Building an MVP? Just Stop.

So You're Thinking MVP?

Before you dive into your minimum viable product, there is another way to get started that you should strongly consider, one that has considerably less risk, higher impact, and helps to TRULY understand your market and the product you're about to build.

Here's the best part, you can do it without ever building anything.

In fact, you can get started with it today, it's the "no excuses" way to validate your product, generate revenue, and gather learnings directly from your customers while also proving product-market fit, Go 2 Market, and the concept behind your upcoming product.

This strategy teaches you how to truly walk before you run with your product.

Many think that the MVP is the first stage to really kick off any startup, but the facts are most minimum viable products fail.

You can generate substantial revenue while building the product, while also working directly with partners and customers to ensure that the solution you're building is one that the market actually wants.

The best part is, all you need to start validating your market and proving your concept is someone to sell it (the founder), a decent pitch deck and process, and if you want to pitch the concept of a product then some mockups will get you a long way.

What this means for you:

• Brainstorming happens directly with the market.

• Validation is monetized rather than conceptual feedback.

• Launch WITH a pre-existing user base and revenue.

• Start gaining traction and learning in just a couple of weeks.

If you haven't started selling your solution before building it, you're making a big mistake; and the likelihood of your success with an MVP is pretty low.

In this article, I will teach you how to close your first customer and start generating revenue today, without ever writing a line of code or wasting money on Engineers.

What is a Minimum Viable Offer

This is the lifecycle for how to mitigate risk for building products.

The MVO is essentially a way of selling your audience on their problem before going into the build phase. When you think of the "Hero's Journey" and what it takes to create a successful startup, for most founders, the validation started way before the product had been conceived.

Do you build first or solve first?

The answer is always, to solve first, and here's why…

When you go to market with an offer to solve a problem, you can use the problem and solution concept in its rawest form to fulfill the issue at hand.

If you're incapable of solving or monetizing the solution before building, then likely the problem you're solving has a few flaws:

• Your problem may exist but it isn't a priority

• The problem you're solving isn't impactful enough

• Your perceived buyer isn't willing to invest in a solution for the problem.

• Your Product-Market Fit has not been well defined.

Many founders make the mistake of jumping into their solution's "innovation" premise without doing their homework. In most cases, with every startup you can imagine, there was always an offer before a product.

This can be challenging in most markets, but this is especially true in Software. When you think about Software as a service, you have to remember that you're building a solution that fulfills a service.

Therefore, you can establish value by creating an offer for service that models the eventual solution.

This is where you not only generate revenue but gather the learnings to create truly exceptional products, and it's called embedding with your market.

When it comes down to understanding your market, you should always look for the blue ocean opportunity. To identify that opportunity, you should experience it firsthand.

Now I know, you're probably thinking, "I don't want to start a services business," and that's okay, and there might even be potential services already serving your target market. If that's the case, you can go about through a process of re-selling an existing provider or building relationships with those currently solving the problem.

Another critical point is when most founders talk about building solutions and finding validation, they rarely speak about truly monetized validation.

Nothing talks louder than customers validating with their wallets when it comes to launching products, and no, investors DO NOT COUNT.

You need buyer validation, which helps you generate revenue and create your first users. The MVO lets you know with 100% confidence that you're on the right path - the process of truly becoming a hero and not just another guy playing founder raising funds or bootstrapping without truly understanding the what or who they are solving for.

The Heroes Journey

When you think about that story, the story of your favorite startup, you'll hear all the tales behind it. Frequently within that tale, what many new founders skip over is the hero's journey.

Most skip over it or ignore it, yet reference it all the time, they'll tell everyone around them about the tales of other founders to validate starting a company, but then when it's time to build their journey, they like to skip the line and pretend that knowing someone else's tale is enough, they have the blueprint!

They believe they have an advantage due to listening to the mistakes of someone else's journey.

Every new founder these days has observed businesses' rampant growth and innovation over the last 15 years, and everyone believes they are in a better spot than the previous.

However, when building your blue ocean, you're at a complete disadvantage.

You think that copying another person's model will make you successful.

This is a misconception. Unless you have the resources, capital, and work ethic to make it happen, the chances you get off the ground are a bit less than 10%, based on reported stats. I can promise you this.

