
How Dropbox Started As A Minimal Viable Product - dclaysmith
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-product/
======
prpon
I've read the chapter in the book _lean startup_ and again here. I fail to
grasp the Minimum viability in that chapter.

Drew built a product with considerable reverse engineering before he got any
feedback, tried explaining to the vcs and investors without much luck. It all
worked when he created a video.

Where in the mvp in that? May be I am too thick to understand but for me this
is a case of retrofitting the story to match your theory.

Dropbox had a great product that people loved with a better video. No, they
did not use feedback loop to pivot and all that mvp stuff.

~~~
buss
I must agree. MVP is getting thrown around and twisted like "pivot" did a few
months ago. A video is not an MVP, because it's neither viable nor a product.

A video is great and, if done right, it's immensely useful at quickly
explaining the value of the product your're building. It is not a product,
though.

An MVP for dropbox would be something like a directory with a git repo that
auto-commits everything and has a cron job push to & pull from a remote server
every minute.

~~~
kanamekun
Here's how Eric defined MVP:

<< First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new
product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated
learning about customers with the least effort. ...

Second, the definition's use of the words maximum and minimum means it is
decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgment to figure out, for any given
context, what MVP makes sense.

[http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-
viable-...](http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-
product-guide.html) >>

By that definition, it feels like a video could definitely qualify as an MVP?
It allowed them to validate important learnings about customers with the least
effort... not so different from an AdWords MVP smoke test:

[http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/how-to-go-
from-i...](http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/how-to-go-from-idea-to-
launching-with-paying-customers-in-8-steps/)

In any case, it sounds like Drew programmed enough to create a prototype but
not enough for it to have the polish required for a user to be able see that
it "work[ed] seamlessly" or "worked just like magic." So in that sense, the
video did allow him to exert less effort and still test his customer
hypothesis.

~~~
plinkplonk
"Here's how Eric defined MVP:

<< First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new
product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated
learning about customers with the least effort. ...

Second, the definition's use of the words maximum and minimum means it is
decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgment to figure out, for any given
context, what MVP makes sense."

In other words, the definition is so broad and stretchable that any successful
effort can be retroactively called an MVP, just like all successful software
projects are claimed to be "agile" in some fashion (or lean or whatever the
latest fad is).

MVP, pivot, Lean Startup(TM) - all this sounds like something tailored
primarily to sell books and seminars, not what successful startups do. Now
that Drew is successful, I am sure what he did will be held up as an example
of the latest faux methodology. I am waiting for the Eric Ries post that
portrays Steve Jobs as a "lean startup" visionary.

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reidbradford
How meaningful is the term "minimal viable product" in this context (or any)?

Dropbox was designated from the beginning as an online storage tool. If they
had not provided online storage when they started, no one would have used
them. In that sense any advanced features were icing on the cake.

But I don't see this as being a critical part of Dropbox's success. They
probably could have launched six months later with a more full featured
product and still done well in the online storage market - simply by virtue of
the strength of their product, team and strategy.

I'm a little tired of Eric Ries' simplistic axioms and consequent tendency to
try to squeeze every use case into the mold of a supporting example.

To the extent that the term can be applied to any successful startup, how
meaningful is it?

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staunch
If anything, Dropbox is proof that _sometimes_ "if you build it, they will
come" really works. They had already built the entire product, and they're
demoing it in the video, it just wasn't ready to ship.

This isn't anymore a MVP than a video game or movie trailer.

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mhartl
It's _Dropbox_. The 'b' isn't capitalized.

