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Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?

#4

Post by 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.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?

#7

Post by 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.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?

#9

Post by 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.
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