It's actually less than 1% when you factor in how many start unannounced and fail before ever reaching the launch point.

If you think about all your favorite companies and go back and listen to the founding story, they were selling the offer far before they ever pitched the end product. This is common, and in most cases, it's what defines the actual value in the end.

When I work with clients or start my own companies, I follow a natural progression cycle that is made to follow the Heroes Journey, which consists of:

Positioning:

It's typically easier to start with the who before the PROBLEM, but you can trade the two back and forth. I always prefer to start by building out an avatar that I want to sell.

However, for most first-time founders, the problem will likely exist first. The issue with working backward from the problem is that they have usually conceptualized a solution that solves many Avatar issues, giving them the mindset they have a bigger market than they actually do.

Minimum Viable Concept:

Now that you know the who, it's time to conceptualize the problem for your who. If you're working backward from the problem, try to identify who your concept serves the best, that can truly afford to solve, or who is paying for a non-innovative solution.

When it comes to your minimum viable concept, you're essentially taking the essence and packing it together. You can have a solution for many problems, but in this stage, you're only focused on the concept that solves the biggest problem for a SPECIFIC audience.

You can always go back and revise and manipulate your concept down the road, but we're focused on creating your PILLAR concept in this stage.

It's the unique differentiation that sets you apart from everyone else. It's WHY we're deciding to take a risk and embark on a journey, and it has to solve something substantial enough to justify another expense for the buyer.

Build Your Offer

Now that we understand the minimum viable concept and the buyer, it's time to figure out its value by crafting an offer that we think provides a baseline solution for what our minimum viable product would eventually accomplish.

In this stage, many automatically throw in too many "features" into their offer and make it convoluted because they believe that their offer isn't enough to stand alone, so they become insecure and keep increasing its value.

However, if that's the case, if you can't take your PILLAR concept and sell it to your customer, you're likely focused on the wrong problem.

When developing an offer to present to potential buyers, you need a simple pitch deck or a really well-rounded speaker who can truly articulate the solution so that the buyer understands it.

Honestly, I've done this with absolutely NO collateral and have gotten to well over six figures before even making a logo or thinking of a company name.

Launch Experiment

During your launch experiment, it's crucial to approach it as if you had the product. You're not trying to sell them on something that doesn't exist, but you want to focus on closing deals on a cold audience, not your network.

When it comes to successful launches, your network will only get you so far. You're on the right path if you can take an offer and close a deal on someone who has no previous awareness of you.

What you will learn from this process is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL.

You're going to learn:

• Does your pillar concept CONVERT?

• Is your pillar concept a prioritized PROBLEM?

• How much is your pillar concept truly WORTH?

These are THREE significant validations you will receive in the first couple of phases.

Oh, and don't forget, you're already generating revenue. You just closed your first user. Just like when you launch your MVP, the ANXIETY is high. Can you truly solve the problem and retain them?

Well, that's another question…

Typically founders mask their insecurities in their products; they think just because they launched and someone came to buy, they are good to go.

However, whether or not they stay is genuinely the real measurement of value.

If you're solving a problem that is one and done, you're going to learn how sustainable your monetization model is right off the bat. Still, if you have a concept that solves a reoccurring problem, you're going to need to dive into a few different areas:

• Fulfillment Quality : Does your fulfillment process live up to expectations?

• Solution Impact : Does your solution truly relieve the buyer from their problem?

• Level of effort :  What is the level of effort the buyer is willing to make to solve the problem?

In those three questions, you're going to solve many different things, such as:

Fulfillment Quality

Rating the quality of fulfillment with the customer will let you know whether or not the solution you plan on making into a product is a high enough quality to serve the customer a desirable outcome.

Fulfillment Quality helps you understand:

• Does the solution your building truly solve the problem?

• Do the user stories outlined create a high fulfillment quality?

• Is there anything missing in the fulfillment process that is required?

When you go through the fulfillment of the offer, you will validate these questions which will establish whether or not your product's concept and potential solution truly meet the expectations of the user.

Solution Impact

Rating the impact of your solution on the customer will let you know right away not how valued your answer is for the buyer. You will also learn whether you're charging too much or too little and just how valuable your system is.

Solution Impact helps you understand:

• What is the value of impact for the user?

