

Signs You Aren’t Really Building a Minimum Viable Product - panozzaj
http://22ideastreet.com/blog/2012/01/11/signs-you-arent-really-building-a-minimum-viable-product/

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kevinpet
Sign up landing pages as MVP? Never. Sign up pages to assess interest may be
valuable, but they aren't MVP. MVP is "this is most stripped-down version of
our vision that we think anyone would actually pay for". It's drawing a line
in the sand. It's not expected to be profitable or grow quickly, or anything
like that, but it's expected to be something that you can actually sell to
someone. If you make the MVP, and no one buys, and you go through a couple
cycles of "who's our target market", and there's still nobody buying, you need
to kill it. Give up on that product, take anything you've managed to learn
from your prospective customers, and build something else.

In other words: MVP isn't a catch-all for everything you could do to interact
with your customers before you validated your vision. MVP means the "minimum"
(stripped down, only the core features) "viable" (you must believe someone
will buy it as-is) "product" (it must actually do something and provide
value).

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lucisferre
So then what was the Dropbox video MVP?

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kevinpet
I'm not sure I understand you. If you're talking about the creative craft
"What is Dropbox?" video, that was definitely post-MVP. Dropbox launched
publicly with the ability to pay for it in Sept 2008. The video that made them
take off like a rocket was in Sept 2009.

You could argue that sept 2008 was already post-MVP and they had what they
considered a tentative MVP in March 2008 when they launched the private beta.
Remember, the whole lean startup philosophy is about testing and learning. If
they _knew_ in March 2008 that their product was actually good enough to sell,
then they should have let it out earlier.

I don't actually know anyone at Dropbox and I don't know if they are lean
startup fans or if they would characterize anything this way, but I think it's
a good example of the best case scenario for how you can build a great
product: initial beta followed closely by minimal MVP with real paying
customers, then some tweaking to get all the kinks worked out (technical and
marketing), then one of your marketing pushes finds the market and you take
off like mad.

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lucisferre
I'm talking about this [http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-
viable-prod...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-
product/)

Also that Eric specifically mentioned this in the book. I'm confused that this
is surprising to you. I'm assuming you've read the Lean Startup?

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gfodor
My problem with the "MVP" concept is it assumes you can generally know what it
is you need to learn. This is true sometimes, but often not. Often taking the
extra leap of faith on something results in richer, more meaningful
understanding than the surface-layer assumptions you have before you actually
make the leap. Launching a landing page can only tell you so much compared to
if you got a working prototype in front of test uers, and a working prototype
in front of test users can only tell you so much compared to having a real-
world product being used by pilot customers. Learning that people don't sign
up on your faux landing page could mean any number of things, and your
reaction to it depends largely upon your assumptions about what you _think_ it
means.

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loceng
The way I validated my ideas, instead of a landing page, was simply asking the
people who would be users and getting feedback on the features and function.
This replaced the need of having a landing page. I then created a prototype,
which I had hoped would be enough for an MVP, though you gain insights while
developing that you couldn't see otherwise - and realized it wasn't enough for
the user adoption and usability level required.

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nubela
You know what, I hate (its a strong word, i know) this whole lean startup
movement. Yes, a lot of point make sense, iterate whats working, throw out
whats not working.

But theres a giant conundrum to it, especially for certain types of startups.
Lets take the startup I am working on now as an example. I am working on a
Bookmarking framework for real life. Or you can call it, delicious for worthy
experiences in life. But what was delicious without users? Not just do I want
to bookmark material, I want to discover them too!

