How Lean should a start-up be? | Hacker News Reader

How Lean should a start-up be?

12 pointsJayTe9 comments

My cofounder of Prognition Corp, Chris Metcalfe and I both like the model of the lean start up and the idea of producing the Minimal Viable Product (MVP). The MVP is then morphed into a more complete solution using customer feedback.

The problem we encounter, however, is that when we define the MVP it seems to lack innovation; it’s designed to be plane Jane. We’ve read other articles that tell readers not to look to customers for innovation. What we debate is if we should produce the MVP or what we’ve started to call the Minimal Viable Awesomeness (MVA). For a start up (a company with no money) it takes considerably more resources to produce a MVA then an MVP. Allso, the MVA is most likely a bit of a “push,” what happens if initially people don’t get it. Is it better to introduce the MVP and then introduce the “awesome” factor?

All thoughts will be appreciated.

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The entire point of the lean startup is getting out of the building and validating your ideas with customers. Everything else is gravy.

Go out, talk to people, and they will define what you should be building, and what will constitute MVP or MVA.

You seem to not be spending enough time talking to customers. You cannot define these things on your own, that's the whole idea.

Great article on what a mvp is: http://www.w2lessons.com/2010/10/minimum-viable-product-diss...

Another one[1]: Your Product is NOT “The Product”

And finally[2] How Zynga Uses Ghetto Testing and Minimum Viable Products

[1] http://www.ashmaurya.com/2011/06/your-product-is-not-the-pro...

[2] http://grattisfaction.com/2010/01/how-zynga-does-customer-de...

The main idea is really about learning. Whatever is the minimal you can do while still learning something valuable is what you should do. If releasing your MVP won't help validate your core business assumptions then it probably isn't worth the cost of releasing it.

However do you have to build the MVA to at least somewhat validate it?

If people don't get it... Are you sure you get your customer base? It's all just about rapidly learning about your market.

In other words, MVP is really just a fake landing page with a sign up button and see how many people click on it.

Thank You! It is about rapidly learning about our market. We have existing customers and we're building an add on module. We're going to pole our customers this week about what they want. Do I feel dumb.

"poll" your customers, please. "pole"ing your customer is very different.

That's great!

An important thing to keep in mind is Customer Development and Lean Startup both are very cautious about directly just asking your customers what they want. It's more about validating the problem and then getting the minimal solution in front of them somehow. Hell paper prototyping, RAD... w/e you have to do.

Not saying "You're Doing It Wrong" just throwing an idea out there since I'm not sure exactly where you are mentally with all this. :)

Well, launching MVPs are supposed to challenge your assumptions and it sounds like you're sitting on a pretty big one right there.

That your market can only be disrupted by this hand-wavy awesomeness you're alluding too but we have no idea wtf you're talking about.

If, for example, you're talking about setting up a new human-computer interaction device and the MVP is a mouse where you really want to build a gesture based input device, then yes, you're probably right. A mouse is not going rock anyone's world and it's a saturated market.

If, on the other hand, you're making a way of easily managing incoming sales calls that's not really been done but you'd make an awesome UX as traditional form based layouts suck, but you know, it'll be awesome, then no, you're probably wrong. The core of your business is the sales call management not the UX and you're going to waste a lot of money on that UX without even finding out if there's a market for the sales call manager.

So details, or personally I'd just ignore all the advice here as no-one's got enough information to tell you anything useful.

EDIT: I guess I'm trying to say have you sat down and figured out if the market you're going after is for the awesomeness or for the actual product. Making an MVP smart phone won't work, but making something better than the iPhone might, but will be expensive. If you've spotted an under served market, go for the MVP just to find out if the market really exists.

> when we define the MVP it seems to lack innovation

Like most MVP's it's probably just a small subset or specific feature of what a mature MVA product will look like. The key is to make that MVP more efficient to the user in comparison to the competing product. Use benchmark words like stronger, lighter, faster and cheaper over complicated terms that require abstraction like flexible, scalable, easier and performant.

Think of something simple like the paper towel. It's a global commodity and sales are pretty much flat, so how is a brand to distinguish itself from others? Just cut the towels in half with another line of perforations. The new towels are smaller, lighter and cheaper by volume over the competition and all they did was adjust the settings on the perforator.

Not everything is genius at the first iteration. It's hard work and requires a mix of innovation and feedback over time.

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