5 Ways to ID Your Minimum Viable Product

I thought I’d try to outline some thoughts on this tweet I saw this morning.

@startupSQUARE: Someone Please Write a Blog Post about Minimum Viable Strategy http://blog.startupsquare.com/customer-development/someone-please-write-a-blog-post-about-minimum-viable-strategy/ #leanstartup #entrepreneur

Here’s a few key ideas:

#1: Pivot for continual, incremental improvement
If you’re afraid to pivot, then either you haven’t found the right idea yet, or you’re a glutton for punishment. Your loyalty isn’t to one specific idea, your loyalty is to making the world a better place. Keep poking until you find your customers’ pain point, then solve it.

In my experience, finding MVP has been very difficult, because I’m a product guy, a tinker. I look at technologies and tools and imagine what I could do with them. This leads to a lot of cool ideas with very little business potential. In fact, HeyIndie started out with one of these ideas. Thankfully, through some very basic customer development, we figured out there was no business there. But the knowledge we acquired was instrumental in our pivot, which changed not only the product features but the market focus as well. That’s a lot of change, but it only appeared after we came up with the new product idea, and we were so excited about it, we didn’t care about losing the original idea.

#2: Do something valuable for a large number of customers & do it often
This is my version of business model 101, but it’s super important. In order to have any chance at growing into a real business, your solution must have a high value, for a large number of customers, and it should occur as often as possible. At least two of those numbers should be big. If they’re all “ehh”, then it’s going to be hard to get paying customers. There’s always exceptions, of course, but you’d better be a ninja if you expect to pull it off.

For our original idea, we could argue a large, growing number of customers, but our value proposition was variable to weak, and it occurred infrequently. Not a good mix, especially online, where everyone is accustomed to getting things for free.

#3: Learn and validate your ideas via customer interviews
There’s one way to learn about a customer segment. Go talk to them. They are the only ones know what’s happening today, and what they need to move forward. There is no one else. No journalist or analyst can give you this information. You have to get it yourself.

I am a product guy, as I mentioned, so I don’t naturally tend to phone calls, interviews, etc. So, I hired a friend to help out. I can’t pretend we’re following Steve’s advice to the letter, but we’re getting in front of real customers and learning a lot of valuable and subtle insights into what they need to be successful. And it feels great to be able to inform your product strategy with that knowledge, knowing it can help your future customers kick ass.

#4: Plan to charge for your product
This one’s controversial in some circles, but the key word is “plan”. You will find that “free” or “paid” greatly affects your decision-making process and priorities. Whether you end up actually charging or not, adopting a “paid” mentality keeps you more focused on adding value.

I like focusing on a paid product, since I think it keeps the product focused. If you’re gonna charge, you need a clear value proposition, which counter-intuitively requires a smaller feature set (more features muddies the core value). We haven’t bothered to add a subscription module yet, because we don’t need it for alpha testing, which we plan on using to define our pricing strategy. We need real customers using our product in real situations to gauge our true value first.

#5 Get close to the money
Maybe this one’s obvious, but the further away from the money you are, the more difficult it’s going to be to get some of it.

Our new product is a tool for social marketing that improves your ROI. It also includes some basic analytics that can help prove it’s worth the cost. After interviewing several potential customers, we shifted our focus to an area we knew had value: we can help you sell more product — now that’s close to the money.

Iterate, iterate, iterate
In sum, I think finding MVP is all about iteration. Just assume you’re going to get it wrong the first time, but plant your flag anyway. You have to start somewhere, and it’s inevitable that customer interviews will lead you in new and surprising directions. That’s what everyone means by “fail fast”: no matter how good you are today, you should always be striving to be better tomorrow.