So You Think Your MVP is The Solution?
It is a tool, a means to an end, but not necessarily the solution.
In April, I documented the steps that took us from concept to our first iteration of i1Machines. For me, one big takeaway from the past year that still resonates in our day-to-day work was the adoption of strategic thinking.
Whether it is developing a function, planning an event, or taking on new partners, strategic thinking keeps the team aligned. When I explain why I choose certain actions over others from a strategic standpoint, my teammates can easily understand where I come from and suggest alternative solutions. Team communication has improved a lot.

With the MVP ready, we now have a tool to validate our assumptions, so we talked to potential users, ran through our product and asked them to use it. What do the results tell us? Are they interested? Is the market ready to adopt our solution? We soon met our next hurdle — getting interested and invested users onboard, and finding product-market fit (PMF).
You know how we always try to imagine a positive outcome, be it getting into the school of your choice, scoring a date with the girl of your dreams, or making your first bucket of gold. It was the same with the MVP.
I pictured how it would be well-received (at least moderately), some users will come onboard and tell others about it (organic growth yeaaaa), and fundings and partnerships might fall in place. We will have to make tweaks here and there, which we will figure as we go, but we will get there right? As always, reality would paint a different picture.
Learning About Your Audience
After several user interviews, I came up with a rough segmentation of our audience. They generally fall under — Interested/Not Interested, and Think It Will Work/Think It Will Not Work. Each segment of users has a similar level of buy-in to our visions and ideals.

This framework was loosely adopted to help us figure out what the audience in each segment were looking out for. It was also constructed on a hindsight basis, so there may be biases in the categorisation of audience. You should come up with a different categorisation that better suits your hypotheses.
There were two recurring themes that we found:
- Price transparency is a sensitive information that many companies are unwilling to compromise on. Many of them feel that if you are respectful of your competitors, they will reciprocate, much like the example of Prisoner’s Dilemma. As long as all involved accomplices keep mum and tell the same story, they will all be safe from conviction.
- Concerns of a first mover (dis)advantage. Despite the promise of a reduced sentence (an advantage) for the informant, there is not enough movement in the market that pressures any of them to make the first move.
Not Everyone is Your Customer
There are the ideal customers, and then there are those whom would require some persuasive effort on our part to get their buy-ins. Our ideal customer is a construction company that is ready to embrace technological changes, and willing to experiment with new processes.
One thing I learnt (besides getting relevant feedback) was that building your first group of users is hard. You can build a castle, a compelling story, a “complete” product, but you cannot expect customers to magically come to you. The truth is, they may not need your product or service at all.
Nonetheless, there are some who would greatly benefit from your services. Find them, pursue them.
A Cut Above The Rest
The other issue is the amount of competition in the market, especially for B2C or tech companies. With so many alternatives around, how will your ideal customer hear about you? What makes you stand out, and what makes your business defensible?
That is to say, what are your competitive advantages and unique selling point(s)? You have to communicate that clearly to win customers.
Adapting Your Game Plan
We started off hoping for “a hit”, and ended up uncovering different challenges. Nonetheless, we also found the ideal customer who participates enthusiastically, and with whom we can partner with to illustrate use cases.
Knowing your ideal customer also means that you can find other potential users who share similar characteristics. Reach out to these people through the use of effective channels and the right key messages. And this in itself, should be a plan that you can readily adjust.
For i1Machines, we adapted from targeting broadly to having a narrow, refined scope. We are also looking at partnering with several institutions and participating in an upcoming industry event to increase our outreach.
A MVP is a tool to validate your assumptions. You (try to) spend as little resources as possible to find support for your hypotheses, and if it is not supported, you tweak, execute and repeat.
Could we have spent lesser resources in our journey thus far? Possibly. Our “MVP” was of relatively high fidelity. However, we could not have gotten the above feedback with just a paper prototype or a mockup.
What is Your ‘Minimum’?
For i1Machines, creating a higher level of ‘minimum’ in our MVP increased the chance that our product resonates with the users (assuming it solves their needs). The MVP bridges what we imagine our product to be, with what the audience perceives it does. It is by building this bridge with your audience, that helps you understand their needs.
Creating a more completed product does not guarantee success, but it helps in the bridging effort. However, that would also mean putting in more work and resources into building something that may be scrapped totally.
Hence, it is important to first define your ‘minimum’ from a strategic standpoint. Then, keep iterating until you get the buy-ins from your ideal customers, partners and investors.
The MVP is not the final solution. It is a tool. It is a work-in-progress. It is the means to an end.
While my first piece discusses the process of building an MVP, this article touches on using MVP as a validation tool. I hope this documentation of our work with i1Machines may help others who are going through a similar journey.
How did your company develop the first iteration of the product? Feel free to comment below, and give a ❤ if you found the above points useful.
