MVP: Minimum Viable Product

Topics Covered (TL; DR)
1. What is an MVP?
2. Difference between PoC, Prototype, and MVP
3. Concepts related to Minimal Viable Product
4. Key Goals of Developing an MVP
5. How “Minimum” should an MVP be?
6. Stages to build an MVP
7. Target the Right Market while building an MVP
8. Factors influencing the Cost of MVP Development
9. How to Test an MVP on the Market?
10. How to Measure the Success of Your MVP?
11. MVP Examples: 5 Business Use Cases
12. Questions

What is an MVP

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the first version of your product that you can deploy to your customers to deliver value. MVPs help you learn about your customers and how they use your product. This feedback helps you build a better product.

This term has been around for some time. SyncDev co-founder and president Frank Robinson coined the term in 2001, but it has since been popularized by lean-his startup movement pioneers Steve Blank and Eric Ries.

The minimum viable product is that version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning¹ about customers with the least effort. — Eric Ries

¹Validated learning is the process of taking a metric that defines a desired goal, taking action, and then studying changes in that metric as a means of assessing if our actions were appropriate.

MVP is about continuous analysis and a never-ending decision-making process for founders. It requires not only business expertise but also a reliable and experienced tech vendor.

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a key step in your product development journey that allows you to test your business idea in the real market. Such an approach is widely used in the software development industry. Amazon, Dropbox, Instagram, and Facebook also started their journey with an MVP.

The primary goal in developing an MVP is to provide a minimally functional product that solves a core user problem. MVP allows you to research the market with minimal time and expense compared to launching a full application. By narrowing the scope of your product to basic functionality, you can start customer feedback loops more quickly and iterate your product faster based on real feedback rather than guesswork.

Difference between PoC, Prototype, and MVP

A proof of concept essentially deals with the question of feasibility, i.e. whether a particular idea can be realized with a particular technology. A POC works as an internal project, but a prototype can be submitted for early feedback to learn more about the process and design. Proof of concept, prototype, and MVP are different phases of product development. PoCs and prototypes are used in the prototyping stage and require minimal to moderate investment.

MVP development involves entering the production phase with core features and functionality to see how the market accepts your idea. Creating an MVP takes more time and money than creating a PoC or prototype.

Concepts related to Minimal Viable Product

1. Minimum business increment (MBI)
   MBI is the minimum value a customer (internal or external) can achieve in line with a company’s strategy. MBI delivers value to customers and gives product teams valuable feedback that the right features are built and built the right way. MBI is an all-inclusive solution for delivering customer value. MBI can be both MMF and MMR if done right.
2. Minimum Marketable Product — MMP
   MMP is a concept that encourages companies to create minimal products based on the idea that less is more. This concept says that if you create a product with minimal features that can help users such as early adopters and innovators, you can sell or market that feature. The main goal of this concept is to reduce the time to market. This is because products can be introduced more quickly, and you can expect a faster return on investment.
3. Minimum Marketable Feature — MMF
   The concept of minimal marketable features is a subset of a minimal marketable product, a small, self-contained feature that builds quickly and provides value to users that sells or markets the product. It can be used as a tool as MMF is part of MMP, where small discrete functions are identified and integrated into the product. These features are marketable and can meet customer needs.
4. Minimum Marketable Release — MMR
   An MMR is a release of a product with a minimal feature set that meets the current new needs of our customers. MMR is used to reduce time to market between releases by reducing each release’s consistent feature set to the smallest increments that deliver new value to customers. An MMR consists of one or more MBIs (ideally one).

5. Minimum Lovable Product (MLP)

The MLP (Minimum Lovable Product) represents a customer-centric product development strategy that prioritizes empathy and innovation in creating a product that elicits an emotional connection with customers from day one. This approach diverges from the conventional MVP (Minimum Viable Product) methodology, which focuses on launching a product with only the essential features to validate its viability in the market. The MLP, on the other hand, prioritizes the delivery of a product that not only meets but exceeds customer expectations, thereby establishing a foundation of customer loyalty and trust. By leveraging an empathetic and innovative approach, the MLP drives customer engagement, enhances the user experience, and sets the stage for long-term product success. The MLP represents a cutting-edge, customer-focused approach to product development that prioritizes emotional connection and drives business outcomes.

