minimum viable product

Minimum Viable Product is a term, popularized by Eric Ries, for a process for developing web applications. At Early Stage Legal, we believe in expanding the concept from web applications to any new product or service and to entire companies.  We believe most startups should be Minimum Viable Businesses, for example. 

The basic idea of MVP is to gain the most possible information about the success prospects of a product at the lowest possible cost and as quickly as possible.  To do this, entrepreneurs should focus on increasing the speed of the product development cycle as much as possible and deploy smart, inexpensive product value tests as frequently as possible. 

MVP borrows elements of the Scientific Method in that you are looking to develop hypotheses, test them, and then refine your hypotheses in an iterative fashion, but it also has a strong emphasis on finding rapid, low-cost ways to test hypotheses.

the product development cycle

The basic product development cycle involves the following elements performed iteratively:

  • Idea Generation--this refers to brainstorming period where you come up with the specific product you think will succeed
  • Prototyping--this refers to develop a low-cost test version of a product that resembles the proposed final product closely enough to give potential customers a good idea of what value the final product will have
  • Testing--this refers to the process of designing experiments to understand customers' assessment of your product
  • Data Analysis and Learning--this refers to the process of understanding what exactly your tests implied

rapid, low-cost ways to test products

Most of the steps above are straightforward, but many entrepreneurs struggle with finding or designing low-cost tests of their product idea.  The following techniques help entrepreneurs to test their product offerings in a rapid, low-cost fashion:

  • Mock-ups / prototyping
  • Deploy first, code later
  • Customer surveys
  • Panel tests
  • Business plan competitions--while you may not be able to test the product directly, you can test the overall business concept
  • Staging investment based on tests
  • Staging a limited market offering
  • Creating an alpha product
  • Creating a beta product