What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
Once you’ve come up with a potential solution you want to create to address the problem your target customer is facing, it’s time to create that solution. This is when you create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) which doesn’t have a ton of complex features built out, but is enough to be barely functional — a proof of concept showing that there is demonstrated interest in your product. To get an understanding of how it all works, it’s useful to look at some of the most successful startups that once were in the same vulnerable position.
Airbnb
Two product designers came to San Francisco in the hopes of coming up with a big idea and creating a business, but found themselves struggling to pay rent with the city’s high living expenses. At the same time, they realized how difficult it was to find a place like a hotel room during the time of a large conference, gathering, or sporting event.
These two combinations of their own struggles led them to test their own idea: air beds and breakfast. They had enough room in their apartment for several air beds, so perhaps the apartment owners could host guests for an alternative to finding hotels, which was both expensive and in very limited supply. Thus, they quickly built a website with only the contact info and address of their location, not much else.
During a designer’s conference, the two hosted 3 people around the world with air beds, giving them enough money to make rent. At the end of the hosting period, the two knew that this was a project to keep working on, because that one weekend allowed for everyone in the apartment to “feel as close as a family”, something that is absent when staying in a hotel. After more people came to the platform, and tons of funding poured into the startup, the company was able to redesign their website in order to add an interactive map, options (such as price, custom duration of time, or number of rooms) to choose from, So, they quickly expanded this idea beyond their apartment, turning it into the company we know today.
DoorDash
During his fall quarter of junior year at Stanford University, Stanley Tang wanted to learn more about the pain points of restaurant owners. In one particular visit, the owner of a macaroon store showed him pages of unfilled deliveries that she couldn’t fulfill. After talking with more store owners in downtown Palo Alto, the team realized that dealing with delivery was a consistent problem across all businesses in the restaurant industry: “store owners kept agreeing that they didn’t have good solutions for delivery infrastructure”. Many restaurants didn’t even deliver because it was too much of a hassle.
After thinking of ways to solve the problem, they came up with a hypothesis: “delivery as a service”. Customers could go to one place to put in their orders, and delivery drivers could fulfill the requests. (In this way, delivery drivers didn’t have to work for a specific restaurant; instead, they could fulfill deliveries for restaurants in the area.)
Next, they created a small landing page in one afternoon, putting a list of Palo Alto restaurants (with menus attached) and a team member’s personal phone number at the bottom of the page, calling it “paloaltodelivery.com”. The team wanted to see if this is something customers actually wanted; in other words, would they use the site? It turns out, the answer was yes, and their orders quickly went from 1 per day to 2, 5, 10, 20, and continued to grow.
The stories of these two companies have many similarities and differences. The differences: Airbnb started out with a few customers. Although they were growing, they needed the extra push from investors to really kick off and get a lot of users. Unlike Airbnb, DoorDash’s website had no backend code such as a signup to an interest/waiting list, yet what they were able to build in one hour allowed for perhaps a better solution than adding more complexity to their website, as you wouldn’t get the same direct interaction between the orderers and the founders over email responses the way you would over phone calls.
Similarities between Airbnb & DoorDash
With this being said, there are far more similarities between the two companies: Both found a pain point (for DoorDash, by talking to dozens of restaurant and cafe owners, for Airbnb, solving their own pain points of finding a place to stay and helping people afford their rent) and tested their hypothesis. They didn’t know their hypothesis would turn into a large company, but knew that they had found a real need and a solution that might just work.
They launched quickly, without waiting to get off the ground or developing too many features. In this way, they were able to get their product into the hands of real users as soon as possible.
“If it takes more than a month to build, then it’s not an MVP.” — Michael Siebel, CEO of Y Combinator
As a founder in the building stage, you may be thinking about all of the cool add-ons you could do to further address the need of the person, but you must remember that the customer has likely not used any of the existing tools in the market because they are to complicated, becoming too general and not specifically addressing their own problems. This excerpt from a Y Combinator essay explains what could happen if you get lost in your own world of perfection without prioritizing your users:
Well, consider how many assumptions you’re making that could turn out to be disastrously wrong:
- You spend months figuring out how to launch custom mobile apps for your clients, only to find out that what a restaurant owner really wants is a mobile-optimized website that’s easy to find on Google.
