Don’t make this mistake with your MVP
I’ve worked with a lot of start-ups who, quite rightly, follow ‘The Lean Startup Methodology’ and build a minimum viable product (MVP) to test their ideas early.
But, a big mistake I see very often is mistaking what the MVP is:
The thing you need to test is: does your business work? Not: does your product work.
The difference is, you need to build the bare minimum business, not the bare minimum product, and then see if that business works. Here is an example:
I had a singing teacher who wanted to build a web app that would analyse an audio clip and give automated advice on how to improve the user’s singing. They would upload their clip, and get their analysis back.
The MVP for this idea is NOT a tool that analyses an audio clip… the MVP is a website that ‘looks’ like it is analysing, but instead it is the teacher themselves providing the analysis (using their years of expertise).
Ultimately, it’s simply a web form with an upload button on it.
This is super quick to build, and the teacher can get instant feedback on his proposed business idea: do people want this? Will they pay for it? Do I have a strong brand? How will I get customers? He can build the product (the analysis technology) later, once he knows he has a viable business.
That is what we mean by ‘MVP’. Often it is codeless, ‘dumb tech’, because the thing we are testing is our business model.
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