Ask HN: How minimum a Minimum Viable Product, Can be? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How minimum a Minimum Viable Product, Can be?

Some insights into your MVP, Please. Tell about time consumed, ignored features etc. What is important and what is not? Is design important for an MVP?

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You have to think about your MVP as a serious effort to validate or disprove your thesis and assumptions. An MVP does not have to be code, it does not have to be a prototype of your real app. You can duck tape anything together (video, screen cast, screen shots, photo shop images...) to try to prove/disprove your thesis. Here a quick example. Let's say you want to build a new way of searching for hotels. The first question you ask yourself, is what is it that will make people come and use my product/site (instead of expedia or hotels.com)? What is the value that I am adding? So you come up with your 2 or 3 true, core value adds that you think build the foundation of why people will love your product. Now you go ahead and verify if you are right, if these 2-3 value adds really are enough to have people come and use your product (if there is a market for it). So you identify a place on the web where your target audience hangs out and you put your MVP (whatever form/shape it has) in front of them. Drew Houston from Dropbox just showed people a video that was fake (the real product did not work yet and was not really build) to measure how many people would like it and the response was amazing.

For reference check out: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Dropbox-reach-its-first-100-100... and: http://vimeo.com/16091659 Drew is very inspiring.

Make a hypothesis, let the market validate it. I would say if you're spending more than 1-2 months on designing, developing, and testing (on real cusotmers) your MVP, your cycle is probably too long.

I'm currently looking at a 6 week cycle for one "iteration".

It will depend on how difficult your product is, as well. There was a linked article on HN recently about how dropbox's MVP was too complex to build ahead of time, so they used a video demo as their MVP.

I launched mine in about 6 weeks. I think an MVP consists of:

1) using as many frameworks/themes/pre-made stuff as possible to eliminate subjective decision making on your end 2) reducing options for your end users as much as possible. Stuff like items per page or random other minute extras just don't matter. Just make the decisions for your users. 3) The most simple version of your idea that is still unique and useful

if they gave you concrete details, how will they sell books and speaking engagements. j/k sort of

Its subjective. Being an entrepreneur you need to figure out what the smallest unit of measurement is to validate an idea. So based on your expertise, you should sort of know what that is. Example: design ? well its based on your audience. If you are launching a tech oriented product.. you could probably get away with a not so nice design. If its something to do with money, you probably need to use a design that builds trust so you remove that as a factor from validating your idea.

From all the high profile pivots you read about here, I don't think anyone really has any idea, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. For business solutions its a little easier IMO, because you can talk to customers, solutions and problems. For consumer oriented products its much harder.

The minimum thing required to save someone time and/or money. If it will save them time/money, they will pay for it.

You should read Ray Dalio's "Principles" - it's excellent. In it, he talks about prioritizing. Broadly paraphrasing, he says something like, "First, get everything critical to 'Adequate'. Then ask if you want to get it to 'Excellent'. If not, usually you want to stop at 'Adequate'."

For minimum viable, you want to get to 'Adequate' on the core components. That's probably the main product you sell and whatever payment / lead capture is going to be critical for you (email signup, payment processing, or whatever).

A good final, last question to ask is if launching now the way you'd like to has a realistic danger of permanently screwing up your brand. If not, definitely go for it as long as the product is Adequate and the lead/payment systems are Adequate.

If you can get to Excellent very quickly without much more effort in an area, maybe go for it. Take measures to ensure your brand isn't permanently damaged by being too lax somewhere, and then get it out there.

http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...

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