- Or, after using all the latest technologies to build real-time chat, you find out that restaurant owners can barely deal with email and don’t want to sit at a computer all day.
- Or, worst of all, you might find out that restaurant owners don’t want the hassle of dealing with technology and maintaining mobile apps and have no interest in using your product in the first place.
Instead of being wrong, look for what a Co-Founder of TeeSpring has to say about being right:
“You’re never going to get a better sense for your product than actually listening to real users, and especially in the early days, the product you launch with and the feature set you launch with is almost certainly not going to be the feature set that you scaled with. The quicker you talk to users and learn what they actually need, the faster you can get to that point” -Walker Williams, Co-Founder of TeeSpring
Great, so what type of MVP is best for me?
As you can tell by comparing the MVP’s of Airbnb and DoorDash, MVP’s can come in a variety of different forms, and they could be as simple as a landing page with additional contact information! For some, it could require an email sign-up, phone call, or text message. (what’s special about DoorDash’s MVP is that it went beyond the “interest form collection of data” — calling in meant you were actually calling in for a delivery, not just saying you’re interested in the product).
Regardless of what you end up choosing, your MVP needs something that resembles the real product and a call to action. One form of this is “the fake door”, which gives a very accurate indicator of how many people you can expect to download your product when it is launched. You make the website look as if the product already exists, and add a place for interested consumers to put in their contact information if they want the product for themselves.. Then, after the consumers input their contact information, they are sent to the next page which reads, “product coming soon”!
On a similar note, a type of MVP growing in popularity is the interest wait list, which startups like Clubhouse and Snackpass have used to invoke FOMO, the fear of missing out; when all your friends are on Twitter talking about how much they love Snackpass, you want to join in with your friends. This method could also allow your company to slowly let people in if your infrastructure isn’t built to handle high amounts of site traffic, although that’s not to say that you should leave people on your wait list for months on end.
Another type is a survey — the challenge here is keeping questions both short and open-ended; you want to get valuable feedback, but don’t want the form to be so long that no one will take the time to fill it out. Whenever you’re asking questions to potential users, make sure not to ask leading questions — that’s questions with yes or no answers. All humans are biased after reading a yes or no question, convincing their own mind that “okay, maybe that is the case for me, but I’m not exactly sure…I’ll click yes”; plus, the entire decision-making process your potential customer has when thinking about the question is lost when not written down.
Sounds great, but what if I’m a non-technical founder? Can I still build an MVP?
Yes! Even an MVP like DoorDash’s was made only using HTML and CSS. Today, it is even easier, since there are so many free website building tools out there — the downside is then your potential users seeing wix.com advertising everywhere as they try and scroll through your page.
To build an app, there are plenty of minimal (block) code and no-code tools like MIT App Inventor (appinventor.mit.edu), Bubble (bubble.io) or Glide Apps (glideapps.com), most of which were built to make it easier for entrepreneurs to get their ideas off the ground and turn them into solutions.
Also, there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube on how to build a basic app or responsive site with JavaScript! It’s typically better to have a technical co-founder or founding member who can dedicate time to building out your product, although you can easily immerse yourself in how to do some of the work an additional team member would be doing.
TL;DR: Key Takeaways
- A minimum viable product is a proof of concept for your startup idea.
- Build and launch quickly to get the product into the hands of your users. The quicker users start using the product, the quicker you get valuable feedback.
- Don’t build out many complex features — keep it simple and easy to navigate. Otherwise, you run the risk of spending building multiple features without keeping the user in mind, which may ultimately end up to be a multitude of features your users aren’t looking for.
- The right type of MVP depends on your company. It could require an email sign-up, phone call, or text message, but should require a call-to-action so you’re able to collect the interested consumers’ contact information so you can get a hold of them, and track how much interest your MVP is generating.
- Plenty of no-code or minimal-code tools exist for you to get started with something simple and non-technical! Although it’s best to have someone on your founding team who’s comfortable with what it will take to build your product through code.
Resources
Here are some additional resources if you’re looking to read more about MVP’s:
