How do you improve your MVP with customer feedback?

Sometimes we are in too much of a rush to build. There is a concept of preto-typing that makes sure you are building The Right It before you build it right. And the tools and ideas that you might use to pretotype are precisely those you should apply when building anything, including your MVP. Do you have an existing product or service you can test your hypothesis on? Can you test the demand and usage spending the least amount of money possible? You are trying to answer the question: "Are people interested in the product" And once you answer this question you can move to thinking about what are the next steps in building out the core functionality that users have told you they want. And remember to always be iterating.

Here is an example of minimal viable product MVP goals that can be tested in an experiment: 1. User Acquisition: The goal could be to acquire a specific number of users within a given time frame. 2. User Retention: The goal could be to test the engagement and retention of users with the product. 3. Market Fit: The goal could be to determine if the product meets the needs of the target audience. 4. Revenue Generation: The goal could be to test the potential revenue streams for the product. 5. Scalability: The goal could be to test the scalability of the product, especially if it involves technology or infrastructure. It's essential to define clear, measurable goals to evaluate the viability and potential success of the product.

Check if you have a Product Market Fit with that MVP. Here is how to do it in 7?? easy ways: 1. You have organic growth (product solves a real problem), without a huge marketing spend 2. Word of mouth (people are talking about your product) 3. You have good reviews & testimonials 4. There is a response from media or industry analysts 5. People are actually paying for your product (shows that it gives value) 6. You have high referral rate (eg Net Promoter Score (NPS) that shows how likely people are to recommend your product) 7. Low Churn Rate (customers stay with you)

Customer feedback is the secret sauce for improving any MVP. We gather input through surveys, interviews, and focus groups. Then our crack team springs into action, furiously whiteboarding and sticky-noting how to make Version 2.0 the bee's knees. We rinse and repeat until customers are buzzing with delight. The process stings a little at times, but their sweet satisfaction is our own personal honey.

Move fast and break things, has IMHO put more startups in the ground than the ones who take their time to construct a credible hypothesis. Your answers are dependent on the quality of questions you ask. Its imperative to structure the right questions, so as to recveive actionable insights to act upon later. Carefully think about the needs of your potential users, their utility and how you can deliver that in the most impactful, yet capital efficient way.

My favourite MVP is a quiz or an assessment. If I can get people filling in quizzes they must be interested in the topic. As an added bonus the quiz questions provide invaluable data that reveals valuable insights about what people are trying to achieve. For example, an MVP for a fitness business would be an “Are you really ready to get fit? Answer 10 questions and find out”. You can use ScoreApp to set this up easily and cheaply.

AIRBNB is a great example of how customer feedback creates success. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia moved to San Francisco where they shared a three-room-apartment. When a design conference came to town in 2007, they saw an opportunity to earn some extra money by renting out their floor space, and called it Airbed and Breakfast. After two years of experimenting and failing, they focussed on New York as a popular tourist destination and had meetings with their New York-based users: —both hosts and guests. These meetings were crucial in making solid offerings with that included professional pictures of good-looking spaces. The basis of success of AIRBNB, was laid fifteen years ago, when the founders connected to their users.

To ensure you stay on track - - Co build with a handful of customers - these typically are early adopters who're invested in your success and would be open to giving constructive feedback even at a prototype stage. - Don't just focus on the pain that the prospects are trying to solve for, also ask questions around what end goal / state are they trying to achieve - In case you're super early focus on on getting facetime with users, physical meetings are event better in the early days as you can see reactions live and also capture suttle nuances in the feedback

Early feedback is so important. One can think that they have a winning product but it’s all about how the customer receives it. Early customer feedback and engagement can’t lead to small tweaks that make a huge difference.

Categorising feedback always helps. Apart from capturing feedback also look for which areas could be blind spots, look for what the feedback is clustered around. More importantly focus on feedback that actually matters - I'd pay for it now if you can fix A is always better than This feature A could be better. Prioritize ruthlessly and focus on solving one thing at a time to make sure the ROi is clear

When the folks at YMMY Marketing developed their AI-based Sales Bot, instead of going through multiple cycles of development before taking it live, they went straight to prospects — real life businesses hurting from low lead engagement — and asked them to test out the Sales Bot and offer feedback. The feedback offered was at first critical, but it allowed YMMY to quickly correct course and improve the product, much more quickly than if they had strived for internal perfection while keeping a deaf ear to the actual potential buyers of the product.

Check out how UBER tested its MVP Uber was born out of difficulty finding taxis the traditional way. And that was the problem Uber was focused on in the first stage. UberCabs was an iPhone app meant to connect the users with cab drivers and offer them a way to make payments via a credit card. The MVP version offered only these features on an initial level. The fancier features were added only after the app received significant downloads signalling its validation. At first, they handled all the orders manually. Uber offered drivers to accept and manage orders on their own. Only 3 out of 10 agreed, giving a start to the no. 1 taxi app in the world. Uber started with just 3 cars and validated its idea before its competitors could.

Very True! This often lets one pivot from your "initial" usecase for your product to the one that customers are willing to buy! On of my first companies, we developed a video conferencing sofware that we thought might be useful to primary care physicians since the VA (Vetrans Affairs) physicians liked it. Turned out the private practice (physicians) was not very enthusiastic since they had NO way to bill for it. (Insurance at that time would not pay for this as a service!) So we pivoted to usecase where physician (from their office/home) could connect to a "remote kiosk" with this type of software. Such healthcare services were provided to companies or entities like Oil companies (Rigs) or elder care nursing homes No insurance billing here.

You can also PRETOTYPE instead of MVP, like Tesla did … Tesla used a Lotus Elise to interest potential buyers for their first car. In 2003, the founders of Tesla had an ambitious idea (an all-electric 2-door sports car). In order to convince potential buyers to order its car, Tesla created a pretotype of what the car would look like. Lotus supplied Tesla with a ‘glider’ Elise - which was filled with models of key components. This was not a prototype, because the vehicle didn’t function. Tesla was able to show buyers a close proxy for the final design. Tesla asked “Will you put down a $5,000 deposit to have it built to order?” From this test Tesla secured several hundred deposits, a non-trivial result to reassure their Investors.