How Dropbox Started As A Minimal Viable Product
techcrunch.com
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Drew built a product with considerable reverse engineering before he got any feedback, tried explaining to the vcs and investors without much luck. It all worked when he created a video.
Where in the mvp in that? May be I am too thick to understand but for me this is a case of retrofitting the story to match your theory.
Dropbox had a great product that people loved with a better video. No, they did not use feedback loop to pivot and all that mvp stuff.
The video was just a prototype so that he could give a demo over video, and get feedback on that: "The challenge was that it was impossible to demonstrate the working software in a prototype form. The product required that they overcome significant technical hurdles; it also had an online service component that required high reliability and availability. To avoid the risk of waking up after years of development with a product nobody wanted, Drew did something unexpectedly easy: he made a video."
It's a pretty clear case of an MVP. He build the minimum needed to ask people for feedback (in this case, not even a product but just a demo/video). The strong customer response to the demo/video that he then received validated his product-market fit before he invested a lot of time turning his demo into a fully working product.
IIRC Drew applied to YC in early 2007 and had some working code by that time. The change dates on files in video are March 2008, so he's been working at this for at least a year.
Calling this a MVP seems like a bit of a stretch.
A video is great and, if done right, it's immensely useful at quickly explaining the value of the product your're building. It is not a product, though.
An MVP for dropbox would be something like a directory with a git repo that auto-commits everything and has a cron job push to & pull from a remote server every minute.
<< First, a 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. ...
Second, the definition's use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgment to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense.
http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-... >>
By that definition, it feels like a video could definitely qualify as an MVP? It allowed them to validate important learnings about customers with the least effort... not so different from an AdWords MVP smoke test:
http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/how-to-go-from-i...
In any case, it sounds like Drew programmed enough to create a prototype but not enough for it to have the polish required for a user to be able see that it "work[ed] seamlessly" or "worked just like magic." So in that sense, the video did allow him to exert less effort and still test his customer hypothesis.
<< First, a 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. ...
Second, the definition's use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgment to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense."
In other words, the definition is so broad and stretchable that any successful effort can be retroactively called an MVP, just like all successful software projects are claimed to be "agile" in some fashion (or lean or whatever the latest fad is).
MVP, pivot, Lean Startup(TM) - all this sounds like something tailored primarily to sell books and seminars, not what successful startups do. Now that Drew is successful, I am sure what he did will be held up as an example of the latest faux methodology. I am waiting for the Eric Ries post that portrays Steve Jobs as a "lean startup" visionary.
Dropbox was designated from the beginning as an online storage tool. If they had not provided online storage when they started, no one would have used them. In that sense any advanced features were icing on the cake.
But I don't see this as being a critical part of Dropbox's success. They probably could have launched six months later with a more full featured product and still done well in the online storage market - simply by virtue of the strength of their product, team and strategy.
I'm a little tired of Eric Ries' simplistic axioms and consequent tendency to try to squeeze every use case into the mold of a supporting example.
To the extent that the term can be applied to any successful startup, how meaningful is it?
This isn't anymore a MVP than a video game or movie trailer.