Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product? - Ade_Lack
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jballanc
The very first iPhone.

I feel like sometimes people confuse Minimum Viable Product with Minimum
Sellable Product. That is, MVP is not about building the smallest thing that
someone will pay you money for. It's about cutting out all the pieces that
might fall onto the 20 side of the Pareto principle. It's about resolving any
50-50 decisions by picking one way and going with it, instead of quibbling
over which way is the best ("Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good"
sort of thing). It's about making every really difficult design decision
answer the question "do we really need this feature? right now?".

If I can take you back, you might remember that the first iPhone didn't have a
customizable home screen or a unified inbox. It went with "The Web is Your
API" instead of native apps. It didn't even have copy-paste!

That said, if someone handed you an original iPhone, it is still very
recognizable as an iPhone. It still took YEARS to iterate internally and reach
that first model iPhone. From friends who've worked on the iPhone, I've heard
there were something like 5 unreleased precursors to the iPad. That's right,
the iPhone was actually the MVP of the iPad.

So, MVP doesn't mean you don't have to work at it. It doesn't mean that it
won't take a lot of time to develop internally. At CodeConf, Wil Shipley said
to think about it as Minimum Viable Awesome. MVP is about recognizing which
decisions are best made by the engineers and product managers, and which are
best made by the customers. Your MVP shouldn't be the first thing you can
charge money for, it should be the first thing you can charge money for and
feel proud about.

~~~
liorsion
Your examples just show that your first sentence is wrong :) Actually, MVP IS
about building the smallest thing possible that someone would use - paying for
it or just using the process - and it's not about 50-50 decisions.

The idea behind MVP is simple enough: market response is more important and
more accurate than anything you can ever do yourself - so the most important
thing you can do is get it. The best way to get it is be out there fast,
however - in order to get something that's worth something you need to give
something meaningful (value) - and the result is the MVP.

MVP doesn't mean you don't have to work at it - it means you have to THINK
about it a lot.. and be very connected to your market.

------
MattBearman
As we seem to be allowing a personal bias, I'll submit my MVP -
<http://bugmuncher.com>

I've built the minimum in order to get it live in 2 weeks. I've got a HUGE
list of features to add in future, including customisation, multiple
highlights, automate the subscription process, API, etc.

~~~
Ade_Lack
Hey no problem with sharing your own as far as I'm concerened. Looks like a
great MVP and I'll be interested to see how your own feedback leads the
direction of any future features you have planned.

What tools, frameworks, languages did you use?

~~~
MattBearman
The front end tool is built in JavaScript with jQuery (but it's safe to use
with other JS frameworks). The website and processing side was built in
PHP/CodeIgniter, running on a linode VPS.

------
shabda
Groupon

"Groupon 1.0 started on a WordPress blog"

[http://www.tomloverro.com/2010/08/19/groupon-1-0-started-
on-...](http://www.tomloverro.com/2010/08/19/groupon-1-0-started-on-a-
wordpress-blog/)

------
dools
Well, I'm obviously pretty biased here because I made it, but I really enjoy
using <http://cueyoutube.com/>

It was a "sunday night" project, and the first thing I've ever done where I
thought I did just the right amount of work and no more. It hasn't, like, gone
viral or anything but has a few likes and a few people using it - who knows
maybe some more will use it.

But it was a great feeling - to really get something useful made, throw it out
there and see what happens without investing a whole lot in it.

Another I made earlier this year was <http://pickdropapp.com/> which was even
less successful than cueyoutube :)

I find that whipping up things like this and just releasing them is a great
way of "staying in shape". Releasing software is like a habit and the more you
do it, the easier it becomes.

To deviate from my shameless self promotion, I would also like to add that I
love the story of TKs <http://toutapp.com/> \- he's actually turned that into
a real product now with thousands of users, but he got a lot of validation
from his initial MVP release so that's a real success story. He's written
about it quite a bit on his blog.