• How willing is the user willing to provide feedback on the impact?

• Does your solution scale with their problem?

• Does the impact of your solution excite the user?

Understanding the impact of your solution is going to help you build a significantly better product, as well as the marketing, and sales process. The impact you create helps outline all of the selling points. It also teaches you what to focus on when building the product.

Level of Effort

You sold them on a solution; since it isn't a product yet, they are involved in the fulfillment process one way or another. Now it's time to figure out how FAR the buyer is willing to go to solve the problem.

It would be best if you made this process slightly more time-consuming to provide a high ticket and high-value process; the more your customer is willing to engage with you in the process lets you know the importance of solving the problem for the customer.

As stated previously, the goal is to always validate with the customer opening their wallet. That sounds much worse than it is, but when it comes to validation, dollars talk, and if the customer is willing to keep paying and keep engaging, you've genuinely got a solution.

Level of Effort will teach you about:

• What user experience is required to help your avatar

• How frictionless does the solution need to be?

• Will the required effort deter your user?

This rating is all about finding out how far your customer is willing to go. If your user is willing to put a high level of effort into solving the problem, and they remain grateful for the solution, then you've got a high ticket value product.

However, if the user immediately starts to shy away due to the level of effort, you're likely looking at a lower value problem.

Every buyer has an expectation for the level of effort required to solve the problem, your process requires exponential effort, and they consider it more work than it's worth, you need to re-think your process and focus on a seamless experience.

During this stage, you're solving for value, as well as user experience. You can truly understand what is needed, and how much emphasis on user experience is required.

Unlock Your Advocate

You've realized by now that you're just selling the offer, which is the solution you're focused on building for your target audience. It doesn't require much, just a basic sales process and someone to pitch it.

However, finding buyers and retaining them is not enough.

It's a great start, it's enough to consider the build process and continue to revise and repeat the offer sales process, but the most critical step is:

"Will your customers ever become advocates?"

Now when it comes to advocates, this takes many different faces.

When I talk about unlocking your advocate, I want to know whether or not my buyer is motivated enough to become part of the sales process. If your solution ends up being so impactful that your buyer can't live without it, you've officially hit a gold mine.

The fact is, if they can't live without, then they've started TELLING EVERYONE.

The advocate will do this without even asking, and they are just so excited about the solution; however, it doesn't hurt to ask your users to share!

When this situation occurs, it's what we like to call "Unlocking Advocates."

When you've unlocked an advocate, you've officially identified that your solution sells itself through your customers and/or partners.

Minimum Viable Offer Benefits

• Product-Market Fit Validation

• Immediate Revenue Creation

• Faster Feature Release Validation

• Blue Ocean Discovery

If you're currently bootstrapping, an MVO is not only the perfect way to start building revenue to offset risk, it's a great way to fund hiring and building out your team.

If you're looking to raise funds, this is the perfect way to build case studies and high-quality initial user feedback.

The MVO will help you to pitch investors on more than just a concept and product, instead, you'll be pitching a validated concept that is actively generating revenue, with real users, who can't wait for you to launch.

The Minimum Viable Offer is designed to scale with your concepts validation.

It Just Takes Effort.

So, let's conclude; I think that's deep enough!

Hopefully, you've realized that to get started with your market and make revenue.

You need an excellent pillar concept, a decent offer, and capable hands. I'm serious; get your hands dirty and dig in; the best founders and stories are created from that path. If you're looking for easy money, copying other people's models, or writing random financials in a spreadsheet, you're probably not cut out for the MVO or even an MVP.

My question to you would be, what are you even really willing to do to succeed?

It's nice to think through the result and the conceptual product. Still, in reality,

I'd think very long and hard about the journey you're on, the resources required, and the level of effort needed to succeed in a red ocean such as technology because there is nothing easy about it.

You May Want To Follow!

You've read this far, congratulations!

Feel free to comment below, request further explanations, and follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/NotableFounder.

Have Questions about the article or how to start the MVO Process?

Well, I'm here to help, ask questions below like:

• How do I find my first customer?

• How do I structure my offer?

• What should my sales process look like?

• How do I fulfill my offer?

• What should my offer cost?

I'm looking forward to hearing from you!