The Vanity Minimum Viable Product
Deliver customer value. Don’t show it.
(This essay first appeared on RamliJohn.com)
I’ve been helping out a lot of entrepreneurs with their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) through one-on-one mentorship calls via SoHelpful.
On one such calls, the person emailed me a beautifully designed mockup of a mobile app. I can tell he paid a designer a lot of money for it. The conversation went something like this:
“So what do you think?”
“Uhhh… It looks pretty… So this your MVP?” I asked.
“Yup, it is my MVP. I’m asking people what they think about it,” the person said with such inflated enthusiasm that I almost felt bad that I was about to crush his hopes and dreams.
This guy isn’t alone. Many people think that the path to validated learning is this:
Step 1: Think of a new product or startup idea.
Step 2: Create a mockup using pen-and-paper, Balsamiq, Photoshop, etc.
Step 3: Get out of the building! Ask potential customers what they think about your mockup.
I’m seeing a lot more “MVPs” like this. Mockups are great communication tools. They help show your vision. But they are not optimized for validated learning.
The Vanity Minimum Viable Product
Mockups, videos and landing pages are what I call Vanity MVPs. They make you feel awesome, but doesn’t necessarily lead to validate learning about your riskiest assumptions.
When you just show a mockup, landing page or video to a customer, you’ll get answers to questions like:
- Can people navigate through my product?
- Do people understand what these buttons do?
- Can people do the basic tasks in my app?
- What do people think about your product?
Vanity MVPs really don’t test your riskiest assumptions about the core value of your product or service. Do people care about your core value? Will they keep coming back? Will they become passionate evangelist?
To answers these questions, you have to stop showing how you’ll deliver value to the customer and build an actionable MVP that actually delivers customers value. That’s why Ash Maurya, author ofRunning Lean, refined the phrase MVP in this blog post as:
A Minimum Viable Product is the smallest thing you can build that delivers customer value(and as a bonus captures some of that value back).
Feedback Vs. Reactions
Vanity MVPs also invite feedback rather than reaction. There’s a big difference between the two.
Jake Knapp, design partner at Google Ventures, said in this essay that feedback comes from the brain, and reactions come from the gut. When you’re trying to validate your riskiest assumptions, reactions are more useful — they’re closer to what the customer truly thinks.
Think about the last time you asked someone for feedback. What’s the first thing they do? They think. In the worst case, they’ll think up something to tell you just because you’re asking them.
But when you show someone a product for the first time, you can see the reaction of the person right away. You can see confusion, delight, surprise, understanding, excitement — whatever.
If you really want to validate your riskiest assumptions with your MVP, stop asking for feedback and observe people’s reactions in the real world and decide what to do.
It can be useful to ask friends or mentors for feedback, but when you’re talking to customers, aim for reactions. And you can’t get reactions until you actually deliver customer value.
Promised Value Vs. Delivered Value
A lot of vanity MVPs are like the “World’s Best Cup of Coffee” in the movie Elf. In the movie, Buddy (an elf played by Will Ferrell) and Jovie (played by Zooey Deschanel) goes out on a date to a small café. Out front, there’s a sign that says “World’s Best Cup of Coffee.” He gives her the cup of coffee and watches in gleeful anticipation of her first sip of the world’s best cup of coffee. Instead, Jovie is greeted with yuckie, disgusting coffee.
A lot of vanity MVPs are like that coffee. They’re pretty drawings or high-production videos of what the product will look like. They over-promise and under-deliver. They don’t test out the ‘V’ part of the MVP — viable. Can you viably deliver the value of the product or service to the customer?
That’s why true validated learning happens when you deliver customer value and you observe the reaction of your customers. Use pre-existing tools, platforms and services like the 3 startups I mentioned in this Pando article that I wrote.
Deliver Customer Value. Don’t Show It.
Mockups, landing pages and videos are great for communicating your vision to your team, but it’s the wrong tool for testing your riskiest assumptions. Stop building vanity MVPs and asking for feedback. Deliver customer value and observe their reactions.
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Need help with your MVP? Schedule time with me for free at www.sohelpful.me/ramlijohn
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Photo credit: Travis Isaacs via Flickr
