Prototype versus MVP

There's a brutality to the prototyping process. Here's some feedback we've got in the last few days.

-'The avatar is scary.'

-'If it wasn't from you I'd have ignored it or assumed it was phishing.'

-'Is my video data deleted after a certain amount of time.'

All these are good points or questions. Talking to an avatar is weird, but so is talking to humans. Our prototype doesn't have the requisite signposts to explain what it does for users. We need to fix that. And the data implications are a whole thing in and unto itself.

But it brought me back to a recent interview I did with Marty Cagan, where we talked about what an MVP is. Now the concept of MVP, popularised by Eric Reis, can have wide meanings for different people. Some people think it's a design in figma, others think it's something that takes a year to build.

Here's Marty's definition: 'I have long defined minimum viable product as the smallest possible product that has three critical characteristics: people choose to use it or buy it; people can figure out how to use it; and we can deliver it when we need it with the resources available – also known as valuable, usable and feasible.'

What fortell.ai are doing right now is prototyping. We're putting the earliest version of our technology in front of users and getting feedback. The most important question we're trying to answer is not 'could' you use it but 'would' you use it and pay for it. This is the point of the prototype. To spend as little time as possible to learn as much as we can. Fast.

Happily, from some recent inbound, it seems that people are curious about how we could help them answer the questions. Whether we can turn this curiosity into cash, only time will tell.