10 tips on Minimum Desirable Product: Part 1
MVP is dead, long live MDP
or why your email landing page is not your MVP
I love the lean startup movement and the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) methodology, though sometimes before even building MVP, you may want to explore whether there’s an interest at all in your product. This is where Minimum Desirable Product (MDP) comes into play.
Let’s dive into definitions:
MVP
The version of a new product that brings back the maximum amount of validated learning about your customers with the least effort.
MDP
The version of a product that qualifies the interest in it and the need for its existence. It therefore kickstarts customer development before you even have customers.
The crucial difference between these two methodologies is the presence of your customers. Whenever you just start your “next big thing”, you don’t really have customers and you don’t even know who your customer will be. You may say “how does one validate the amount of interest in the product so early in the funnel and what is the metric to be used?” The metric can be anything from the website visits, emails given or even money paid towards the product.
Remember, MVP is a viable version of a product. The product exists and it helps you learn about your customer.
Landing page is not your MVP, you can’t learn about your customer based on how gently they scroll your page.
On the other hand, with MDP your product may not even exist in a conventional sense, though it has to exist in some form in order to grab interest and validate the need.
Define what is MDP for you?
Personally, it took me almost a year to transform my brains from a developer-centric “build it and they’ll come” thinking to “market it and see if anyone gives a sh*t”.
Trust me, no matter how many Lean Startup books your read on this, it really sinks in ONLY when you actually see that you can achieve much more with the second mindset rather than the first one.
Tweet at me if you want to hear about how I launched a viral video and got 6000 subscribers for the music-related app through a simple landing page without writing a line of code.
MDP for our smart shopping list app Capitan took the form of a beta test program announcement for our Apple Watch app.
It is very important to understand that MDP serves an informational purpose and tends to educate as much as possible. We’ve achieved this with our press articles, video and a clean looking landing page.
Check out another great example of a marketing tool SocialSearch.io, which lets you “Steal Customers From Your Competitors Using Social Media”. It sends you 10 laser-targeted leads from your competitors each week. Simple as that and doesn’t require months of hardcore development.
Understand the market/users
So what do you do when you’ve got some traffic to your website, got some emails and comments under your content? You measure and learn, it is as simple as that! We are living in times when there is so much data flowing around that you can access for free, you just have to stretch your back and get it.
Google Analytics
Did you know that you can get a rough estimate on the age, gender and interests for people who visit your website?
I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to understand WHO is interested in what you are offering.
What is their age?
What are they interested in?
You can’t build a product for the “default internet user” and you never should, because great products satisfy specific needs of a certain demographic.
The stats on the left are the actual stats we’ve got during the month of an active promotion of the Capitan app in the press and on startup-related sites such as BetaList. We were even mentioned in two “Best Apple Watch Apps” articles before Apple Watch was released (lol).
Go Beyond Email
You’ve made hundreds of people leave their emails. However, those are just emails and you don’t have any information beyond which email provider they use, right?
WRONG! You can use any of the tools such as Rapportive to augment the email address with other helpful information including the name, title, LinkedIn profile, twitter, facebook account information etc.
Look at their social profiles, their job occupation, what they like and what they post. This may sound a bit creepy but it is super effective in learning who your target persona actually is before moving forward.
Talk to potential customers
After grabbing information on WHO is interested in your product, you need to go deeper and understand WHY they are interested. So many founders tend to discard the power of talking to their customers. They merely dig into analytics, cohort analysis and get stuck in data paralysis when they can just ASK HUMANS!
And MDP is especially great for this because you don’t have a customer yet, you have a person that desires your product for some mystical reason that you have no clue about. Remember, you have no clue why the person left their email address until you talk to them.
Personally, I love using online surveys to follow up with signups and pre-qualify the talking, especially the interactive ones by Typeform. If you are not living on ramen, you can even pay $20/month and get awesome features such as notifications and survey results sent to you and your co-founders as they happen in real-time.
Get 10% OFF for TypeForm with this link or apply the “ARTURK” code on checkout.
When creating your online surveys, make sure you ask the right questions, I highly recommend “Ask” and “The Mom Test” books to make sure you are on the right track with your survey questions.
Trust me, you will learn so much from talking to those people, you may even have a high chance of pivoting before building your first MVP.
I hope you enjoyed the first 3 tips. Want to know when the second part goes up? Follow me on and please recommend this post ☺
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