I had a "MVP", and it was really minimal. I spent 2 days coming up with a
landing page (ctrleff.com), 1 day to plan and create the mockups, the second
to actually turn it into fruition. Result? I frontpaged iPhone and Android's
subreddit, and got about 10% conversion rate, while it is by no means great,
it was certainly encouraging! But if MVP is all for motivation, then yes, I
agree, by all means go ahead with building a MVP. But this landing page did
nothing to tell me if my startup is going to be adopted or not. There were
people who liked the idea. Thats it! This is no metric for any form of
success. (Not every startup can be dropbox)

In my books, an MVP is an actual product that would determine actual user
adoption. So the next step, or 2 months since the launch of the landing page,
I'm done with the backend, and almost done with the Android App. And the app
is by no means a sketchy app, I actually spent some time making sure that it
looks exactly as what it should in the mockup, that it was not jerky,
scrolling was smooth. Feature set? A minimal one: that is, the creation and
digestion of Checkpoints (aka bookmarks). Thats it! But I am not stopping
here, then there is the iOS app. Only then, would I consider my MVP done. A
MVP that I won't hate to use and would continue to use. No double standards
here, I will not release a product that I personally would not even use. I can
be wrong, but I want to be proven wrong. Did I mention I'm a one man armt?

TL;DR: I hate the MVP movement, just build a real product with a minimal set
of features.

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stanleydrew
Sounds like you didn't build an 'MVP' according to the article then. If you
read it, it complains about the same things that you do. An 'MVP' is not
merely a landing page (although it sometimes might be). It is the minimal
thing that you need to build to test some set of assumptions and continue
learning. If you weren't satisfied with the outcome of the test, then build
something else and test again. Which is exactly what you are doing.

Seems like you and the author would agree on a lot of points, including the
definition of an MVP:

"A MVP is not a minimal product, it is a strategy and process directed toward
making and selling a product to customers. It is an iterative process of idea
generation, prototyping, presentation, data collection, analysis and learning.
One seeks to minimize the total time spent on an iteration. The process is
iterated until a desirable product-market fit is obtained, or until the
product is deemed to be non-viable."

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polemic
> _A MVP [minimal viable product] is not a minimal product...._

While I agree with the general sentiment of the post, the insistence that an
MVP doesn't actually have do _be something useful_ has something wiffy about
it. Am I the only one who thinks that a landing page is not a viable product?

A lot of the time people don't know what they want/need until they actually
have something to use, so simply pitching an idea and seeing if they get it is
not, in my mind, sufficient for gathering hard data.

But maybe I just like to call a spade a spade.

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viscanti
It depends what idea you're testing. If you're looking to see if there's any
interest at all in the idea, a landing page with adwords could test that. You
can funnel traffic there and see if anyone clicks a "buy now" button. That can
be enough to see if the idea warrants any additional work.

A landing page isn't the only way to do an MVP, and it's not always helpful in
finding out more about your problem area. If it does help, then great, use it.
If it doesn't add any additional information, don't waste your time.

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aaronjg
The site seems to be down for me. Here is the a google cache link:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JmMIBrO...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JmMIBrOTVhgJ:22ideastreet.com/blog/2012/01/11/signs-
you-arent-really-building-a-minimum-viable-product/)

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dave_sullivan
I think the key is balance. It's easy to get carried away with "gotta be
perfect at launch", but it seems equally easy to take MVP too far (or, not far
enough wrt product). It's an interesting concept, but it seems like many
consider it religion.

Honestly, as a user, the whole landing page thing strikes me as borderline
offensive because it shows you haven't put much time in and therefore don't
value my time. But sometimes, that's a price worth paying to get some early
validation for an unproven concept. As always, it depends.

Wrt to lean startup in general, I do appreciate their step by step scientific-
ish approach, I think it's based on sound principles.

~~~
loceng
My first go at my projects I was hoping to create MVPs initially, though I
realize what I created fell short of MVPs, and therefore I call being at the
prototype stage.

I'm not sure anyone can truly know for sure what a MVP will look like, as
there are too many insights that you can learn as you're building a product.

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outside1234
great article. its really hard to focus in on learning first and coding third
as a technical co-founder. I love the last three questions - they forced me to
focus on an even more minimal landing page as "MVP 0".

