

Making sense of minimum viable products - i386
http://johnnyholland.org/2012/02/making-sense-of-minimum-viable-products/

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CharlesPal
MVPs are not formulaic, as Ries put it in “The Lean Startup.” “It requires
judgment to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense.”

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bmelton
Exactly. If you're in an entirely new space (e.g., Twitter when they first
launched) -- an MVP should be the minimum thing that proves the functionality,
e.g., distributing your status to friends via SMS.

If you were trying to launch a Twitter competitor now, you'd be hard-pressed
to get away with the same degree of minimalness.

However, if you had a unique take on the approach, say, all Tweets get posted
backwards and upside down, then you can probably get away with a page that
does that, as minimally as possible, to test and see if people actually like
that. If they do, then you start fleshing it out. If everybody hates it, move
on to the next idea, or pivot it into something better.

The point is that the MVP allows you to qualify whether or not people will use
it. If you're solving somebody's pain, they probably don't give a flying hoot
if it has fancy mouseovers, or a WebGL rotating background, or even good
typography. Do those things help? Sure. But if the idea at its core is rotten,
then all those things are is a waste of time. They are things that slow you
down from figuring out whether or not the core of your idea has validity.

If the idea is proven, by somebody else entering the market first, then the
bar is raised on what gets counted as 'minimum', unless you're approaching the
problem in a uniquely different way. Google Drive is, as near as I can tell, a
feature-for-feature knockoff of Dropbox. That said, it couldn't be crappy. The
Google Docs integration isn't enough of a differentiator to allow for the bad
initial first impression of a half-assed client. If it worked in some
fundamentally different way though, perhaps it could have.

The point though, is exactly what you said... MVPs are contextual, and the
context is the market. How unique is the idea. Is it radical thinking? Does
the model need proven? If nobody's done anything like it before, why not? Is
it a great idea that you're the first to stumble onto, or is it a bad idea
that everybody else has realized stunk, and haven't done it for that reason.
Get your product out there to find out, as quickly as possible.

