5/12/2018 The Ultimate Guide to Minimum Viable Product – Hacker Noon

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Viable Product
Brainhub Follow
Nov 17, 2016 · 11 min read

Please raise your hand, if you’ve ever heard about minimum viable
product (MVP) and have no clue what it is. When you talk to software
development companies or startups itself, you will often hear about the
MVP and Agile Methodologies.

Getting started with MVP

It might be that you have a great idea for a product/platform/mobile
app/e-commerce. This idea will make your company grow and
moreover show to your bosses what a motivated employee you are. You
want to make this idea fast into reality. So you talk to an IT department
in your company, you have couple meetings, exchange tons of e-mails.
Then you receive estimation from them stating that they need two
months initiation phase, four months coding phase and three full-time
resources until they can launch the product — your brilliant concept.

This is a lot of time, meaning a lot of money, meaning that you bosses is
most likely going to reject the idea for a product even before having a
chance to test the thing or see it materialised.

Well there is a good news, building an online platform/mobile app/e-

commerce doesn’t always have to be such a long and expensive process.
With the right MVP you can test your concept with real customers and

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with their immediate feedback continue to build a product that they

will simply love.

I’ll walk you through what is an MVP, give you 5 examples of the
most successful MVPs and give you free tools to build it and links to
resources to learn more about it. When we’re done you’ll know
exactly what MVP is, how to do it and what tools to use.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

And what is this Minimum Viable Product

all about?
“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 e ort.” by Eric Ries

Long story short. The di erence between a nal product and a

minimum viable product is showed on the picture below.

It means that you build a minimum set of features possible to be able to

deploy your product. If the problem is: I have nothing to sit on, then
probably the basic solution will be to build a chair and put on hold a
project of building an advance hi-tech armchair.

MVP is all about solving the problem by the most basic solution.

One of the most important graph you need to know, while building an
MVP, is a lean startup circle. Both, MVP and lean startup circle, are
take from the fundamentals of lean startup methodology. This cycle
says that it is best to build fast and measure/analyze each iteration of
your product. It’s better to change the product (pivot) many times and
upgrade a product often (agile) instead of hiding it from everybody
and building it for yourself — not the customers. You do this circle so

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many times as you get product/market t, which means you will solve
the real problem of users and you will know who are they.

Minimum vs Viable vs Minimum+Viable

Product
See the graph below which shows how you can achieve a perfect
balance between building only a minimum or already a perfect viable
product.

Few key words:

MINIMUM means that the product is so bad, that nobody wants to use
it

MINIMUM+VIABLE means it’s a mix between those two; minimum

enough to solve the users problem

VIABLE means that the product is fast, reliable, optimised, well

designed and looks professional

EXAMPLE:

Problem to solve: It’s hard to nd a used bike in Munich.

Minimum: A bike on sale in front of your house with a piece of paper

with o er.

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Viable: A web-platform — with user pro les, messaging, noti cations,

search and best t system. Website is fast website and based on newest
scalable technologies like javascript (node.js / meteor.js).

Minimum+Viable: Simple free list in google docs with manually

collected o ers from classi ed ads/facebook groups pages with bikes
description, photos and contact details to seller.

What are the bene ts of building MVP?

#1 High ROI with low risk

It’s all about maximising the value that you will get back as soon as
possible on a minimal risk. This means that it’s better to nd out what
exactly customers desire before giving them the polished and nished
product.

So, before building 10 features of your new amazing product, ask your
customer rst about their opinion (do a customer development),
because they maybe need only 1 or 2 from those features to solve their
problem and you don’t need to build the other 8. By not building the
not needed feature you save time and money.

#2 Reduce money+time spent on product

development
Verify your idea rst than build the product. Don’t build a team, setup a
sales/marketing process before you are not sure what problem you are
solving and what your customers really needs are.

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#3 Get to know the customers as soon

as possible
Show your product to your customers as soon as you have some rst
version of it, get to know them better, recognise their needs. Then you
can build a product/service they really want. This can help you to get
the feedback from them as soon as possible — Your idea/product
wouldn’t be a hyper viral from the day one, don’t even count on it.

Advantages of knowing your customers:

– Getting feedback about your features/product way faster

– Easy to de ne a marketing campaign or sales process

– Easier to scale, when you know who to look for

#4 Finding the early adopters

“You’re selling the vision and delivering the minimum feature set to
visionaries, not everyone.” by Steve Blank

Before getting your product to the mainstream and becoming the

second Facebook you really need to know who are the early adopters
within you product range (so-called trendsetters). Those are the rst
users of your product, who are eager to solve their problem despite of
the basic functionality of the software you o er.

If you recognise the early adopters (who and where they really are) it
will be easier for you to set up the marketing campaigns to attract more
people, learn from them what features they really need and the most
important validate your product assumptions.

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Tools for non-developers to build MVP

Collect a set of tools that can help you with de ning your MVP at each
stage. It’s based on a lean startup circle.

IDEAS
Business Model Canvas — A framework to describe your business idea.
It can be called a business plan 2.0

Lean Startup Validation Board (Javelin) — A framework to test your

hypothesis. Helps you to nd out who is your customer, problem and
solution.

