
An MVP is not a Cheaper Product, It’s about Smart Learning - ibrahimcesar
http://steveblank.com/2013/07/22/an-mvp-is-not-a-cheaper-product-its-about-smart-learning/
======
toumhi
These days, I'm beating the drum that a MVP is not necessarily a V1 of a
product idea.

If you consider the goal is to learn whether you can have a business or not,
you start thinking less in terms of your product and more in terms of what is
the underlying problem, customer segment, market conditions, discoverability
etc etc

Also, instead of thinking as idea -> MVP -> product, it can help to think of
MVPs as a series of experiments, rather than a monolithic product designed to
verify all assumptions.

I blogged about this process that we could have followed at my company,
instead of burning cash and months of work building something nobody wanted:
[http://www.sparklewise.com/minimal-valuable-
experiments/](http://www.sparklewise.com/minimal-valuable-experiments/)

~~~
beat
I'm currently putting together MVPs of the difficult UI aspects of my system,
because those are the parts I'm worried about. The back end is actually pretty
straightforward. The UI stuff is the stuff I want to get in front of users for
review.

After that, I need to do some technical MVP for proof of concept, to prove to
myself that my assumptions about certain data patterns are actually correct.

The important thing, though, is to get to where I have working code I can show
others to get feedback, even if that code isn't anywhere near complete as a
marketable product.

~~~
stdbrouw
Testing your UI is what most people would call prototyping, though. You've
already decided on what you want to build, just not what the interface to what
you're building should be exactly. An MVP is for deciding what to build or
whether to continue to build.

~~~
marcamillion
Or more importantly, what version of what you build will your customer pay
for/use - i.e. what will add value such that it would change their behavior.

------
ValentineC
Sometimes I think the whole lean startup movement is either heavily
misunderstood, or just overrated.

If you have a validated market willing to pay for your audience's eyeballs
(based on, let's say, startups that have been in the space before), do you
still need an experimental MVP? Or should one focus on building the real
product?

~~~
jval
I can see what you mean here. I feel like this often applies to SaaS products
and Network companies like Facebook, where forerunners in the field have
validated the need for something in the market, but failed from a technical or
a distribution angle rather than a product perspective.

Its a very good point. I think the 'lean' movement is really meaningful when
you're talking about big engineering innovations (where the alternative is
often between doing a big build or doing manual work) rather than a network or
service business where the concern is actually around the quality of the
network or service you're providing, which can't be easily faked or tested.

------
rkaplan
This reminds me very much of pg's recent essay about doing things that don't
scale ([http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)). That
essay's very direct title seems to come from the fact that technical founders,
like the Stanford students mentioned in the article, can be biased to solving
engineering problems before solving business problems. "Do things that don't
scale" (as well as Steve's advice here) is a reminder to solve the actual
problem, and to solve it in the easiest way, not the most fun, technically
challenging way.

------
makerops
So I asked, “Would it be cheaper to rent a camera and plane or helicopter, and
fly over the farmers field, hand process the data and see if that’s the
information farmers would pay for?"

After the 2nd paragraph, I assumed a question like this was going to be asked,
but my "frugalness" assumed it was going to be:

"Wouldn't it be cheaper to get a DSLR, and spend 8 hours walking through a
field and taking pictures?"

~~~
spamizbad
If you've got a friend who's a private pilot or working on some sort of flight
certification and needs hours... you could probably talk them into taking you
up for the cost of fuel and lunch.

A farmer may not feel comfortable with you trundling through their fields on
foot.

~~~
rmason
Back in 1984 I took the first infrared crop pictures in Michigan. We rented a
Cessna, took out the passenger seat and I got on my stomach and pointed the
bosses 35 mm out the inspection port.

Special IR film from Kodak that had to kept refrigerated when it wasn't in the
camera. I could feel the pilots tight turns in my gut. Good times!

------
alabut
TLDR: we often rush to building an initial version of a product when we can
jump straight to manually creating value for a customer and testing demand by
charging for it, then crystalize that learning into a product later.

I believe there's a corollary to this: you can jump straight to building an
MVP when you're building for yourself and are confident there are others like
you. I remember PG describing it (in a video that I can't find the link to) as
a design pattern where the broadcast signal and receiver all within the same
brain.

