Startups are a risky business, that's why some clever guys such as Eric Rise and Steve Blank came up with the idea of Minimum Viable Prototype, which allows founders to test their solution, before creating the whole product. Sounds like a cool idea, but how does it usually work?
A Standard MVP lifecycle
Creating a MVP is far better than developing your startup in the stealth mode, but it's still quite risky. In the beginning you don't really expect the amount of work in front of you. Launching a MVP usually means following 3 core steps:- Step 1: customer interviews. Having assumptions about the needs of your customers is not enough, so you go and ask about what they want. After 10 or 20 meetings you collect enough feedback to conclude which features are crucial to the market success. At least you think they are.
- Step 2: creating MVP. You don't want to risk your time, so you make exactly what your customers intend to purchase. Standard MVP's development takes from 1 to 4 months. Of course that's the great investment, because you already validated your solution and customers need it. You just add one or two features, which don’t take so much time, but they nice to have.
- Step 3: surprise, surprise. Nobody bought it. You can come up with at least a few explanations: it's not completely ready yet, it needs more features, customers need time to consider your pricing, etc. The solution is awesome and you have no doubt that it's going to sell after minor improvements.
What can you do next? Yeah, ask more customers, get more feedback and implement it another way around. Don't be surprised, because the outcome will be probably the same as the first time. Using the above methodology means fortunately working for a couple of months before closing the first sale. That's far to long for me.
Don't code
Development of your MVP takes time and money, so let's consider the options for decreasing the risk of creating something that nobody wants to buy. You can certainly discard 50% of the features, which means faster development and lower budget. But let's think out of the box. Sales are the most important success factor for a startup, wouldn't you agree? Development of your MVP cost money, sales bring money. Would you rather earn money or spend them on something risky? Exactly, instead of developing your MVP you should rather start selling your solution before writing even a single line of code. How could you possibly sell something that doesn't exist? Let me introduce you to the brand new kind of MVP that stands for Minimum Vendible Product. It takes just a couple of hours to validate your Minimum Vendible Product, so it means that you save tremendous amount of time and the risk is far lower:- Step 1: creating Minimum Vendible Product. Ask yourself: what I really need to close the very first deal? How can I offer preorders to my first customers? I bet, that in 90% of cases you just need to create a landing page or a simple PDF. Describe in details what are benefits of using your solution and there you go. How can you reach first customers? Go on the phone and call some. You can also spend 100$ on AdWords and analyze the conversion.
- Step 2: develop or not to develop. The decission is easy. Did it sale? Did it sale enough to cover the cost (time spend on the telephone, billing from AdWords) and make some satisfying profit? It might be a good idea and a decent solution - you should give it a try... and sell much more preorders.
I started this blog to prevent you from creating products nobody wants, we will get much more into details in the next posts - stay tuned. Now just remember about the most fundamental rule: Forget about developing anything, before you sell it. The only validation of your solutions are payments from your customers.
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