Best Minimum Viable Product Examples

Recommended methods to validate your business concept.

So you’ve come up with what you think is an amazing idea for a website or mobile application. You are convinced that this is the next billion dollar idea. Sound familiar?

So many people have gotten to this point, stopped and asked, ‘now what?’ Here at VentureStorm we’re here to help you, so I’ll lay it out nice and simple.

Option A) Crawl into your basement for a few months to build the product yourself

Option B) Spend thousands of dollars hiring developers to build the product for you

Option C) Spend a few hours building a minimum viable product to make sure people will even use the product

I hope choosing Option C was as painfully obvious to you as it was intended to be. But what type of minimum viable product should you build? I’ve taken 5 of the most common minimum viable product examples and broken them down so you can take the first steps to building a successful business.

Landing Page

Otherwise known as the home page- it typically describes what a company does or how it works. Rather than building the entire product, you could simply create a landing page that describes what your product will eventually do. If your landing page is getting thousands of hits, people are sharing it on social media, and others are subscribing to your mailing list, then it becomes apparent people are interested. This may only take a few hours, and is an easy first step to gauge the interest of potential users.

Explainer Video

You can create a simple video online that explains exactly what your product would do. Whether you create a prototype and click through it while explaining how it works, or use animated graphics to explain a hypothetical situation in which your app would be useful — both allow potential users to visualize what you’re trying to build and how it would benefit them.

Dropbox created a explainer video that received millions of views on YouTube because it identified a problem that many people had. They now have over half a billion users on the platform. Long before VentureStorm, we created an explainer video for a different concept which we’ll shamelessly share here as an example.

Selling Before You Have a Product

This approach is as simple as it sounds. Identify who your target customer would be, discover their contact information, and cold call/email them and see if they are interested in your product. Try to sell the product as if it was already complete and ready to ship the next day. If they do show interest, be transparent in that you actually don’t have the product finalized yet, but will stay in touch with them. Congrats, you’ve got a few potential costumers when you do launch! However, if you cold contact hundreds of people and none show any interest, maybe you should reconsider your product and be thankful you didn’t spend months building it!

Wizard of Oz

The ‘Wizard of Oz’ minimum viable product appears to be a fully functional product on the surface, but you are actually manually handling much of the functionality. Zappos, the biggest online shoe retailer, is one of the more famous examples of this approach. Rather than purchasing warehouses of shoes for inventory, Zappos’ founder simply uploaded thousands of pictures of shoes. Once users selected to purchase a pair of shoes, he would personally buy them, ship the shoes, and handle payments all on his own. This approach saves a ton of development time and allows you to test the level of demand for your product.

Crowdsourcing

This approach is likely to be a combination of many of the examples described above; however the results are very direct. I say that because those who are interested in your product can essentially purchase it before you even build it. This is the ultimate form of validation — when strangers view your page on Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, open their wallets, and actually purchase what you are intending to build. Building a successful campaign can be difficult, but a failed campaign can also save you an incredible amount of time and money.

Conclusion

There’s not always a right answer for the ‘best’ minimum viable product for your circumstance; however, there are plenty of methods to validate whether the demand is there before spending unnecessary time and money. For everything entrepreneurship and technology, be sure to subscribe and stay up to date with our new and improved blog!

Originally published at blog.venturestorm.com on December 12, 2016.