Even better is when the thing you build solves a real problem at a business
you're running and it makes you more money. My favorite YC example is Ilya
from Mixrank. He was working as an SEO consultant when he realized some of his
process was abstractable as scripts, wrote some to help him do his job better,
then emailed it around to other SEO colleagues to see if it helped them as
well, and all of that validated learning helped him attract his technical
cofounder and then build Mixrank as a product. I believe they may have even
been profitable before starting YC?

~~~
ValentineC
If you find the video, please do post it. The closest I've found was PG's
article on Organic Startup Ideas:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html)

------
programminggeek
I am actually in the process of reversing the process and building the
marketing first, and not building the product until there is enough marketing
validation. My thought is, if maybe 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 ideas is going to sell,
better to figure out what will sell before building out every idea and then
hoping for the best each time.

~~~
Bjartr
I recall, but can't find, a story on HN about someone who, before building any
product at all, put up a website with an explanation of value, and a
"purchase" page. People put in their credit card number trying to buy the
product, validating there really was some market for them.

~~~
ljf
Tim Ferris talks about it in 4 Hour Workweek, but sure plenty others discussed
the idea before that.

------
j45
The sentence that jumped out to me:

“We’re engineers and we wanted to test all the cool technology, but you want
us to test whether we first have a product that customers care about and
whether it’s a business. We can do that.”

...

Me: I find it a little interesting the amount of silence on this type of post,
that cuts out the noise of building for the sake of building and focusing on
what customers, actually, want, and not over-obsessing on your stack.

Most things can get you through build-measure-learn quick enough, leaving
plenty of room to get out of the building.

------
bdehaaff
I think you can read the post and come to a very different conclusion and one
that I have written about in the past.

The MVP is a curse for ambitious technology companies that want to grow. In an
increasingly transactional world, growth comes from long-term customer
happiness. And long-term customer happiness comes when customers adore your
product or service and want you to succeed. You should be thinking about what
it will take for customers to love you, not tolerate you.

In this case, insights from the data about the agriculture is what customers
really need. And if you give it to them in a meaningful and actionable way,
they will love it (at least that's the theory). That's radically different
than what might be minimally viable (e.g. a ton of data that they could sift
through in Excel).

Really think about the type of mindset change it would take. What would it
take you to create a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP)?

[http://blog.aha.io/index.php/the-minimum-lovable-
product/](http://blog.aha.io/index.php/the-minimum-lovable-product/)

~~~
badclient
I agree with a lot of what you write even though I still see value in the idea
behind MVPs.

My biggest issue is with the discourse and the stories that are written about.
I find most so-called case studies of successful product dev by methodically
following the lean process to either be lacking OR highly suspect(due to key
missing details).

I was reading the book _Nail it before you Scale It_ and while I
wholeheartedly agree with the title of the book and even the theoretical
ideas, it was disconcerting to me that a lot of the successful examples cited
in the book are companies that no longer exist.

Overall most authors on this topic do a great job of pointing out how a
company wasted ton of money on building a product no one wants but the same
narrative seems to oversimplify how the company finally achieved success.

------
marcamillion
This is one of the problems I face with building 5KMVPs for clients. They
often confuse how they want their final product to work, with the product that
their clients will pay for.

The truth is, I think most entrepreneurs (and engineers) can easily fall into
this trap. It is helpful to have someone else to bounce ideas off of - and
that forces you to build what the client would pay for, versus what you want
to build.

Even I fall prey to that for my own projects. Even though I build MVPs for
people, when it comes to my own projects, I have to make a conscious effort to
CONSTANTLY ask myself - is this what I want to build or what the client will
pay for. Often times, I have to even take a step back and talk to a trusted
friend that understands the internet. Get their feedback.

So, the most valuable thing I have learnt in my year+ running 5KMVP is that my
most valuable service is when I push back on the client. Asking more
questions, probing to get to the heart of the problem they are trying to
solve.

------
mathattack
Very good point on market centric versus customer centric view of the MVP. Is
the critical path "Will someone pay for this" or "Can we get it to work"?

------
area51org
The MVP is meant to be a wet thumb in the air: is the wind really blowing
north, the way we think it might be?

------
hsuresh
This is true not just at "building an MVP" stage. At my current startup, we
are focusing on traction, across different channels/verticals. We have found
it quite useful to test and learn about these channels by running experiments.

------
johnrob
Perhaps a better name for MVP would be FVP: "Fastest viable product". The end
goal is to get something in a customer's hands as quickly as possible. There
is no reason for the product to be minimal (or cheap). Renting a plane and
manually processing images is extremely expensive from a per unit perspective
- but the more important feature is that it can be deployed quickly.

~~~
vog
_> Renting a plane and manually processing images is extremely expensive from
a per unit perspective_

But the total cost is still low. This is a very important feature. In the
article, this was about reducing the total costs of the MVP by about 90%.

Replacing "MVP" with "FVP" would dismiss this important feature.

Moreover, if your MVP is really minimal, maybe you don't need any investor at
all to build it!

