http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product
What is the minimum viable product?
Nivi: First topic: What is the minimum viable product? Talk to me about minimum viable products.
Eric: OK, well let’s start with the question. Why do we build products in the first place?
In the end, we hope to be able to launch product to lots of
customers and have them give us money so that we build a great business.
One approach to solving that problem would be, let’s build a product
with the maximum number of features that will maximize our chance of
success in the end. But the problem with that is you won’t get any
feedback until you’ve already built all those different products.
All those different features, so you ship this product with a ton of
features, and generally, by the time it’s done, it’s too late to make
sure that you are on the right track.
The alternative would be, let’s do the release early, release often
thing, and let’s get feedback as we go. The issue there is, if you just
follow the release early, release often mantra, you find yourself
running around in circles, because you ship code, you get some feedback
from people, you do a focus group.
Some customers say, “Give me feature X,” “Give me feature Y,” now
you’re kind of like, maybe sometimes you do what they want, maybe
sometimes you’re going to do what you want, and then they get mad at
you, and you’re chasing your own tail a little bit because you’re not
operating against a clear, long-term vision of what you’re trying to
accomplish.
The idea of minimum viable product is useful because you can
basically say, look, our vision is to build a product that solves this
core problem for customers, these kind of general feature areas, and we
think that for the people who are early adopters for that kind of
solution, they will be the most forgiving.
And they will fill in their minds the features that aren’t quite
there if we give them the core, tent-pole features that point the
direction of where we’re trying to go.
The minimum viable product is that product which has just those
features and no more that allows you to ship a product that early
adopters see and, at least some of whom resonate with, pay you money
for, and start to gave you feedback on.
Nivi: So there is some set of customers out there, we believe, that just with these features alone, this product is useful to them.
Eric: Exactly right. And sometimes it’s useful to
them because early adopters have the same kind of visioning power that
entrepreneurs do, but because they can see what the end product is
going to be.
