Minimum viable product vs minimum lovable/awesome product
Recently, I've read more and more about moving to minimum lovable/awesome products. Here are my thoughts on that.
The premise of minimum lovable products is basically that it's a lot easier to convince users to try and use products that feel awesome.
While that is certainly true, I think the best course of action depends on the space the new product is in.
A MVP works best if it is something that doesn't yet exist at all. For example the early Excel sheet of Nomadlist. A database like that didn't exist before, so people used it, shared it and added data to it.
If there are already products that can be used to solve the same or similar problems, and the new product is not an obvious 10x improvement, then a minimum lovable product is probably better to create.
My reasoning is that if people have already a solution for that problem, they are a lot more likely to move back to their old solution the first time they encounter an issue.
These are my 2c on that topic.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that!
Let me start off by pointing out that MVP does not per definition means an actual "product". The word "Product" in MVP is defined as "something resulting from or necessarily following from a set of conditions - a product of his environment" (as per Websters dictionary).
MVP is a process to validate assumptions (on which you're basing/building your business/project) with the least amount of effort possible. Therefor, the nature of an MVP is dictated by the assumption you're looking to validate. This is also means you're constantly creating new MVP's (or modifying existing ones) to validate different assumptions as you're business moves forward.
In the early stages of your project/business, an MVP can be as simple as a landing page, a survey, a bunch of interviews of even a phone call.
Having said that, it follows that whether or not your MVP is a lovable product is irrelevant. The success of an MVP is defined by whether it validates (either as true or false) the assumption you are looking to test.
Even though I am not familiar with the term "minimum lovable product", it would appear that whether or not your product is lovable is highly subjective, no? How would you even being to define what "lovable" means? Would this be something you love yourself? Or customer X? Or customer Y? Point being, asking 10 different customers what would make the product "lovable" would likely result in 10 different answers :)
That's a great take on what an MVP is.
I always thought of it coming after validating assumptions.
So it is likely that one would create multiple MVPs for the same idea, just to see which assumptions of that idea hold, and which do not?
I actually don't like the term minimum lovable product that much, exactly for the reasons you stated. "awesome" would be better imo. From what I've read, it is about having good UI/UX, ironed out most glitches, and might even added some lovable features, like the Twitter heart button explosion animation.
I think I understand what's going through your head. I find myself regularly in a state of contradiction when it comes to this sort of thing.
For example, generally speaking, I've found that indie hackers are often encouraged to look at entering existing markets, rather than trying to create a new paradigm of sorts. However, if you're going to enter a competitive market, it feels natural to assume that you can't just throw out some barely viable, clunky looking product. It's possible to succeed in a big market even without having to differentiate that much from the competition, but you'll certainly struggle if your product starts off much worse than your competitors. At least that seems to be the natural way to think about it.
Also, I sometimes struggle to see how a landing page can be enough in a competitive market. You might actually do a really good job of driving traffic to your landing page, but then you can't actually deliver a working product to the interested visitors. Worst case being that you bring their attention to your general product idea, but you end up driving them in the direction of your competitors because you couldn't deliver what they want right now.
Some of these thoughts I base on my own behaviours. For example, I'm not one to register my interest in something if there's plenty of other options out there in the market that I could use right now. I guess the comeback to this could be that, if there's nothing you plan to offer that isn't already available, then maybe it's not worth trying to compete?
I'm still pretty naive to what it takes to be a successful indie hacker - I think it helps to bare my insecurities and internal conflict as part of my learning therapy. I'm very grateful to this community at this stage to help educate me in the areas where I'm thinking incorrectly!
If the is no existing product, there might not be an existing demand or people might not understand your offering easily.
Your MVP need not be 10x better, but lovable in a certain aspect: a useful feature not available in existing product, a better UX/UI, or just run faster.
If the users like it, they might not switch immediately, so you should poll for feedback on what would make them switch to your product.
IMO the MVP is all about feedback. The idea is that rather than obsessing over the minutia of design/development/which-db/which-framework we quickly test the hypothesis and update our priors.