We're going to close this week's lectures with a few remarks about the Minimum Viable Product. The Minimum Viable Product is the smallest product you can do that provides a complete solution to a major pain or gain point for a customer in your customer segment. It's the smallest product that you can ship them, that's going to solve their pain. The truest test of fit, in a market, is do you have a minimum viable product that people will pay for? When you reach that point Your goal. Before you've reached that point, everything you're doing is tentative. So it's really important to get a minimum viable product. What is it? It's not an alpha or a beta. If you have something that's sort of unfinished, you can ask people to test that. That's fine, that's alpha testing and beta testing. That's not a minimum viable product. A minimum viable product is something they can actually use to solve their problem. To address their pain or their gain. It's not just cutting off the feature list. A lot of people say, okay, we've run out of time. We've gotta ship the product. Who cares if it doesn't have all the features that people say they want. We're just going to cut off the feature list and ship it now. That's not a minimum viable product. That's a minimum product, it's not a minimum viable product. It's also, of course, not the ultimate product and service. It's the minimum one that you can do. The ultimate one, you may never get there. But you better start with the minimum one or you'll surely never get there. It's the smallest possible product or service that can satisfy the customer need or problem. At what point do you need an MVP? Well, two points about this. One is, you need an MVP as soon as possible? It's the ultimate hypothesis. When you come out there with an MVP and you put it in someone's hands and they say, yeah, looks nice, a little expensive. You don't have it. You haven't hit it. If they look at it and they say, yeah, that's not quite what I meant, you haven't hit it. You haven't nailed it. If they look at it and they say, how do you use this? You haven't hit it. You haven't nailed it. It's the ultimate test. You put that in someone's hands and they take out their wallet and they want to pay for it, They say, wow, I've been waiting for this, I gotta have this now, that's an MVP. And it forces you to think about an overall value proposition, because you can't have it, it won't be viable unless you have all the things you need in there to satisfy the value proposition. If people say, yeah, how do I get refills for this? We didn't think of that, you need to work on it, that you don't have the minimum product. So, as soon as possible, you have to have a MVP out there. The other thing though, as late as possible, you want to delay as long as you can, and give yourself as much opportunity as you can, to do costumer discovery. The more customer discovery you do, the smarter you're going to get about what should be in your product, and so you want to put it off as long as possible, while, of course, making it as soon as possible. And the other thing about an MVP is once the MVP is there, it sort of pushes the team into sales mode. You subtedly stop being in customer discovery mode. You stop asking open-ended questions, and you start pitching and that's fine, when you're ready to sell, that's great. But, if you're going into that mode before you're ready, when you don't have something that's a real value proposition, doesn't really solve a pain or gain for your customer segment, then it's probably a big mistake. MVPs are a little bit different for physical products than they are for virtual products. A physical product, it's really nice to have a mock-up, even if it's made of styrofoam, early on. I was working with a team that had an ultraviolet light that could purify water, and I said, I think a lot of people might switch from Brita over to this if the bottle had a cool blue light that went off while it was cleansing the water. I said, but in order to find out if people want that, you've gotta have a mock up of the product with the cool blue light and give it to them and see if their pupils dilate. See if they like what they're looking at. So, in the case of an MVP, for a physical product, it might even be okay if it doesn't work. But it has to capture certain elements of the value proposition, and allow you to kind of verify them. Years ago, I was an engineer in Silicon Valley, almost went to work on the first tablet computer, this was in 1989, something like that. And I went to my interview, it was top secret, what this company was up to. And after I'd been sworn to secrecy and sign multiple NDA's, they showed me a cardboard mockup of a tablet computer. It was the first time I'd ever seen anything like this, and my jaw dropped. I said wow, I gotta work on that. It didn't work. It was just made of cardboard but it excited me. So, physical product is good to have something palpable, even if it doesn't exactly work. Virtual product, you're in a pleasant situation. You can actually do something on the web that does what you want. But doesn't do it with all the bells and whistles. It's called a low-fidelity mockup. So you do something that allows you to look at, purchase, pay for and ship whatever, or download the product or inspect the content, whatever it is you want to do. But it does it at low-fidelity. It's not the ultimate in veldtness. It's a little bit rough. That's fine too. But you need something there that allows you to go the whole process so you can see if people embrace the process end to end. And one good way to approach a minimum viable product, is to have what they call a concierge product. A concierge product is something where ultimately the fulfillment or the backend will be automatic. But right now you're just doing it with sweat. So you have something where people can order the information product, and instead of them being able to download it right away, you have cached one sitting there, so they're not getting their own fresh copy. They're just getting a cached one, but they can see how the process works. That's a concierge simulation, or Uber when they first started out, didn't have apps in the cars of the drivers. They had to call up the drivers and get them to come. But it was very important to them to see if the end to end process worked. So you have a working front end, you do the back end manually and even though it only works for a small number of customers, it allows you to test elements of the value proposition in a way that a minimum viable product should. So styrofoam, mock-ups of physical products, low fidelity web and concierge product simulations are great, minimum, almost viable products. They have an important role to play. Main points. The best proof of customer interest is them buying an MVP, so the sooner you can get an MVP out there, the better. MVPs are all about what you didn't put in the product. What you can leave out, what you don't have to have now. What you can have in release two. And if you're strapped, and you want to get something out, consider having some kind of concierge MVP that mocks up some stuff manually, that customers don't see. Thank you.