Google Docs — Use the free surveys to ask your customers for
feedback. Use the docs to share your thoughts with early adopters or
just simply describe your concept.

BUILD-PRODUCT

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Landingi.com — Build a landing page, modify it and measure the

results (no technical skills needed)

Unbounce — Other similar tool as above

Shoplo — Create a e-commerce shop in a couple of minutes (no

technical skills required)

MEASURE-DATA-LEARN
Google Analytics — Get to know who is your customers, how often
they visit your website and how many of them click your Call-To-Action
buttons

Mixpanel — Alternative to Google Analytics

Freshmail — Create beautiful and personalised e-mails, collect easily e-

mail addresses and send mass e-mails to your subscribers.

Share with us your MVP idea and get a free feedback:

mateusz@brainhub.pl

Examples to copy
There are many ways to build/test your MVP. The most popular and
e cient are:

• Landing Page

• Blog

• Wizard of Oz MVP

• Crowdfunding

• Fake it till you make it

Landing page
The easiest way to test your idea. It’s the rst page on which your
customer is landing. If you type www.google.com then you see the
perfect example of landing page.

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Here you can read a great story of company called Bu er, who
describes step-by-step how they use a landing page to validate their
business idea.

DIY Landing page

• Use one of a free websites like landingi.com to setup a page

• Describe really good what are the bene ts of your product to

customers (not features!)

• Add one Call-To-Action ex. Collect e-mail address, get customer to

pay for the product

• Get tra c on you website — post on forums, comments on the

related blog, setup the Google Adwords

• Measure the results

• Calculate if there is enough interested by calculating conversion

rate (users who left e-mail or paid/unique visitors on the
website)

• Interview the potential customers and adjust product to their

needs

When you know what the customer needs, send us an e-mail — we will
build you an epic product

Blog
Groupon is called on of the fastest growing company in history. After 7
years on the market this local deals marketplace, hires more than 10
000 people and serves 48 M customers.

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The founders of Groupon started with writing a blog based on

WordPress with the group o ers. They’ve contacted the small local
companies and ask if they will get a better o er if they get for them 30–
50 customer for one product. Then they post the o er on the blog as a
blog post and promote within a local community. If somebody bought
an o er they send a coupon in PDF. Everything was done manually. No
Sales team, no automated e-mails and noti cations — All done with
a simple usage of gmail.

Wizard of OZ MVP
The largest online shoe store started by Nick Swinmurn in 1999 is one
of those concepts tested by MVP. It was one of the very rst shoe online
stores.

Nick has used the MVP named in Lean Startup Methodology as Wizard
of OZ. He launched an online shop o ering di erent shoes, however
with that di erence that he doesn’t have any warehouse or any shoes
bought. So if the customer ordered a pair of shoes Nick went to a local
shoes shop, buy a pair of shoes and send them by himself. The website
was only making a good impression and collecting the customers.

You don’t have to start with the warehouse — Start with a good landing
page and do the job by yourself, then automate it when there is enough
orders.

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Fake it till you make it

When I started a company called Fit Food First (RIP), where we wanted
to help people to nd healthy restaurants nearby and get
recommendation on the menu, then we veri ed our business and build
the product in just two days.

Despite of this we wanted to make an iPhone app to pack this

functionality there, which was impossible, because even none of us got
enough technical skills to build it.

We’ve launched a simple landing page and send it to our friends to get
them aware of our product and it looked like this.

Then we build our product, which was a simple paper sheet with a
google maps with local restaurants near the Center of Munich
(Marienplatz) and we went there to sell those “product” for 1 Euro
each.

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We assumed the success rate for the product (conversion rate) at level
of 10%. So if we get this conversion rate this means that it make sense
to go further with our concept and maybe build an iPhone app.

You would be surprised, but from 13 people “pitched” in the city

center we sold 5 maps!

38.5% Conversion rate.

For a product which was only a piece of paper….

Here you can download for free our pitchdeck with conversion
rates and landing page optimization

Crowdfunding
The company called Pebble used KickStarter to fund their idea of
making an amazing smartwatch. Before building a product they just
shared their concept with crowd on the Kickstarter (Pebble KickStarter
Campaign). Everybody, who was interest could use the page as a pre-
order form, which means if the goal of the campaign will be reached (in
case of Pebble it was 100k $!) than the watches will be delivered to
customers after given time. It was one of the most successful campaign
on the KickStarter till now (over 10M $ pledged).

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They made a video, prepared pictures of the product, wrote a press

release and spread the word between friends/family/media.

Interesting fact is that they got no. 1 most funded campaign at the
Kickstarter in 2015. They doubled the result of the rst campaign and
got 20M $.

Comment: However be aware that crowdfunding campaign is not

so easy at it seems to be… Behind many of the companies who
get thousands of $ there are marketing agencies and many
experienced people.

CONCLUSION
Now you are ready to create your very rst MVP. Remember it doesn’t
have to be perfect! Just use the described tools and copy one of the
MVP examples for your very rst product. Below you can nd more
resources like books or blog posts, where you nd more details on MVP.

Have you already build an MVP? Are you already building a

startup?

. . .

More blog posts here

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