6. Minimum Viable Experience (MVE)
The MVE (Minimum Viable Experience) represents a holistic approach to product development that prioritizes customer satisfaction by taking into account all touchpoints of the customer journey. This extends beyond the product itself and encompasses elements such as messaging, branding, sales enablement, and customer support. The MVE represents the baseline level of experience that an organization must deliver to meet the evolving needs and expectations of its customer base. By embracing an empathetic and customer-centric mindset, the MVE drives customer engagement and fosters brand loyalty, ultimately leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and a more robust customer experience. The MVE represents a data-driven, customer-first approach to product development that prioritizes customer experience and drives business outcomes.

userpilot.com

7. Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF)
The MMF (Minimum Marketable Feature) represents a product development strategy that focuses on delivering incremental value to customers by rapidly delivering targeted and marketable features. This approach aligns with the Agile methodology’s first principle, which prioritizes customer satisfaction through the continuous and iterative delivery of high-value software. By focusing on both marketable features and providing a tangible and meaningful benefit to users, organizations can enhance the customer experience, drive engagement, and meet the evolving needs and expectations of their target audience. The MMF represents a customer-centric, value-driven approach to product development that leverages Agile principles to deliver market impact and drive business outcomes.

8. Minimum Marketable Product (MMP)
The MMP (Minimum Marketable Product) is a product development philosophy that leverages the paradigm of “less is more” to drive innovation and speed-to-market. By keeping the feature set concise and laser-focused on meeting the needs of key market segments, such as early adopters and innovators, the MMP enables a more streamlined and efficient go-to-market strategy. This results in a nimble product launch and expedites the time-to-value realization for stakeholders, thus driving ROI (Return on Investment) optimization. The MMP represents a data-driven approach to product development that prioritizes marketability and minimizes time-to-market, maximizing market impact and revenue potential.

Key Goals of Developing an MVP

1. Ability to test a product hypothesis with minimal resources
2. Avoidance of the bigger failures and fund expense
3. Checking real-life market tendencies
4. Cooperation and hand-in-hand work with potential users in crafting the final product necessary
5. Shortest time between product launch on the market and early adopters
6. Gaining and expanding the user base
7. Possibility to attract investors early
8. Ability to apply for crowdfunding
9. Continuous product development team learning and education
10. Reduction of potentially wasted engineering hours

How “Minimum” should an MVP be?

MVP must contain only the most valuable features and most importantly it should be fully functional. A complete product should be released without low-grade bugs or feature crashes. A good MVP should have all core features that deliver value, a well-designed user experience, and solid reliability.

Stages to build an MVP

MVP development is not much different from regular product development. The steps are the same, but the goals, resources, and speed are different.

Stage 0: Acknowledge the basic MVP principles and techniques
Before you get down to business, it’s a good idea to outline the basic MVP principles and techniques and ensure your team adheres to them throughout the process. The following points are important at all stages of an MVP initiative.

1. Focus on building awareness
2. Interview customers all the time
3. Try pre-selling the product
4. Set up a feedback loop
5. Create a landing page
6. Use social media
7. Start an ad campaign

Stage 1: Identify the problem your app is trying to solve
All apps are born to simplify users’ lives and solve special problems. Your app should provide value to your users. Otherwise, the app store will collect dust. You should have a clear understanding of :

1. Long Term Goals
2. Short Term Goals
3. Success Criteria

Stage 2: Research the market
Without a thorough market analysis, you cannot get a complete picture of your competitors, users, and their needs. You need to know if there are competing solutions. If you want to compete, you have to define your own characteristics for your product. This can be achieved by performing thorough market research.

State 3: Map out User Journey(s)
A good way to give your users a great experience in the first iteration of your app is to visualize the user journey. This allows you to open the app and see the product from the user’s perspective until you reach your final goal — for example, “making a purchase”. This reveals how to design your app in a way that is convenient for your users. Get to know your customer by below activities:

1. Identify The User
2. Identify The Actions (Jobs)
3. Identify the Story Endings

Stage 4: Prioritize features
The idea of ​​MVP is to develop a fully functional app with basic functionality. As such, you should define the features that provide the most value to your customers. Write down all the features you want your app to have, then select the features that are essential to creating a great minimal viable product.

