Go to the profile of Jeffrey Wong
Jeffrey Wong
Student of the game. http://jeffwongdesign.com

Bunch, The Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

“MVP” is a term that’s thrown around a lot in our field, for designers, developers, executives, investors, etc. As we get closer to shipping Bunch, our team has really focused on what MVP means.

We’re taking this very seriously and our team continually asks “what features are core in order for us to test our hypothesis around Bunch”. Right now, all of our energy is focused around making sure that there’s a rock-solid experience around account creation, adding/messaging friends, and get notifications. Everything else is an optimization or nice-to-have at this point.

I love that our team has taken this to heart and put it into practice.

The Missing Features

As we prep to ship to the app store, there were be specific bug fixes that will be punted to latter releases. We’re committed to squashing hi-priority bugs, and they’re certainly on our radar, but we have to prioritize between shipping earlier vs squashing every bug. Right now, we’re weighting towards shipping earlier to see if we have product market fit. If you’re curious about some of our missing features, here are some examples of bugs/features that will be omitted from our MVP:

  • Bluetooth audio support. If you send a message while using a bluetooth audio device, your video will be muted. Obviously power users (including myself) will want to message while using bluetooth in the future.
  • Android app. For our V1 know it’s important to connect with the right people, and some of our closest friends are on Android.
  • Adding and messaging more than 8 people. Ideally, it’d be nice to message more than 8 people, and we have a design solution for that as well.
  • Saving videos. A lot of apps are fighting for to be the first camera you use when capturing a moment. Saving videos is important, but isn’t core to our product experience at the moment.
  • Better first time user experience. Bunch has been deliberately designed to be a more experimental. There are no back arrows, no keyboard, or actual “buttons” to do anything. Everything is gestural, and at the moment, the app requires the users to stumble around to figure things out. I’ll share more on this philosophy later.

And the list goes on. We could spend months to refine, optimize and iterate, but the only way to know if this app will have traction is to ship the MVP.

Success Metrics

This is the hard part about MVPs… I think it’s easy to kill off an app before it’s been given a fair shot. Negative feedback from users or paltry numbers can be one of the first thing that shuts an MVP down.

So when should we talk about success metrics? For me, I’ll be able to devote my mind to metrics and measurement after we ship to the app store. I can tell you that (initially) there are a few things that need to be true for Bunch to be a success:

  1. Shipping an app within 1 month. I’m so proud of how far we’ve come in such a short amount of time. This will be the biggest win my book—and at the current course and speed, this will happen.
  2. Bunch has a small group of highly engaged users that message with each other. For example, I would prefer to see 100 users message each other like crazy versus 10,000 users that use the app once and churn out. I would love to see a small niche of power users emerge from this app.
  3. The app grows beyond our own network. I’d like to drive enough users to get 10k registered accounts. I’d like to see highly engaged users to be outside of our own network. This will be partially organic, and the other part will be nurturing the community.

Obviously, there are other metrics like DAU/MAU, k-factor, NPS, etc… but it’s hard to look at numbers until we have statistical significance.

I mean, if we get to brass taxes, I think 10,000 registered users should give us a strong enough signal. And sure, if we had +40% DAU/MAU, a k-factor >1, and NPS score of +30, we’d be in the strike zone.

But I don’t want to look at numbers… yet. :)

My philosophy is to build for ourselves first, persevere, and learn quickly. I can tell you right now that I love using Bunch with Annie, Vinny, beta users and my team. I hope there are other people in the world that will enjoy this MVP as much as I do, even if it’s just a small bunch.