Startup Bootcamp, Part 2: The minimum viable product explained

MVP…most valuable player? Not exactly. While you’ll always be the MVP to us, in this guide MVP stands for minimum viable product.

The MVP isn’t your final product; it’s the minimum amount of time, effort and resources required to put your idea in front of your target audience and test your business hypothesis before fully building it out. An MVP is an Agile approach to quickly learn if there’s a market for your idea, and if there is, what feedback you can gather to further refine your offering. What’s Agile? Good question. It’s the method of dividing large concepts into smaller, manageable tasks with the goal of constant reassessment and adaptation based on feedback.

Like that friend who constantly espouses the benefits of meditation, make this your new mantra:

“I will not let my MVP become a full blown, refined product or service.”

While it’ll be tempting to add extra features, tinker with it until it’s perfect and overengineer at this phase, restrain yourself. You don’t want to spend months developing your product only to find out no one wants it, do you? Maybe you have a masochistic streak, but the answer should be a resounding “Nah.” Your MVP is meant to jump start the learning process. Any work beyond what’s required to gather validated learning is a distraction at this phase. Got it? Good. Now, which MVP is right for you?

The All Star List: The Types of MVPs

Time, budget, skill set and how much you need to fake it will determine the type of MVP you should develop. Listed in order from “it looks like it exists but it doesn’t” to “it looks like a commercialized product but it’s a minimally functioning test” the most common MVPs are: 

Landing Page

Develop a landing page to collect email addresses from your target audience for more information. This is an affordable approach to collecting feedback. You can easily reach your target audience for their opinion and iterate or amplify if necessary. We recommend building a landing page in addition to one of the other MVPs in this list. 

Email or Survey Validation

Pitch your idea (like it exists) to your target audience via email or web survey to gauge interest. This is ideal for adding a feature or iterating on a portfolio extension to an existing product offering or business. It’s cheap, fast and hyper-targeted, with low risk of damaging your brand. 

Wizard of Oz

We’ve all seen the movie; do you remember the ending? The Wizard, a floating green head, ruled Oz by portraying himself as a larger-than-life overlord. But when Dorothy pulls back the curtain, the Wizard was just a man pulling a bunch of strings. The Wizard of Oz MVP looks like a fully functioning product, but the back-end functionality (time and resources you shouldn’t spool up now) is operated by a person. What you have “works,” but with an Oz-like abstraction in the background to make it go. 

Explainer Video

This approach visually outlines your offering, even if it’s not real yet, to clearly demonstrate how your product will function in just a few minutes. Dropbox launched their company this way. Before they spent months developing a product they weren’t sure the market wanted, they created a short video showing the functionality before it existed. Don’t worry, we demystify the video production process later. 

The MVP Roadmap

We explained why launching an MVP should be your first order of business and the types of MVPs you can develop, but where do you start? Did you think we’d just leave you hanging? Sheesh, we’re not monsters. The MVP roadmap, with the amount of time needed to complete the tasks in each section, is below: 

To illustrate each step of the roadmap, we’re using a fictitious (albeit delicious) concept that’s been sizzling in our brains: a beef jerky subscription service called Primal Post. Are you a self-proclaimed gym rat meathead (get it?) with a penchant for rare, delicious jerky to satisfy your portable protein needs? Great! You might just be who we’re looking for. But first, we need to determine whether we should go into the meat business or keep our day jobs. We do that through a process we call the sniff test, which we’ll outline in our next post.