~~~
Ade_Lack
Nice work. What language, platform, framework did you use?

~~~
dools
For cueyoutube - there's no backend! It's just a static page with some
JavaScript on it (mostly jQuery but totally hacked together because I can't
stand JavaScript :)

I actually copied and pasted most of it from other sources (which I've listed
on the page).

The playlists are "saved" by sharing them - each playlist exists only as a URL
containing a comma separated list of video IDs.

I've been sharing on Twitter using the #cueyoutube hashtag.

Unfortunately, however, my primary webserver is down due to a drive failure -
I'm waiting for the VPS image to copy to a new host now. Bummer :( Should be
back up in about an hour with any luck.

There are some suggestions from people over at
<http://cueyoutube.uservoice.com/>

I really want to only work on the site in response to user demand, you know?
Like I want to _keep_ it as an MVP always. If people like it, then they will
use it and make suggestions and I'll react to that.

I'm really enjoying the "throwaway" nature of the playlists themselves (ie.
you don't login, you don't give them a name, you don't "save" them, you just
create, share and move on with your life), but also the "throwaway" nature of
the project - it's good to have something that's useful but that I'm not so
heavily invested in (unlike Decal, which I'm like, totally invested in to the
point of insanity).

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I love this design strategy -- used the same one for <http://hn-books.com>

Why code a back-end if you don't need one? You can get away with a lot more
than you think you can just with a static page and the browser. With hn-books
the book list exists as a static JSON file. I can put my entire site on any
kind of web server -- even run it easily offline.

~~~
revorad
Wow, really? I would have never guessed HN-books is all client-side, but that
does explain the jumpiness of the UI.

------
hundredwatt
A friend of mine sent this to me a few years ago:

"""My favorite video on bootstrapping/minimum viable product:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv17lF60OHY>

It's well worth watching the whole thing."""

~~~
dools
_"U-2 Reconnaissance Aircraft at Osan"_

Some sort of airforce RickRoll?

~~~
hundredwatt
I said the same thing when I first had the link forwarded to me, but watch the
video. The U2 spy plane serves a very important role for the airforce, but
can't land or take off on its own.

This is a great example of designing something with an extreme focus on
achieving its purpose while ensuring any necessary, but non-core functions are
only minimally included.

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bane
I'll be absolutely shameless and plug our two services, Momentomail and
Wormwall (<http://www.kymalabs.com>). Momentomail is a bit more mature since
it's older. But when we first launched it, the entire site wasn't much more
than a login page and the "Schedule an email" interface.

We made Lifehacker (after only adding a couple more things) not _too_ long
after that.

Wormwall likewise is about as basic a web authoring system as you can get. A
WYSIWYG editor and a publish button. Nothing fancy.

We have well over a thousand users now.

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siong1987
Square, really simple device with no extra features.

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robjohnson
If you discuss MVP in terms of Customer Development and the Lean Startup
methodology, I think that Eric Ries puts it best by saying that whatever you,
as the entrepreneur, think the MVP is, is already WAY too big. Whatever you
think the minimum viable features are for your product/service, you should cut
it in half - and then do that 2 more times. That's your MVP.

------
naner
CD Baby just started out with some links to purchase albums IIRC. Derek then
manually filled orders and sent items out.

~~~
Ade_Lack
I'm finding more and more apps and services started out with key parts of the
eventual back end initially being processed manually.

~~~
dools
I think that's one of the most important things about MVP - don't bother
automating processes until they are actually taking up your time.

As a consultant I see a lot of people put way too much effort into developing
bespoke software to automate or "improve" workflows that don't even really
exist in their business yet, only to find out that the real bottlenecks exist
in places they never even knew (and that they've wasted a bunch of money
building something they'll never really use).

It's like a "real life" analogue of the adage "premature optimisation is the
devil".

------
coreymaass
Since we're including our personal projects :-) I built the Birdy over a
weekend. <http://thebirdy.com> A couple weeks have gone by and it's going
strong with hundreds of users. I've added a few features, and fixed a few
bugs, but otherwise, it's as I built it.

------
richardw
One of the greatest surely has to be the original Yahoo. Started as the
founders' personal list of links. No categories - they only added those later.

<http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html>

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consultutah
Personal bias, but <http://chatvoting.com> is my latest MVP. There are a ton
of features I want to add, but it does exactly what I originally intended.

If you want massively successful MVPs, twitter is probably the king.

~~~
Ade_Lack
How did you decide which feature(s) to go with and which to leave out?

~~~
consultutah
There were 4 features that are necessary for the app to do anything: 1\.
Create a poll 2\. Pick a number 3\. Process SMS msgs 4\. Show results

For this first release, I didn't do anything outside of those 4 features. Soon
I'll be adding the ability to open and close the poll by SMS, get results by
SMS, and many more things, but for now it is "done".

------
briggers
Twitter.

(Unless you want a revenue-generating MVP).

------
adrianscott
I think most great examples of MVP are pretty invisible because you are
typically starting off testing it with small groups of users -- just enough to
get feedback to move it to the next stage. Otherwise it isn't the M in MVP --
It's not the minimum.

We are big fans of using Dave McClure's Pirate Metrics model... building
activation first, then retention, and then going for acquisition, etc.

