Mistakes founders make while building an MVP
“A lot of times people don’t know what they want until you show it to them” - Steve Jobs
You can't say whether people will buy your product or not. The next logical step is to build a product. And, test if people are willing to pay for the product.
But wait...
Building a product takes time. It still takes months to build a product that your customers can use. Before you spend months on it and find out that nobody finds it worth paying. It's better to find out before spending a lot of time on it.
That's why Eric Ries coined the term - MVP.
Minimum Viable Product.
But, lots of people made their own version of it and the actual meaning of MVP got lost.
Here's what his idea was: Get maximum amount of validated learning from customers with minimum efforts.
MVP is not:
• An excuse to ship a broken product.
• A one time strategy.
MVP is:
• A process, that you repeat over and over again.
• To learn more about the problem rather than learning what features they want.
Next time if you are thinking validate an idea, make sure you focus on problems rather then getting into features trap.
And, remember people vote with their wallets. Don't trust what they say.
If you find it helpful, it would be great if you can retweet this on twitter.
Preach. I've had so many arguments in my career with product managers and sales people who insist their feature simply has to be in the MVP and the product is worthless without it. This is very rarely true. An MVP in my mind should be basically disposable. You build it as cheaply and quickly as you can in order to learn something. Once you have learned what you need to then you can go about either iterating on it - or when you feel like you've learned enough - just re-writing the product in a more robust way so it can grow.
So, if you follow app developers they have kind of transitioned from MVPs to MLPs. It has to be "loveable". The reason is because the marketplace is more mature now. A MVP, like Uber's years ago, barely works. That won't cut it in 2020 unless its some wildly new and cheap service with no competitor, even then that doesnt last long. Here is a good link on the topic.
https://themindstudios.com/blog/mlp-vs-mvp-vs-mmp/