I did some research. Now, I know it is a powerful strategy to build a startup.
Definition
“The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” — Eric Ries
As far as I understood, the MVP is the very first version of your business with core functionalities and just enough features. Then you provide this version to some best-matching target customers for meaningful feedback so that you could improve the next version accordingly. By repeating this process, you will finally complete your product or service that well satisfies target customers’ needs. It is like raising a baby until he or she grows up to an adult.
Core Idea
Usually, people will use this picture below to explain the idea of MVP. One opinion is that the core idea of MVP is to test whether the customer’s need you want to satisfy truly exists or not during the process, and this is the most difficult part of developing an MVP project. For example, if you are a car manufacturer then your true purpose is probably to satisfy people’s need for transportation instead of producing a beautiful car. In this case, skateboard and bicycle are the minimum viable products. If people think they are useful products, then it means they do need a better transportation method. Therefore, it is meaningful to continue the MVP loop and learn from this process for reaching the perfection of the business project.
Advantages
For new entrepreneurs, building their startup businesses in the way of Minimum Viable Product would be a smart decision since MVP contains lots of advantages (Lastovetska, May 2020). Firstly, MVP could test the business idea with minimum efforts and resources since it only requires changes and improvements based on customers’ feedback each time. Secondly, the process of developing MVP can be controlled stage by stage so that it could reduce the risk of big failures. Thirdly, the final version of the product or service can be very close to perfection as the MVP will provide in-time customer feedbacks in different stages. Last but not the least, not only can the MVP build a solid customer base during the process but also attract investors in the early stage.
Traps
As every coin has two sides, however, many entrepreneurs and their teams will make mistakes while implementing the MVP strategy due to different reasons (AgileAlliance). For example, the biggest one is that they do not really understand the core idea of MVP and only think that MVP is to provide customers with limited functionalities without a plan for following learnings. Therefore, they may just stop at the first stage forever. On the other side, some teams will misunderstand MVP as MMF [Minimum Marketable Features] and MMP [Minimum Marketable Product] which focus on how to promote and earn. In this case, they may go the wrong way instead of healthily interacting with customers and they will not be able to receive meaningful feedback from customers.
One More Thing
We can never talk about Minimum Viable Product without the two concepts of “Minimum” and “Viable”. The “Minimum” means to use the least efforts and resources to get meaningful feedback, and the “Viable” refers to testing whether the business idea could better satisfy the customers’ needs. Besides, I think there is the third concept of “Development” because the purpose of MVP is to provide a better version of products and services based on learnings from customers until we reach the perfection of the final version.
MVP works well at the beginning of a business plan but the learning loop should never be stopped.
