Minimal Viable Product
In The Lean Startup a minimal viable product is the minimal product that defines the fastest way to get through the Build-Measure-Learn loop. The goal of a minimal viable product is to *begin* the process of learning, not to end it.
- The video minimal viable product
- Dropbox started with a youtube video of a 'vision' for the product. This is the original demo:
- Minimal Viable Product - Dropbox Demo
- See also: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-product/
- The concierge minimal viable product
- This approach is quite different and aims for 'royal treatment' of your early adopters. The lean startup describes how Steve Sanderson of Food on the table visited his first customers personally, carefully learning what their basic needs where. Only after having a sound understanding of the prime requirements he started automating his service.
- Fake it until your make it minimal viable product
- This version was used in 'aardvark' a service for AI like automated answering questions. This was started with having 'real people' answer the questions first. (This form i consider quite dangerous, remember the M10-S2 - Case - Lernout and Hauspie Speech Products case...)
Quality
The role of quality in an MVP can be counterintuitive, the basic principle is:
>If you do not know who your customer is, you cannot know what quality is
Even low quality MVP's can lead to high quality products and services. Eric describes the example of a need for moving 3D avatars in the IMVU 3D chat which was too costly and difficult to implement. They could not affort it and decided a what he calls lame version of the feature that could move the avatar only by clicking. It turned out to be a highly valued feature.
