A selection of 5 awesome Minimum Viable Products

We all fear to step forward into the unknown future. Making the “Leap of Faith” to follow our dreams. Getting started always seems to be the hardest obstacle to overcome. If only there was an easy hack to get the engine started, gain some speed, and keep that momentum.

That hack exists, and it’s called “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP).

The term was coined and defined by Frank Robinson about 2001, and popularized by Steve Blank, and Eric Ries.

In his famous book, The Lean Startup, Eric Ries defines it as follows:

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

Here’s a selection of eight MVPs that sky rocketed the products behind them.

1. Dropbox

Before writing a single line of code, the Dropbox team needed to answer the question of whether customers would want to use and pay for their file-sync solution. In order to achieve this, they “get out of the building” and put their proposed user experience in front of real users for feedback.

They made a short explainer video and started sharing it with their network to see how people would react. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video demonstrating your products user experience is worth a million. The 3-minute video demonstrated Dropbox’s intended functionality and resulted in signups increasing from 5,000 people to 75,000 overnight — all of this in absence of a real product.

Dropbox’s video walked potential customers through what the product is and demonstrated how it would help them, eventually leading to why they would want to pay for it.

2. Buffer

Buffer is an app that lets you batch and schedule newsfeeds on your social media platforms, saving you time and programming the posts flow in such a way that maximizes their impact. When starting out, Joel Gascoigne, Buffer’s founder, run a simple test.

Buffer’s MVP was just a landing page. It explained what Buffer was and how it would work, encouraged people to sign up and offered a plans and pricing button for people to click on if they were interested. When they did, however, they were shown a short message explaining they weren’t quite ready yet and that people should sign up for updates.

Through this MVP, Joel understood what his potential clients were looking for. To understand this, he used the email addresses received from the signup form to start conversations with the potential users of the app, gaining valuable feedback and insight into what they would want.

Furthermore, he got an estimation of how many visitors would be willing to pay and which price ranges they would feel comfortable with. He tested this by adding the prices table in between the landing page and the signup form. When someone clicked on the pricing plans button, they were shown the plans to see whether they would be interested in paying for something like Buffer.

This zero-risk MVP helped Buffer identify the market and shape their product features in the coming development as well.

3. Tim Ferriss’s Facebook ads

Tim Ferris is well known for his famous book “The 4-hour workweek”. It turns out that Tim Ferriss wanted to title his first book “Broadband and White Sand”. What do you think? Winner?

As you can imagine, his publisher pushed back, and then Tim pushed back. To end the stalemate, the publisher suggested they run a few Facebook ads to test titles.

I think you know how this story ends.

But get this: The winner — The 4-Hour Work Week was not Tim’s favorite. But he can hardly argue with the results. An investment of a few hundred dollars saved his book from the remainder pile.

4. Pebble

Pebble proved that cramming massive amounts of tech into a coin-sized space isn’t a prerequisite for success. Its e-paper-based original design raised $10 million on Kickstarter, with backers proving the concept was something people actually wanted.

[2017 Update] The company demonstrated repeatability with the Pebble Time raising over $20 million in 2015. Yes, Pebble retired from the market last year, but it proved with millions of sales that not everyone needs the fastest and latest tech.

5. Airbnb

In 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia wanted to start a business, but also couldn’t afford the rent of their San Francisco apartment. There was a design conference coming to town, and they decided to open up their loft as cheap accommodation for conference attendees who had lucked out on the hotels nearby. They took pictures of their apartment, put it up on a simple website, and soon they had three paying guests for the duration of the conference, a woman from Boston, a father from Utah, and another man originally from India.

The up-close interaction gave Chesky and Gebbia valuable insight into what potential customers would want. This concierge MVP helped validate the market and prove people would be willing to buy the experience. With their initial assumptions answered, that people would be willing to pay to stay in someone else’s home rather than a hotel and that not just recent college grads would sign up, they started Airbnb (then called AirbedAndBreakfast).

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 291,182+ people.

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