Metvy

Business Program
Product Basics
Testing Your Offering :: MVP

In this section, we will cover:

MVP — Minimum Viable Product — and how to develop it

Important: you will iterate a LOT during this phase of your startup. Your solution will
need to change as you get feedback from customers - that’s a good thing! If you aren’t
changing, you aren’t learning.
Minimum Viable Product
The phrase “if you build it, they will come” may have worked for Kevin Costner’s
character in the movie Field of Dreams, but it’s terrible advice for entrepreneurs.
Before you build anything, test your offering to make sure there’s a market and that
you can meet customer needs.

The key to testing your offering is to figure out what your customer would need to do
differently to adopt and use your offering, then test just that behavior.
MVP typically stands for Minimum Viable Product, but we like to think of it as a
Minimum Viable Proof. Your MVP will get you valuable feedback early before you spend
costly dollars on development.

There are two key components of this:

- the product or service, and
- the customer behavior.

An example of an MVP is a Kickstarter video for a product that hasn’t been built yet.
When they meet or exceed their funding goal they can be confident in the market fit.
Airbnb’s MVP happened by accident. The founders wanted to start a company but
were low on cash, so they decided to rent out their apartment. They took pictures and
listed it on a simple website and soon had paying guests. This gave them confidence
that customers were willing to pay for this service.

The MVP tests just the core functionality of your offering to see if customers will
change behavior. What’s the simplest product or service you could develop that
satisfies the needs of your customers?

To align your co-founding team on your MVP and communicate it with customers,
start with a sketch. This can be a drawing of a product, a flow chart of the service, or a
wire frame of the app.

You don’t need a fully functional app or website to be able to test your service. You
want to start on a smaller scale with little or no technology to prove the value of the
service first. Start by prototyping your product’s core functionality.

For example, to test the viability of a cookie that makes you smarter, first try selling a
small batch, before you start investing in marketing and manufacturing. Try selling at
a local festival or to a local bakery and be able to get feedback from those. After you’ve
refined your product and started to acquire lots of customers, you can look towards
investing and growing.
You can often start by developing a service with a more manual work around versus
developing the full app or website.
For example, if you wanted to start a grocery delivery service, you wouldn’t need to
start out with the app or website. You could just have people email you their shopping
list.

This allows you to learn what types of things that customers care about that will allow
you to be more efficient when you do go to develop your website or app.
Fitbit needed to test to see if they could use data to influence customer’s fitness
behavior. So they started with a simple wearable device that just tracked footsteps to
see if it would influence the way customers behaved. They didn’t need to have a fully
manufacturing-ready prototype at the outset and definitely didn’t need to incorporate
all the different potential features.

Products need to start with a prototype that test the concept as simply as possible,
often using some existing technologies as placeholders.

Here’s a process for honing in on the top items to include in your MVP.
- First, make a list of all the potential features that you might want to
include.
- Next, draw a chart with the axes of “easy to implement” and “importance
to the customer.” Plot each of the features on this chart.
Importance to the customer

Z
C
A
Y B

Easy to implement
 - Then choose only the three to five in the top right.

When iTunes first started out, there were no other options to purchase downloadable
music. In developing an offering, they didn’t need to test that customers wanted
to download their music since this had already been proven with Napster. They
simply needed to prove that customers would pay to download music. So this just
required them getting licenses from a few top musicians. Their test proved that many
customers preferred a legal and artist supporting way of getting their music.

- Next, map the phases of developing your offering. Start with an outline.
Then develop the simplest offering, your MVP, and iterate on it a lot.
- Once you’ve proven it in the market, you’ll develop your fully functional
offering. Start simple and get feedback early and often so you don’t waste time or
money developing things that your customer doesn’t care about.

Product Development

1. Outline — Start with a simple sketching or outline, ensuring alignment

and getting feedback.

2. MVP — Then, setup a “looks like” test — the offering with some manual
workarounds but that still feels the same to the customer.

3. Prototype — Finally, develop the full prototype after you have gotten
feedback from these early tests.
You may ask why there is such a long gap between the First MVP and the Prototype
- the reason is that there are multiple iterations on the MVP until a more formalized
prototype. The first MVP is rarely the correct version. There will be a lot of learning from
it to iterate upon and integrate into multiple more versions before being ready for the
prototype. Keep iterating until you feel confident that you have answers to most of the
questions about customer behavior that you had at the outset.

Click here for a template to get started with your MVP.

Then, map your product development with this template.