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Signs You Aren’t Really Building a Minimum Viable Product

22ideastreet.com

57 pointspanozzaj17 comments

Sign up landing pages as MVP? Never. Sign up pages to assess interest may be valuable, but they aren't MVP. MVP is "this is most stripped-down version of our vision that we think anyone would actually pay for". It's drawing a line in the sand. It's not expected to be profitable or grow quickly, or anything like that, but it's expected to be something that you can actually sell to someone. If you make the MVP, and no one buys, and you go through a couple cycles of "who's our target market", and there's still nobody buying, you need to kill it. Give up on that product, take anything you've managed to learn from your prospective customers, and build something else.

In other words: MVP isn't a catch-all for everything you could do to interact with your customers before you validated your vision. MVP means the "minimum" (stripped down, only the core features) "viable" (you must believe someone will buy it as-is) "product" (it must actually do something and provide value).

So then what was the Dropbox video MVP?

I'm not sure I understand you. If you're talking about the creative craft "What is Dropbox?" video, that was definitely post-MVP. Dropbox launched publicly with the ability to pay for it in Sept 2008. The video that made them take off like a rocket was in Sept 2009.

You could argue that sept 2008 was already post-MVP and they had what they considered a tentative MVP in March 2008 when they launched the private beta. Remember, the whole lean startup philosophy is about testing and learning. If they knew in March 2008 that their product was actually good enough to sell, then they should have let it out earlier.

I don't actually know anyone at Dropbox and I don't know if they are lean startup fans or if they would characterize anything this way, but I think it's a good example of the best case scenario for how you can build a great product: initial beta followed closely by minimal MVP with real paying customers, then some tweaking to get all the kinks worked out (technical and marketing), then one of your marketing pushes finds the market and you take off like mad.

I'm talking about this http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-prod...

Also that Eric specifically mentioned this in the book. I'm confused that this is surprising to you. I'm assuming you've read the Lean Startup?

My problem with the "MVP" concept is it assumes you can generally know what it is you need to learn. This is true sometimes, but often not. Often taking the extra leap of faith on something results in richer, more meaningful understanding than the surface-layer assumptions you have before you actually make the leap. Launching a landing page can only tell you so much compared to if you got a working prototype in front of test uers, and a working prototype in front of test users can only tell you so much compared to having a real-world product being used by pilot customers. Learning that people don't sign up on your faux landing page could mean any number of things, and your reaction to it depends largely upon your assumptions about what you think it means.

The way I validated my ideas, instead of a landing page, was simply asking the people who would be users and getting feedback on the features and function. This replaced the need of having a landing page. I then created a prototype, which I had hoped would be enough for an MVP, though you gain insights while developing that you couldn't see otherwise - and realized it wasn't enough for the user adoption and usability level required.

My problem with the "MVP" concept is it assumes you can generally know what it is you need to learn.

More accurately, it forces you to have falsifiable hypotheses to test, which is pretty useful.

You know what, I hate (its a strong word, i know) this whole lean startup movement. Yes, a lot of point make sense, iterate whats working, throw out whats not working.

But theres a giant conundrum to it, especially for certain types of startups. Lets take the startup I am working on now as an example. I am working on a Bookmarking framework for real life. Or you can call it, delicious for worthy experiences in life. But what was delicious without users? Not just do I want to bookmark material, I want to discover them too!