Step 5: Create A Pain And Gain Map
After completing the user flow, create a pain-and-gain map for each action. A pain-benefit map can be used to identify all of the user’s pain points and the benefits that the user will derive from addressing each problem. This tactic helps identify where you are most likely to add value. You can then focus your MVPs on those areas and add low-impact areas to your product roadmap for future releases.

Step 6: Decide What Features To Build
At this stage, you can identify features to include in your MVP and features to include in your low-priority product roadmap. Below are tools to help you determine the capabilities you need for a successful MVP. By asking what your users want and what they need, you can identify and prioritize features. The only functionality that should be included should be related to the overall goal of the product.

1. Opportunity statements
2. Breakdown the functionality into features and include in your product roadmap
3. Prioritization matrix

Stage 7: Build and test
Once you’ve passed the planning phase, transform your thoughts and ideas into an early version of your application. However, the app should be high quality and bug-free to avoid crashes on the first screen. MVPs should engage users from the first touch and screen, fix their problems, and encourage them to use the app regularly.

Stage 8: Collect and analyze feedback
Creating an MVP is all about getting user feedback. With the MVP in hand and user feedback, you can keep iterating to get the results you want. Collecting feedback and testing changes in the real world is the only way to build a product that users really want, need, and love.

Target the Right Market while building an MVP

Imagine how you could sell air conditioning minimum viable products in Antarctica. This is a challenging job. The same rule applies when a company has a mission to build an MVP. No matter how good your product/service is, if your company can’t solve the other half of the equation, it will fail. That means finding the ideal target market for your MVP.

Beautiful product development in an ugly market segment simply makes no sense. — Dan Adams

1. Analyze the Competition
It is important to do a deep dive into competitor research to determine what your product competes with. Building an MVP that is not yet on the market is nearly impossible. Even if the startup has a unique idea, it joins an existing competitive industry. So you need to figure out how to put a minimally viable product in an industry that is doing what your competitors are trying to do. To know that, startups need to research their competitors. You have to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.

2. Geographically Segment the Customer Base
Once you’ve identified your customer base for your MVP, your next task is to focus on geographic segmentation. This is an effective strategy used by companies to familiarize themselves with the location-based attributes that make up a particular target market. Analyzing the location of your ideal customer base can be a real game changer in building an MVP.

3. Find the Motivation Behind a Purchase
Once you have geographically segmented your customer base, the next task is to understand the motivation behind purchases. This allows startups to perfectly balance their MVP positioning.

The easiest way to achieve this is through a survey. With a minimum viable product in mind, ask relevant questions. Once the survey is complete, it can be completed in a number of ways depending on the budget.

Factors influencing the Cost of MVP Development

• Type of development team (freelancers, outsourced, or in-house specialists)
• Location
• Hourly rates
• Level of Expertise
• Business domain
• Features to develop
• Mobile platforms to reach (Android, iOS, or both)

When estimating your budget, do not forget project management, design, coding, and testing, but also maintenance costs.

How to Test an MVP on the Market?

Building a product that is at least viable is an important process. But after you get the finished product, it’s too soon to stop. The next critical step is product launch and evaluation. Testing aims to understand how the business idea meets market needs and how the product can be developed. MVP validation steps vary depending on your type and business needs. Here are some ways to assess product needs.

1. Wizard of Oz or Flintstone MVP
Like the Flintstones trying to create the illusion that they have a real car, and the Wizard of Oz using tricks to disguise themselves as a giant greenhead, a fairy, a fireball, or a monster, such an MVP looks completely functional. In fact, startups do everything manually instead of using software systems or hiring a team if needed. No core software, just a product concept to demonstrate.

Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn has proven that this strategy works. At first, not a cent was spent on shoes and warehouse rent. He posted pictures of the shoe on his website. When a customer starts ordering shoes, they go to the store and buy the desired pair, which are then shipped. Realizing that the project could work, he added functionalities to his website.

