Startup Hack – Test before you Leap

Building a MVP or getting a basic message to your potential target market and getting some feedback can save a startup a lot of money, time and effort. Committing to an idea based on one’s own mindset and understanding is not a smart thing to do.

A lot of big startups we see today have done this in their early days.

Groupon – Andrew Mason initially sold T-shirts of a single size on a wordpress blog to test the concept.

Dropbox – Drew Houston put together a small demo and showcased it to potential customers to get feedback.

Zappos – Nick Swinmurn tool photographs of shoes and put them online to see if people were actually ready and willing to buy them from there.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Potential customers say, ”Give me feature X,” “Give me feature Y,” and sometimes you do what they want, maybe sometimes you’re going to do what you want, and then they get mad at you. Pretty soon you’re chasing your own tail a little bit because you’re not operating against a clear, long-term vision of what you’re trying to accomplish.

The idea of minimum viable product is useful because you can basically say: our vision is to build a product that solves this core problem for customers and we think that for the people who are early adopters for this kind of solution, they will be the most forgiving. And they will fill in their minds the features that aren’t quite there if we give them the core, tent-pole features that point the direction of where we’re trying to go.

So, the minimum viable product is that product which has just those features (and no more) that allows you to ship a product that resonates with early adopters; some of whom will pay you money or give you feedback.

(Interview with Eric Ries, published on http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product)