I had a "MVP", and it was really minimal. I spent 2 days coming up with a landing page (ctrleff.com), 1 day to plan and create the mockups, the second to actually turn it into fruition. Result? I frontpaged iPhone and Android's subreddit, and got about 10% conversion rate, while it is by no means great, it was certainly encouraging! But if MVP is all for motivation, then yes, I agree, by all means go ahead with building a MVP. But this landing page did nothing to tell me if my startup is going to be adopted or not. There were people who liked the idea. Thats it! This is no metric for any form of success. (Not every startup can be dropbox)

In my books, an MVP is an actual product that would determine actual user adoption. So the next step, or 2 months since the launch of the landing page, I'm done with the backend, and almost done with the Android App. And the app is by no means a sketchy app, I actually spent some time making sure that it looks exactly as what it should in the mockup, that it was not jerky, scrolling was smooth. Feature set? A minimal one: that is, the creation and digestion of Checkpoints (aka bookmarks). Thats it! But I am not stopping here, then there is the iOS app. Only then, would I consider my MVP done. A MVP that I won't hate to use and would continue to use. No double standards here, I will not release a product that I personally would not even use. I can be wrong, but I want to be proven wrong. Did I mention I'm a one man armt?

TL;DR: I hate the MVP movement, just build a real product with a minimal set of features.

Sounds like you didn't build an 'MVP' according to the article then. If you read it, it complains about the same things that you do. An 'MVP' is not merely a landing page (although it sometimes might be). It is the minimal thing that you need to build to test some set of assumptions and continue learning. If you weren't satisfied with the outcome of the test, then build something else and test again. Which is exactly what you are doing.

Seems like you and the author would agree on a lot of points, including the definition of an MVP:

"A MVP is not a minimal product, it is a strategy and process directed toward making and selling a product to customers. It is an iterative process of idea generation, prototyping, presentation, data collection, analysis and learning. One seeks to minimize the total time spent on an iteration. The process is iterated until a desirable product-market fit is obtained, or until the product is deemed to be non-viable."

Lean startup and MVP movements only function if you have someone in control with a clear vision and understanding of what will / needs to be created, and who can defend what the MVP features need to be. If you don't understand the metrics and why they exist then you'll have no idea why your product didn't take off - and that seems too risky to spend your time, energy, money on - if you don't the strong understanding of what must be missing.

An MVP in this sense really is just a real product with a minimal set of features. :)

> A MVP [minimal viable product] is not a minimal product....

While I agree with the general sentiment of the post, the insistence that an MVP doesn't actually have do be something useful has something wiffy about it. Am I the only one who thinks that a landing page is not a viable product?

A lot of the time people don't know what they want/need until they actually have something to use, so simply pitching an idea and seeing if they get it is not, in my mind, sufficient for gathering hard data.

But maybe I just like to call a spade a spade.

I think the original idea of these landing pages was to track how many times your Google Adword links were clicked. Tim Ferris did that to A/B test the title of his book, for example. If you're doing that they are useful and I suppose maybe an 'MVP'.

But no, they're not something you should be submitting to Reddit/HN as if it's a real thing.

It depends what idea you're testing. If you're looking to see if there's any interest at all in the idea, a landing page with adwords could test that. You can funnel traffic there and see if anyone clicks a "buy now" button. That can be enough to see if the idea warrants any additional work.

A landing page isn't the only way to do an MVP, and it's not always helpful in finding out more about your problem area. If it does help, then great, use it. If it doesn't add any additional information, don't waste your time.

The site seems to be down for me. Here is the a google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JmMIBrO...

I think the key is balance. It's easy to get carried away with "gotta be perfect at launch", but it seems equally easy to take MVP too far (or, not far enough wrt product). It's an interesting concept, but it seems like many consider it religion.

Honestly, as a user, the whole landing page thing strikes me as borderline offensive because it shows you haven't put much time in and therefore don't value my time. But sometimes, that's a price worth paying to get some early validation for an unproven concept. As always, it depends.

Wrt to lean startup in general, I do appreciate their step by step scientific-ish approach, I think it's based on sound principles.

My first go at my projects I was hoping to create MVPs initially, though I realize what I created fell short of MVPs, and therefore I call being at the prototype stage.

I'm not sure anyone can truly know for sure what a MVP will look like, as there are too many insights that you can learn as you're building a product.

great article. its really hard to focus in on learning first and coding third as a technical co-founder. I love the last three questions - they forced me to focus on an even more minimal landing page as "MVP 0".

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