
Why is your Minimal Viable Product (MVP) really just a PoS - whoisvince
http://vincentjordan.com/2012/01/why-is-your-minimal-viable-product-mvp-really-just-a-pos/
======
tptacek
A product is "viable" if it generates enough value for a group of customers
that they find it worth paying for.

The "minimum viable" product is the product that does the minimum set of
things to be viable.

Viability and quality are usually orthogonal concerns. Viability and _polish_
are especially likely to be orthogonal.

There are markets you can serve in which polish matters a great deal. Not
coincidentally, these are markets covered carefully by people like Robert
Scoble. Whether you're going to need to genuflect to Scoble's notion of your
"viability" is an important question to address when choosing the market you
want to serve.

~~~
jacquesm
Would you consider WikiPedia a minimally viable product?

~~~
tptacek
I don't understand the question.

------
timdorr
I think the key thing people are forgetting is the V in MVP. It has to be
viable. I keep seeing people building minimal products, but nothing that's
viable.

It's also a factor of people spreading themselves too thin. You don't have to
do a dozen features and make them all minimal. Do the 2 or 3 that are core to
the application and make them full-featured. Who knows? That might be all you
need.

~~~
jasonlotito
Yup.

If I can't use your product for what it's meant to do, then is it really a
minimum viable product?

We already have another term for software that doesn't yet exist: vaporware.

What I hate most are the landing pages setup to gauge interest. Usually they
have a name like:

"Flrghx.ly: social meets socal"

Which, of course, tells me everything. Throw in a few logos, like TechCrunch,
Memefest, Facepalm, and CNN, and a few quotes from JS from SF, California on
how he "Finally can socialize his socal social-mates using Flrghx on his
iPhone."

And then you have the "Hey give us your email! We won't spam you, we promise,
we hate spam! But after 7 months of not hearing from us, we'll notify you of
our launch, and then we'll subscribe you to our newsletter, and then send you
updates that include notifications from our sponsors. But no spam!"

Oh, and if I retween a tweet, I'll increase my chances to get into beta. If I
post to my Facebook, then it doubles that increase!. And every friend that
gives an email increases my chances! OMG! It's like a beta-pyramid scheme.
Next they'll be pitching me Aetna.

~~~
tptacek
The problem with Flrghx.ly is not that it isn't fleshed out and it's not that
it isn't polished. It's that it's not likely to be a viable business.

Plenty of businesses have bootstrapped to customers with nothing but vapor.
I've been on (extremely good) teams that got their ass handed to them _in
version 3.0_ by vapor pitches.

These are really orthogonal issues. How complete your product is, how polished
it is, how few bugs it have, these things usually have less of an impact on
your "viability" than nerds think it does (unless you're serving nerds,
graphic designers, or competing with Twitter).

------
gfodor
iPhone v1 is a pretty good example of a MVP IMHO. No copy paste, no
multitasking, no 3rd party apps, the list goes on. But it was still the best
phone money could buy.

~~~
moocow01
Man, thats setting the bar pretty high

~~~
gfodor
IMHO, the bar is currently set way, way too low. In the domain the iPhone was
in, there was a very large amount of "must have" features for a product to be
something that could succeed in the market. (Email, web, phone, SMS, etc.) In
other domains, the amount of features for this is certainly lower. But, the
bottom line is you should be shipping stuff you should be proud of that can
stand on its own legs. The "embarrassed" point gets overemphasized and usually
is misinterpreted to mean to ship garbage against your better judgement.

------
TWSS
I've wrestled with this, personally. Honestly, I think it's hard to tell
what's viable and what's not when it's your baby, and you've been living and
breathing it for months.

The standard that I hold myself to is whether or not the product provides
value to the user or customer. Does it do something new or interesting that
someone (besides your team) cares about, or is it just the first part of
something that you hope will provide value? It's tempting to jump the gun, and
I think honesty on the part of those around you can help keep you from
releasing a minimum, non-viable, product.

~~~
tptacek
I have exactly this problem with our product, and have known for over a year
what the solution is. If you can't tell whether your product is viable, talk
to its prospective customers until you can.

Unfortunately, this is awfully hard for nerds like us to do. One way I know
this to be true is by watching people who have an easy time of it hustle
through customer meetings, taking a product idea from zero to "purchase order"
with nothing but some static web pages.

------
justjimmy
This was definitely one of the thing that stuck out to me, as I was (still am)
learning about this industry, people throwing around the term 'MVP', all with
their own definition and vision of what is an 'MVP' – from wireframe sketches
(huh) to static screens. Some even blur it with videos explaining what their
product is supposed to do (but no actual product yet). Do MVP really need
work? Or is it sufficient as long you determine that there is value in your
product via whatever means you choose? Hmm…

~~~
whoisvince
Thanks everyone for your replies!

@justjimmy, as for my understanding of what MVP is — there actually needs to
be an actual functioning product... although, Eric himself does mention in his
'Lean Startup book' to products that qualify under the MVP title with just a
video (Dropbox) and a Concierge service (don't remember the product)... I do
find it weird that he mentions those as qualifying, since they really just
validate the business model.

One of his (Eric) simplest definitions for a MVP was a product that could
easily go through a full cycle in the lean.feedback loop:
<https://skitch.com/vince.baskerville/gixq3/mvp-feedback-loop> which
should/hopefully help distill what customers want & thus actually pay for.

~~~
justjimmy
Maybe we need to separate the two more clearly? It's kinda blurry atm. PoC/MVP
is basically boiling down the product to the core and validate if it has
value. (Whether it's through an initial working product, wireframe or a video)
But the actual working alpha product that a startup put in consumers' hands
has to be a non PoS with minimum bugs, as pointed out in the article.

------
alexmturnbull
Good stuff Vincent! Wrote a similar piece a month ago:'Stop Launching Shitty
MVP’s in Competitive Markets' <http://bit.ly/vZXlN3>

~~~
mindcrime
If somebody is "launching" (as in public launch) an "MVP" then they're doing
it wrong in the first place. You don't normally take an MVP and put it out
there for the entire world. You release it to a (carefully?) selected subset
of users, that you've pre-identified somehow, whom you expect to get validated
learning from.

If somebody builds a crappy app, pushes it to the world, and slaps an "MVP"
label on it, they haven't built an MVP and they're not really following the
lean startup / customer development process.

------
SteveJS
Odd. I'd think polishing the PoS idea you thought was an MVP was a more likely
problem.

I know that would be my tendency. I'd need someone crazy helping me jump into
trouble: [http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/inventors-who-want-to-do-
bu...](http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/inventors-who-want-to-do-business-
stop-doing-build-first-because-it-doesnt-work)

