Slimming Down Your MVP

Written by: Garik Tate and Shem Albert

All right, so you have a great idea for a software product, and you found somebody willing to write the code for you, you have some funds, you have studied your niche/market, and you are excited to get started.

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There’s only one problem, your idea is (statistically) f#%$ing terrible. You just don’t know how yet.

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Enter the MVP!

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Minimum Viable Product or MVP, as Eric Ries defines it, is “the version of the new product which allows the team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” In simpler terms, it means downsizing your initial features a LOT!

Chapter 1: How To Think About MVPs

Your goal with an MVP is always to minimize the cost, effort, and risk of building your product while maintaining the core features that will allow you to test a hypothesis with the market. That data will then help you build a better product in the next iteration.

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The reason why this is so important is that we don’t know what we don’t know. Let me break it down for you with an analogy. Let’s imagine a young and cocky car mechanic, we’ll call him Joey. Joey knows how to fix old cars, but he’s never designed a car from scratch. He’s never even built a car from scratch. Now let’s say that Joey was so cocky that he is willing to bet you he could design a whole line of new cars from scratch in just 14 days.

Would you take him up on his bet? Of course, you would!

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There is a lot Joey would need to understand more deeply before he can succeed at something like that. He needs to take a smaller risk on a more easily attainable goal.

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If you’re entering a market that you don’t know very well (and I assure you, we can never understand a market the way we do after starting a business in it), then your first mission is not to “corner the market”, or “destroy the competition”, or “dent the universe.” It’s just to gain as much experience and information as possible while seeing if you can make some money in the process.?

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Step 1: Learn, Step 2: Scale, Step 3: Dent the universe.

Chapter 2: Different MVPs

1. Ugly Duckling MVP

Is your core feature pretty simple? But you're having trouble creating the front-end design? Then it sounds like you might want to build an ugly-duckling MVP. This usually takes the shape of a wireframe, mock-up, or prototype. If you embrace this type of philosophy, you should carefully watch test-users interact with the app and see at which places they get stuck. That way, you can resolve UX problems early on before you invest too much in UI aesthetics.?

2. The “Wizard of Oz” MVP

This is what you call an MVP where you have completed enough of the front-end to give your customers the impression that you have a real working product. Meanwhile, on the back-end, you have someone doing everything manually (creating reports, crunching numbers, sending emails, etc.).?

All MVPs are temporary solutions, but this one is even more so. It takes a LOT of effort to maintain the illusion of a “Wizard of Oz” MVP. But it’s a powerful way to fully test your product while maintaining very low development costs.

This is sometimes called a “Concierge” MVP, but I consider that to be a different strategy (see below).

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3. The “Concierge” MVP?

A “Concierge” MVP means temporarily providing a service that gives you intel on what your customers want in your finished product. For example, let’s say that you want to build an app that helps users lose weight by tracking their exercise and diet. You could shortcut a lot of learning (both market research and domain-expertise) by selling personal coaching as a service.

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4. Single Featured MVP

One of the simplest MVPs and incidentally also one of the most effective. Pretty self-explanatory. You build a product with only ONE feature. This will allow you to test your core hypothesis and continue to rapidly improve the product over time.

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5. Advertisement MVP

Sometimes you can get away without writing any code at all and STILL gather a ton of valuable user-info. First, you create a landing page and/or product trailer, then you begin sending traffic to it (small FB advertising campaigns are your friend). You can begin learning how many people sign up for your product, and how easy it is to generate buzz. If you install heat-maps onto your website, you can also see which parts of the website your customers interact with the most.

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This will give you a fantastic starting location for choosing which features to focus on in the next version of your MVP.

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Another big benefit of having an Advertisement MVP is that you can start gathering email addresses as users sign up for early access to your product. This way, when you launch your product, you have an audience immediately.

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Chapter 3: Slimming Down Your MVP

For some reason God only knows, the human psyche finds it addictingly fun to brainstorm new product features but finds it painful and difficult to prioritize which features to focus on, and which features to cut.

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Here are some questions you can ask yourself when deciding how to slim down your MVP:

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• If you were going to add a new exciting feature, what would you be willing to throw out entirely to allow for it?
• Who is this product for? What’s the primary problem they are trying to solve?
• No bullshit, what would a customer ACTUALLY pay for?
• Am I assuming this product has to help too many people? How can this product help fewer people more effectively?
• What’s the simplest version of the hypothesis I’m trying to test?
• If I was totally forced (bullet to my head), to reduce the features by 50%, which ones would I drop? What about 75%? What if I had to drop everything but one feature?
• Could this feature wait until a future version?

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Your goal is to have your features put into tiers.?

Tier 1: Your absolute minimum version of the MVP

Tier 2: The nice-to-have features in your MVP (be careful with this category)

Tier 3: Your second iteration

Tier 4: Your third iteration

Tier 5-10: etc.

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You want to have as few features as possible in tiers 1 and 2. Preferably fewer than 3 features in each tier (you can always add more later if you are ahead of your timeline, you little over-achiever you).

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And then when you start building the MVP, you must entirely ignore tiers 3-5. Spend all your time and attention on tiers 1-2 with radical focus. Only AFTER you have the MVP up and running should you return back to brain-storming and start dusting off your previous feature ideas.

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Chapter 4: Closing Thoughts

Building a successful business is really hard, so you should take every chance you can get to make it easier. Focusing on a very slim (but still effective) MVP is one of the best hacks my colleagues and I have found in all our years in the start-up world.

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Now get out there and start building cool stuff!