The article separates 'Survey your Customers' and 'Know your Market' like they are two different things. Not sure how you can deprecate the customer input, and stress your own market knowledge without your head exploding.
Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
61–70 of 132 posts
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> IME this part is completely wrong, unless it's defining "serious buyer" in such a way that most of your market isn't one. I used to be such a "serious buyer". I represented a large government agency with over 2,000 sites and several hundred thousand employees. Vendors would turn up with "cute" web apps that used drop downs to select objects like security groups or user accounts. This works great when you're develop…
These 9 bullet points are far from "not difficult to implement" though.
Well, 2 of them are hard, the others are the kind of thing you get if you let a developer take a week or two to solve them at the beginning, but almost impossible to create after the system is built.
So, 3 months of up-front work. It very likely won't break any project/company, but it's enough of a drag that most people will say "fuck it" and not target large enterprises. And, well, there are plenty of other reasons not to target enterprises that the GP isn't talking about, so it may be a good choice.
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#63Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build. This is exactly what killed my first startup. We believed we fully understood what the customer needs and that we should build the right product before we started selling. We were actually trying to build the minimum viable product, but we were hilariously (with hindsight) wrong about what the customers wanted. Almost all…
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Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#64Every company/startup will be different in some way, so what MVP means for them -- and the reason they go that route -- will be unique.
At least in some cases, MVP is the minimal product you made which illustrates your solution, your value proposition. You use that to get big investment to build "the real one".
Unfortunately, some (many?) companies want to take that MVP and live with it indefinitely, organically (sloppily) growing it as they go.
MVP can be seen as that thing you do which gives you the opportunity to exist but which gradually drags you to the bottom of the sea with technical debt.
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#65Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build. This is exactly what killed my first startup. We believed we fully understood what the customer needs and that we should build the right product before we started selling. We were actually trying to build the minimum viable product, but we were hilariously (with hindsight) wrong about what the customers wanted. Almost all…
I came here to say this. The author of the article does not understand what an MVP is. An MVP is the eventual answer to a metric fuckton of customer development, not what you go into customer development with. If you think you already know what the customer wants, I wish you luck at your next startup after this one fails; you don’t know that, and neither does your customer, or they would have built / bought it alread…
With Ansible, Mike already had a successful prototype (func) which had been developed and used by the Fedora infrastructure team for a while. He then left Red Hat and worked on Ansible. So he did in fact already know what the customer wanted! However that's an unusual case for a start-up. https://opensource.com/article/21/2/ansible-origin-story
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#66Last year I tried to launch something like a dozen small companies based on an "MVP" or 80/20 approach.
The hypothesis being that even if not a full 80/20 split, I could ~probably~ catch 50% of the value by catering to the core 20% of features.
This was completely incorrect. I made 12 things that made ~no money.
SaaS is by no means saturated, but it is mature enough that you can't just crank out crap and make money.
Buyers are sophisticated
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#67Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build. This is exactly what killed my first startup. We believed we fully understood what the customer needs and that we should build the right product before we started selling. We were actually trying to build the minimum viable product, but we were hilariously (with hindsight) wrong about what the customers wanted. Almost all…
The other big reason for an MVP is to get from 'customers told us they want this' to 'customers are actually paying for this' as quickly as possible. All to often potential customers say they want X, but really have no idea what they want. The only surefire way to know if a product is on the right path is to have customers using and paying for the product.
All to often potential customers say they want X, but really have no idea what they want.
Or they actually do really want and need X _right now_. However when you come back with X in 18 month then the customer has already solved X themselves, found another company that can do X or don't really need X any more.
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#68Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build. This is exactly what killed my first startup. We believed we fully understood what the customer needs and that we should build the right product before we started selling. We were actually trying to build the minimum viable product, but we were hilariously (with hindsight) wrong about what the customers wanted. Almost all…
In your story you thought you knew what to build, but didn't.
The "MVP" theory is that the MVP is part of validating that you really know what to build, as you say.
OP author disagrees. (I'm not sure OP author says anything about when you "start selling" exactly).
Clearly a lot more can be said about how you know what to build if not an "MVP" approach. OP suggests a few things: "cultivated instinct" (which as a phrase alone isn't too useful, how do you get it?); Spending a lot of time talking to potential customers, and not necessarily taking what they say at face value but "averaging" it, and mixing with that "cultivated instinct"; and maybe most specifically/operationalizable -- spend some time working in the industry/market before starting the company at all, so you've seen "how 5 other companies have built something and know all the things that they’ve done wrong, and it will be a lot easier."
"Domain expertise" might be the main thing he's talking about, arguing agianst the idea that you can start a company without somebody involved having significant domain expertise/experience in the industry, but instead develop that market knowledge as you go, through an "MVP" approach.
I'm curious how those ideas relate to your company, how much industry/domain experience you had before starting the company.
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#69I think the problem with MVP today is that MVPs have such a shorter lifespan now compared to the past decade that by the time you iterate into a full product it should have happened so fast that it looks like you basically built the right product from the start. If you don’t go fast you will miss the opportunity and be beaten by a competitor.
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's some degree of nuance that isn't captured with comments like yours. I agree with your comment in principle, but there are interpretations of this method that are too extreme and that's where most of the bad MVPisms come from (and what I assume this blog post is a response to). As with any process, what most people are doing is not what was intended, and so we have to discuss what people are doing more…
it leaves little room for corrective action Building an MVP means getting something in front of customers as soon as possible, in order to test your product works for customers and change it if you're wrong. The entire point of an MVP is to give you as much time to change things as possible. Everything you do prior to putting your product in front of someone might be wrong. The only validation that counts is the cust…
When I say there's little room for corrective action, I am specifically speaking about the choice to pursue the MVP strategy. A person who starts a company and decides to embrace the MVP strategy is stuck on a hamster wheel: if they've spent a year and not validated anything positively, they cannot "just" change strategy because the organisation has been built atop of the idea of small ideas, not big ideas.
My experience is that most businesses that pursue the MVP strategy never leave the MVP stage, regardless of the viability of the thing that originally inspired them, because they believe to MVP properly is to surrender all creativity, vision and intuition to numbers, which is in turn to surrender what's important when building anything.
No matter what strategy you choose, there has to be a meaningful amount of intuition and understanding to be able to make decisions: a purely data driven approach (with arbitrary goals like "someone paid us") is predicated on product development being entirely quantitative. Customers lie not just in what they say but also in what they do: getting a customer to pay is very easy compared to, say, building a sustainable business. People would have paid for faster horses!
People who espouse the success of the MVP strategy in their own businesses are often people with a level of creativity/intuition/understanding that most people do not have. MVP is a powerful tool in the right hands, absolutely, and I don't doubt that you're one such person, but MVP as a strategy for "normal" people has so many foot guns that I would never recommend it over a grand vision strategy. How many people are capable of picking the right customers to talk to? How many people are capable of understanding customer behaviour? How many people are capable of balancing outlier vs. representative behaviour?
I believe that normal people will have a higher chance of success by pursuing a vision than they would by following customer behaviour from the start.