2. Concierge MVP
Employers who choose Concierge MVP also offer hands-on services. But in this case, the client knows that real people are behind the services provided. This type of MVP is intended to generate ideas about future products, offer services, communicate with customers, etc., and not validate them.

Wealthfront is a financial planning and investment service that started with Concierge MVP. Wealth’s front desk staff communicates directly with clients who need help managing their wealth.

3. Piecemeal
The idea of a Piecemeal MVP is to deliver value using existing tools rather than creating custom solutions. However, the product prototype looks like a complex product. You can use a simple program, compile it and add the necessary features after receiving feedback.

Groupon is a great example of a piecemeal MVP. Its founder, Andrew Mason, launched a WordPress website and manually posted pictures of meal deals every day. He generated offers as PDF documents using AppleScript and emailed them via Apple Mail. That’s how he validated the Groupon hypothesis.

4. Landing Page MVP
A landing page is a single page that:

• Describes your product or service
• Illustrates some advantages of using your product or service (your “unique value proposition”)
• Contains a button that lets interested visitors click to read more, join a mailing list, buy now, or some other action

Joel Gascoigne of Buffer used a landing page to test his concept for his product that automates future posting of social media at optimal times. Joel achieved 120 signups and went on to speak to 50 of these people directly. Joel even had a paying customer a couple of days after launching his product from this list. Now Buffer has over $1m a month in recurring revenue.

5. Crowd Funding/Pre-Order MVP
This MVP type is a great way to generate monetary interest for your idea before you spend additional time and money creating the full product or service.

The basics of pre-orders and crowdfunding:

• Pre-order: When customers place a money order in exchange for a yet-to-be-launched product. The revenue obtained from pre-orders can fund the building and release of the product.
• Crowdfunding: Funding your business idea through small investments from a large number of people.

Pebble has been successful not only in validating its idea but also in receiving payments for the product before its production. Pebble is an e-paper watch for smartphones. This minimum viable product example raised the largest sum, over $10M, on Kickstarter.

6. Email Campaign MVP
Creating an email is a lot less work than creating a product or even a feature within a product. If you have existing customers, you can start by manually writing an email and see if the email response helps. If so, you can move on to creating relevant product features. If you see that most people open the email but don’t click the call-to-action button, you can conclude that the value proposition is not compelling.

Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt started off by emailing his idea to a list of people. After receiving rave feedback, he knew the idea was worth pursuing further.

7. Demo Videos MVP
This includes recording a promotional or explainer video, posting it to YouTube, and seeing if it gets views and comments. The good news is that engaging videos often go viral and automatically start a word-of-mouth campaign. The bad news is that very few videos reach this level and it’s impossible to predict which ones will be.

Record a video from your screen to demonstrate how your product works — does that amount to MVP? From the experience of Drew Houston, the CEO of Dropbox, it turns out it does. Dropbox is a Silicon Valley company providing an easy file-sharing tool that helps to disseminate files throughout all existing devices in one click.

8. Single Feature Application MVP
Like all applicable products, a single-feature MVP app is designed to allow your brand to bring a product to market without a large initial investment.

• Develop an app that solves a single, specific problem your customers have.
• The feature you provide should be core to your unique value proposition.

Spotify: Spotify began as a small startup in Sweden that aimed to solve the growing piracy problem the music industry was facing at the time. The first Spotify prototype was up and running in under five months and launched as a beta streaming service in 2007. The only feature that people were able to use: was to stream single songs.

9. Single Market MVP
A single market MVP is designed to focus on a single user group, demographic, or market. This helps reduce development costs, but the real benefit is savings in customer service and post-release maintenance.

When Uber launched its MVP product in 2010, it was focused on one single market: San Francisco. That’s a far cry from the other 80 countries that have Uber today. Uber took this approach with their MVP to help validate the product’s viability in a small market, which by all accounts, is more tech-savvy and open to new tech than many other parts of the country.

10. Internal First MVP
The idea here is to build an MVP product that can be used internally — either within your startup itself or within a larger organization that you are a part of.

Slack’s early team started working on the app at the end of 2012. By March 2013 they were actually using their own MVP product. This was a great way for the developers to see for themselves exactly what was and wasn’t working.

