Page 58 - The 7 Day Startup: You Don’t Learn Until You Launch - PDFDrive.com

underemphasizing the “viable.”

As an example, Informly was designed to pull in people’s stats and give them a
summary. I wanted to test if people wanted to pay for this, so I built out a
working version with only a few integrations. Most startup founders would call
this an MVP.

Yet this fails the MVP test. Why?

I put out a product with a lot fewer features than other products that were already
available. As a result, no one wanted it. Does that mean it was a bad idea or the
business was doomed? There was no way to tell. If it did have all the features, it
may have been more popular.

A much better MVP would have been:

1. Put screenshots up of an analytics report and explain what the product does.
2. When someone signs up (pays), get them to click on a few logos to select

the services they liked.
3. Tell them their report will be ready soon.
4. Call them up and talk them through what’s being done, build the report, and

give it to them.

This would have taken me one day.

It would have tested my assumption that people wanted the service much more
effectively than a feature-lacking product. The customer would have experienced
something reasonably similar to what my product would do for them.

Once you have your product or service idea, it’s time to think about what you
can launch within one week that represents your final vision for your product or
service as closely as possible. That is from the customer’s point of view. The
ugly “behind the scenes” view does not matter right now.

The key is to forget about automation and figure out what you can do manually.