Lessons on Minimum Viable Products

Popularized by the Lean Startup Methodology, Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) are the smallest version of a solution designed to test one’s fundamental assumptions as quickly as possible. Like many aspects of starting a startup, I’ve found that MVPs are conceptually simple but hard to execute in practice, and here are a few of my lessons learned.

1. Before you build any MVP, you should deeply validate that a problem exists. Even though there are now many tools that have made it easier to prototype, take time to understand your user segment, how they think, and why the current solutions are falling short before you jump into solution thinking. One shortcut to this is to build a problem you experience yourself.
2. MVPs are much easier if you have chosen an important problem. Try to find burning problems where existing solutions or substitutes are poor. Customers will accept (and pay for) remarkably flawed MVPs if their problems are strong enough.
3. Get excited to start small. Entrepreneurs tend to be infectiously passionate and ambitious by nature, and this can lead to attempting grand product visions out of the gate. This is a risky mindset which often leads to waste, as no product survives its first encounter with reality. Rather than getting excited about the complexity of your solution, find excitement in searching for the smallest thing that meaningfully helps your user.
4. MVPs are fundamentally about restricting scope, not quality. Starting small is great, but you cannot afford to cut major corners on usability or to ship a broken product. Severely buggy and confusing products distort learning because users cannot meaningfully interact with your solution. Instead of sacrificing quality, think about limiting scope. Focus on the one or two features that you hypothesize will provide the most value for your users and implement them well. This analogy explains it well:

5. Keep costs low until you have iterated through enough MVPs to find one that your initial customers/users love. Difficult problems are rarely solved by intuition — it takes multiple rounds of attempts while learning incrementally from each failure. Plan ahead and give your team the cushion you need to learn.

These are some of the first lessons that came to mind for me. What else? What are some other thoughts on MVPs?