Types of Minimum Viable Products [Series]: Wizard of Oz
By now, you’ve had a good sense of the different types of minimum viable products. Whether you choose an email campaign, single-feature app, concierge, or a preorder campaign, there are different ways to gather feedback and demand without having to build your whole product.
Let’s dive in deeper into this series on MVPs (minimum viable products) with a look at the Wizard of Oz MVP.
What is a Wizard of Oz Minimum Viable Product?
The Wizard of Oz MVP concept has a somewhat strange name, but it is fitting given its nature. Much like in the movie The Wizard of Oz where the wizard works behind the curtain to present a certain environment to his audience, similarly this MVP requires you to work behind the scenes to give the appearance of a fully-developed product to your customers.
A Wizard of Oz minimum viable product presents your target audience with the illusion of a fully developed product.
What do you do to create it?
At the practical level, this MVP is not much different from a concierge MVP:
- Identify the key component of your service or product that you can offer to customers
- Give the impression of a functioning product, but behind the scenes, manually handle the logistics of delivering that order
- But unlike a concierge MVP where you typically disclose the work behind the scenes, a Wizard of Oz MVP appears entirely functional to the customer from the outset.
The goal: In a short time frame, you can put on the face of a fully developed and functioning product to gather feedback from your potential customers. If enough interest is generated, you have support to develop more automated processes that will allow you to step away from the manual behind-the-scenes work.
The catch: Just like a concierge MVP, this type works best if your product/service differentiator has some form of automation or digital transformation (such as a recommendation engine or digital ordering service).
Like all minimum viable product formats, this MVP is used to test the key differentiator of your business idea, generate demand, and measure whether you have enough interest to move forward.
Pros of Using a Wizard of Oz MVP
- Able to create it with multiple existing digital tools, such as a website, landing page, or existing API
- Get first-hand knowledge from your market of what they like and what they don’t
- Work out the kinks and issues with providing your service so you can avoid those same issues when you develop the full product
Cons of Using a Wizard of Oz MVP
- Requires time and energy in order to perform the service manually
- May potentially alienate customers if they find out that there is no actual functioning product
Wizard of Oz Minimum Viable Product Examples
Check out these real-world examples of Wizard of Oz MVPs in action.
Zappos: Today, Zappos is one of the most popular online shoe retailers in the market. Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn wanted to try and sell shoes online at a time when online shopping was an unknown concept. He was not sure that people would be willing to buy shoes without trying them on first.
Rather than keep a large shoe inventory and face the risk of not generating sales, he would take digital photos of shoes in local stores and then post those shoes online on the Zappos website. When people ordered a pair of shoes, he would literally go to the store, manually purchase the shoes, and then mail them to the customer. Customers were unaware that Zappos had no shoes of their own or that their purchases were being processed manually by Nick.
Needless to say, the concept took off, and Zappos grew into a thriving online shoe retailer, eventually being purchased by Amazon for more than $1.2 billion dollars in 2009.
Cardmunch: CardMunch was founded to help alleviate the pain of having to keep a handful of business cards at a networking event. Their MVP was a simple app that allowed people to take photos of the business cards, and then the app would save the information on the card in a digital format.
In their MVP, there was no special photo-reading technology or AI-generated rolodex behind the scenes. Instead, they faked it by having people from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service manually look at the photo, and then transcribe it into the Cardmunch database.
Eventually, Cardmunch caught the eye of the developers at LinkedIn and was purchased for $2.4 million.
A Final Note on Wizard of Oz MVPs
A Wizard of Oz MVP is a great way to test a concept without significant investment, but it does require your time and effort to pull off. You should be ready for the fact that the demand on your time will grow if your concept is a success, and you should have contingencies in place to expand your team while you develop the technology to automate the process.
The best part of this MVP is that you get to test your differentiating premise in the wild. It’s valuable to gain first-hand feedback to create a remarkable product or service that your customers will absolutely demand.
