Why Your Startup Doesn’t Need A Minimum Viable Product.
Minimum Viable Product is a concept that has been widely debated and discussed within startup communities. The idea of a Minimum Viable Product is to build the smallest, simplest version of your product possible, identify which features are missing and then iteratively add them back in as you learn from customer feedback.
The first factor that you should take into consideration is the success rate of your company. If your company has already gained some sort of audience then it would be smart to have an MVP instead of just a beta version. This allows for you to see how well your product works before spending more time on it and potentially making mistakes. As stated in this article, Quirky went from being worth $25 million in early 2012 to filing bankruptcy in September 2016.
I’ve come across many people who believe this is the only way to create a successful product and want to rush this process as fast as possible – we even promote it here at Empire Flippers with our “Build-Measure-Learn” framework . But what if I told you there was another way?
The Concept Of Validation First came the lean startup movement that promoted building a minimum viable product as fast as possible. It then took on new forms like the “Growth Hack” movement where people like Sean Ellis, Neil Patel and Noah Kagan all espouse building products with viral hooks. All of these are great but they don’t always work for everyone (specifically those outside the US).
The New Way I want to share is what you might call ultra lean startup or validation first. I’m not saying that this is better than MVP>Growth Hacking>Lean Startup – rather different for different markets. It is based on low-fidelity wireframes which can be built in about an hour by one designer who has some basic coding knowledge. Here you build a barebones website for your product without any functionality so users can simply click buttons and navigate the website. You then use the sites analytics to understand if people click on certain parts of your page more than others, which gives you direction of what you need to build next.
It’s important not to get hung up on little details when building this type of product because it is intentionally about learning through validation. It is often for this reason that I see founders skip over this step and go straight into full-fledged development which can cause big problems later on.
When businesses are in their infancy they put together a lot of capital, time and effort into getting things ‘just right’ before they launch. This process usually involves repeated revisions of user interfaces until the product looks the way you want it to look. I think this is a mistake, but I also understand the rationale.
Ideas don’t come easy and often there is a lot of effort put into creating something you think your users will like. But instead of spending time on design, it would be more beneficial to build out at least some elements so that they can be tested out in front of real customers. Iterations are great if they are intentional; otherwise you get caught up in perfecting things that might not even work.
Don’t get me wrong…design is important! During this phase though, my recommendation would be to focus on getting the key components of the product (or service) built with slightly rough edges instead of having an exact finished look and feel before launching your minimum viable product. A good analogy is to compare it to moving into your new home. You would want to get the most important things built first, like a roof and solid walls, before you start putting up fancy expensive wallpaper or hardwood flooring.
There are many stakeholders with an interest in businesses today—investors, customers, employees…and the list goes on! This article suggests asking your users what they think of your product rather than just assuming that their thoughts about your business align perfectly with yours . Don’t be afraid to push back against ideas that don’t hold water or don’t align with your larger vision. It could help you build a better solution and ultimately improve the overall experience for everyone involved because if you’re not solving the right problem, everything else is just a band-aid.
Thus Your Startup Doesn’t Need A Minimum Viable Product because you’re trying to find a fit for your idea and not build an entire product around just features. Some startups are going along smoothly, they have a service that more than doubles the average conversion rate on abandoned shopping carts. They have also had a considerable amount of growth in our user base as well as gaining new customers who are actually purchasing with us. A big determining factor of this success was having an MVP from day one.
This is not to say that MVPs are the best option for every startup. But, there are some factors you should definitely take into consideration before deciding whether or not to move forward with an MVP.