The first version of CoderBuddy was very minimally-viable compared to where
we're at today. It was enough to get something done and to use in workshops.
Since then we've analyzed where the biggest bottlenecks are improving
activation etc., along the lines of the Pirate Metrics model.

Hope this helps.

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wallflower
Launchrock, a service for hosting and tracking launch pages, launched with a
launch page

<http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/01/launchrock-rocks-launches/>

------
csexton
I think my lil mac screen capture app is actually a pretty good example,
originally in v1 it only uploaded to imgur and had no UI except for the menu.
V2 I added advanced features like a preferences window and history.

<http://captured.codeography.com>

While building this I did try hard to focus on what I could do to ship right
away, and nothing more. Even for v2 I had to concentrate on limiting the
features, which was quite the challenge. At this point, I cant even remember
half the things that I _needed_ to implement.

~~~
khakimov
Same things we did too: v1 just simple screen shot for mac v2 screen edit
functions v3 version for win with edit v4 personal profile with history v5
easy-sharing

<http://pix.am>

------
user24
The original gameboy. No backlight. No stereo sound. No colour! No game saves.

(edit: although colour would have been ahead of its time, the other features
could easily have been scope-creeped into the final product)

------
yuvadam
The iPhone [1]

[1] - [http://www.sramanamitra.com/2008/02/24/the-iphone-as-a-
minim...](http://www.sramanamitra.com/2008/02/24/the-iphone-as-a-minimum-
viable-product-archetype/)

------
ccarella
I consider my service, Subjot as an MVP but we're just starting to move beyond
that. Since branching out on my own, its the first product I've built that I'm
moving beyond the MVP.

Why? 68% of all registered users visited Subjot last week. Our total number of
users are still small (private beta) but our engagement is very high.

It's in private beta but you can use this code to check it out if you are
interested - <http://sjot.it/nXM96E>

------
orky56
My favorite examples are where the product satisfies its objective (fulfills
the customer need) AND does it does it better than the competition (via user
experience, number of features, visual design, speed, cheaper). Often people
create an MVP that fulfills a customer need but is worse than the competition.
Every metric will point toward the fact that the MVP failed since they are
based on product market fit (PMF).

HackerNews is a great example.

------
methodin
I've always thought that Instagram was an MVP. I do not have an iPhone,
however, so I'm not sure if the app itself follows that mentality or not.

~~~
adjwilli
It might have started off that way. I didn't download it until recently. But
nowadays it has all sorts of social networking features I think would
disqualify it from being an MVP.

~~~
methodin
An MVP doesn't have to remain an MVP, right? I would think the purpose of an
MVP is to gain traction to be able to expand upon the core product.

~~~
glimcat
The purpose of an MVP is to quit screwing around with maybes and some-days and
get moving.

Also, expanding is often not so good a thing as refining. It's usually better
to have one or two features which are well-refined versus a great many
features which aren't well-integrated and which you lack the resources to
support.

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smashing
86-DOS, aka Quick and Dirty Disk Operating System, which was sold to MicroSoft
famously, was designed to duplicate C/PM's operating system API's. As the
story goes, all the money was in the hardware as software so easy to copy.
Look up the history of FCopy on the C64 to see just how prevalent it was on
the much higher volume platform of the day, Commodore.

~~~
Ade_Lack
Cool! Another reason why web/tech startups should focus on doing one thing
really well.

------
wushupork
Another shameless plug: ShelfLuv.com The original version of ShelfLuv was just
instant search for Amazon books - nothing else - wrapped in a pretty UI that
was done at a hackathon. It would have stayed just that had people not started
using it and validating the idea that there was something there and people
valued a better UX for searching books.

------
jwilliams
As has been discussed, MVP can have a varying definition. If you take the
_minimal_ part very seriously, one of the products I love to reference is:
<http://notepad.cc>

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8maki
The controller of family computer from Nintendo.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Famicom_controllers.jpg>

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spinlock
Zappos started as a website with pictures of shoes and a price. When someone
would order, they would go down to Footlocker, buy the shoes, and ship them
off.

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theitgirl
This is great. I have been trying to figure out what a MVP is. Is a landing
page with a description of your product and a sign up form considered a MVP?

~~~
robtoo
If you are in the landing page business, then yes. Otherwise no.

------
tezza
ASCII Generator: <http://www.network-science.de/ascii/>

------
bhousel
The Apple I - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I>

------
smashing
So, did we do your homework for you?

~~~
Ade_Lack
:) Above and and beyond my friend. Thanks to everyone for all your help, feel
free to keep adding to the discussion I'm checking out each and everyone.