How to Measure the Success of Your MVP?

Everything is part of a process. First, you define the core features; then, you move to product development and launch. You need to constantly measure the success of your product and react to any changes.

• App traffic/Word of mouth: This important metric can show the number of people using your app. If there are tons of traffic, you’ll get tons of users in the long run.
• User engagement: This metric can help you understand the behavior of your users. You need to identify the most important indicators and then use them to measure user engagement rates. For example, the time spent on the app is a decisive factor for YouTube and Instagram.
• Sign-ups: The number of registrations is the strongest indicator of your app’s success.
• Active users: This is an essential factor influencing the success of your app. The number of active users shows how the market reacts to your app and its level of interest.
• Customer acquisition costs (CAC): This refers to the money you spend to get a user. The lower CAC is, the easier you can grow. For example, if you’ve run a $200 Facebook campaign and gotten 20 new users, that works out to $10 per user.
• Paying users: Though the number of active users is important, if your app cannot generate revenue, it’s useless. If the numbers are unpromising, it’s time to pivot and take another round.
• Client Lifetime Value (CLV): Demonstrates how much time a user spends on the app before uninstalling or discontinuing their app use.
• Churn rate: The churn rate shows how many customers cancel their subscriptions and stop using the app. If customers’ average subscription spending cannot cover their CAC, it’s again time to rethink your business concept and take a pivot.

MVP Examples: 5 Business Use Cases

For inspiration, here are some stories behind successful services that are well-known these days and how they started with their minimum viable product examples.

1. Virgin Airlines
Virgin Airlines is one of the largest British airlines operating internationally that was established and is owned, by Richard Branson. What was the minimum viable product for Virgin Airlines? It was just one route and one plane flying between Gatwick and Newark.

2. Yahoo!
What was the MVP product for Yahoo? Yahoo was represented as an MVP website, a single-page website that contained a list of links to other sites. This was a sufficient amount of functionality to satisfy the users and retain early adopters of the system. Today, the system is the second most popular search engine in the world.

3. Airbnb
Airbnb was started as a concierge MVP. Back in 2017, there was a great design conference in San Francisco. The Airbnb team decided to offer their cheap accommodations during this event and posted the information on a simple website. Within a short period of time, 3 guests were interested in paying for this minimum viable service. This supported the market insight that potential customers would be willing to pay to stay at someone else’s home rather than in a hotel.

4. Foursquare
Foursquare is another good minimum viable product example. In 2009, when it was launched, it was a simple app allowing people to check-in at a certain place. No special design, no special functionality, just a single-feature minimum viable product. Today, it has 55 million monthly active users and 7 billion check-ins in total.

5. Facebook
In late 2004, Facebook was the definition of MVP on social media. Users had a simple profile and a great opportunity to connect with their group mates. This one feature was enough to provide an awesome boost and turn a small project into one of the largest public tech companies in history.

Questions:

While the above hopefully sounds straightforward, there are many questions from product teams about this critical concept:

• How do we rapidly converge on a Product Market Fit?
• How do we know we have actually achieved Product Market Fit? What level of “proof” do we need? How many customers need to agree to buy it?
• Is the MVP Test intended to be something that we sell, or is it just an experiment?
• If it’s something we intend to sell, what if a customer won’t buy it? Does this mean it’s not Product Market Fit?
• Who is responsible for discovering Product Market Fit?
• Who makes the decisions regarding each MVP Test?
• How long should we keep trying to achieve Product Market Fit before we give up?
• What should we do when we identify a pivot opportunity?
• Do we need to wait until we have identified Product Market Fit before we start building production software?
• Is an MVP Test the same as a “minimum product?”
• Is the Product Market Fit the same as “product vision?”
• Is an MVP Test the same as MMF (Minimum Marketable Feature)?
• What happens after we have achieved Product Market Fit?
• How do I go from MVP Test to backlog items?
• Is Product Market Fit a moving target? Can I lose it once I’ve found it?
• Is there only one Product Market Fit for a given market or could there be many?
• Do we handle MVP Tests the same way for products for consumers as we do products for businesses?

‘A writer only begins a book but a reader finishes it.’ — Samuel Johnson
Thank you for reading!!