Why MVPs don’t work... and how to make them work.
If you are just getting started on an idea, the best advice that comes your way will be to build an MVP. There will be books to tell you to build it the lean way. Some will go to the extent of telling you to build an MSP (Minimum Sellable Product). Heck, even I tell my clients to build MSPs. But, why don’t building an MVP always work?
I have worked with a dozen clients who have built their products with negligible userbase, and when I propose that I will analyze the response of the market, will analyze their analytics data, competition and get back with a solution to pump up things, their usual response is, ‘But we have already done that, and it doesn’t work.’
Before we get to why it doesn’t work and how to make it work, let’s understand the generalized definition of building a Minimum Viable Product.
What is an MVP?
A minimum viable product (MVP) is a concept from Lean Startup that stresses the impact of learning in new product development. Eric Ries defined an MVP as that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. This validated learning comes in the form of whether your customers will actually purchase your product
A key premise behind the idea of MVP is that you produce an actual product (which may be no more than a landing page, or a service with an appearance of automation, but which is fully manual behind the scenes) that you can offer to customers and observe their actual behavior with the product or service. Seeing what people actually do with respect to a product is much more reliable than asking people what they would do.
Source: agilealliance.org
Read what the Agile Alliance has written as the description of an MVP, and you will immediately realize what’s wrong.
What goes wrong while building an MVP
In my interaction with entrepreneurs, I have always seen people build something, and then they build something more, and then something more on top of it. Sorry, but that was never the deal. Your MVP was supposed to be a premise in which you collect data of your users and understand what is working and what is not. That data then should drive your next move. Which is hardly the case.
Here’s an example of a client I worked with. The core of her product was creating a unique collection of useful content. So the validation here was to be of the core of the business model, and not of technology. She had to identify if the collection that she has made is interesting for her users and if they are really looking forward to it. All she had to do was build a WordPress blog with a categorized list of those content pieces kept in a downloadable PDF, run some ads, create a funnel to track if users are signing up to download that PDF or not. And when they have what was their feedback on the content.
Once this first core validation is done, you can move to the next level of validation by building a personalized experience. But before I get to how you can build a personalized experience without spending too much time and money, let’s talk about what she had to do with the data received from the above exercise.
The validation of the core product
The validation would have given her some ideas, on whether the content was useful for those who signed up. If it was helpful, would they be willing to check out more such collections? And this had to be done until the core validation was in place. Even if 4 out of 10 people had said that it was useful, you have some chances.
Now, should she have shut down if people had not liked it? No. Of course not. That’s where pivot in the business will come into effect. And in 7 out of 10 cases with my clients, we have pivoted to a new business model that worked wonders.
In the case of our content lady, she had a bigger business model in mind. The portal would not just be a curated list of content, but a place where you can personalize your content collection based on your interest, choices, and you could also get certified, learn skills, and find jobs. But there’s an MVP way of testing all these features. You just shouldn’t build it all and then shout at your marketing guy for not getting enough customers.
Teams use the term MVP, but don’t fully understand its intended use or meaning. Often this lack of understanding manifests in believing that an MVP is the smallest amount of functionality they can deliver, without the additional criteria of being sufficient to learn about the business viability of the product. — Source: Agile Alliance
I love this quote from the Agile Alliance. And truly this is the mistake that most companies and entrepreneurs make while building an MVP.
What should you do?
We have shipped buggy MVPs in less than a week as well, but the lesson learned from those were used to pivot business which eventually had 155% quarter to quarter jump in userbase, which was -10% earlier.
It requires research, strategy, and a well-defined plan of action to execute an MVP. Launching it and then launching something without analysis isn’t going to get you anywhere.
Here’s how we got to launching an MVP then optimizing it to create such a huge demand.
The product that the client had, was already a full-fledged version of what was needed. But somehow the conversion was surprisingly low. Based on this, we realized that there is a demand for this product but two of these things might not be working.
- The pricing could be high, or competition would be providing the same offering for lower cost
- The application might not be user friendly or buggy
After researching the competition, we realized that both were true. However, the buggy bit wasn’t so much a worry because 7 out of 10 people were still able to complete the application process until the payment.
So we focused on the first point and relooked at the offering. We realized that the competitors were offering less of what we are offering for almost free.
Once all our hypotheses were confirmed, we redesigned the offering, the user journey, and the pricing. We launched a new app in a week with these changes. And boom. In just two days, we saw a 45% conversion rate from 5% earlier. The app was still buggy though. But we had solved one aspect of the problem without investing too much time and effort in building a good looking, and bug-free app. That happened sometime later which further increased the conversion and userbase.
And that’s how in my opinion most companies should look at their MVPs. It's difficult to believe how simple this is.
Originally published on: https://medium.com/@rajatsinha/why-mvps-dont-work-cd87c768ade7