Page 57 - The 7 Day Startup: You Don’t Learn Until You Launch - PDFDrive.com

Day 2 - WTF is an MVP?

“Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.”
Eric Ries

The Lean Startup introduced a lot of new fancy words into startup lingo. The
most misunderstood is the MVP, or “Minimum Viable Product.”

The concept of the MVP is (in Eric Ries’ words):

“The first step is to enter the Build phase as quickly as possible with a
minimum viable product (MVP). The MVP is that version of the product that
enables a full turn of the Build-Measure-Learn loop with a minimum
amount of effort and the least amount of development time.”

What this means: Rather than spending six months creating a product or service,
do only the smallest amount of work required to truly test it.

In practice, this is interpreted in a lot of ways that prove to be detrimental to
bootstrapped startups. They create a really crappy version of the product or
service without enough features to make it desirable enough for someone to pay
for. Or they don’t create anything, and instead put up a landing page and base
their decisions on email opt-ins. Or they realize it will take too long to create
their actual product, so they create something else.

Most of these interpretations go wrong when they get away from effectively
measuring what needs to be measured. In short, they overemphasize the
“minimum” and underemphasize the “viable.”

A common MVP mistake is

overemphasizing the “minimum” and

underemphasizing the “viable.”