Minimum Viable Product (MVP). What is it and what is it for?

You've probably heard this terminology before minimum viable product or MVP by its acronym in English. But before we dive into the bowels of this concept, let's analyze where it comes from.

A few years ago, to launch a new product or service to the market, you had to follow a series of previous steps such as hiring specialized workers, drawing up an action plan, manufacturing the product, renting a warehouse to store the merchandise and launching it to the final consumer in the hope that it would fit their needs.

As you may have seen, the process mentioned above requires an enormous initial investment and has a significant risk when it comes to validating the business model. The problem is that if that product didn't fit the market, the only option is to change the final product and try again. But of course, the market is a living organism that continues to evolve, so new changes may not work either because they arrive late or too soon.

What if we were able to test the market in real time with our product, reducing risk and investment quickly? This is where the magic of the Lean Starupts methodology comes in with Eric Ries:

Despite the fact that the products I developed were of high quality, they did not contemplate the real needs of the customer

Thus, with the formula that Eric proposed in his book, he establishes that customers must be involved in the creation of this product and have quick feedback on what works and what doesn't to continue iterating.

What is a Minimum Viable Product or MVP?

As its name suggests, it is the minimum expression, in terms of functionality, of a product or service that we want to develop and we release it to the market as soon as possible to validate with our Buyer Persona. In this way, we obtain a large amount of information and feedback from the customer to continue iterating and adapting it to their current needs.

The procedure is always the same and is cyclical: building, testing, measuring and learning. And the cycle is repeated over and over again until we validate the business idea or product is finished.

In this way, we get a lot of information in a short time and in most cases with a very small investment, either through different paid campaigns (Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc.) or with small amounts of money to interview people in a campaign at street level.

The Buffer Success Story

For those who aren't familiar with Buffer, it's a social media content manager similar to Hootsuite. The good thing about this example is that they used the lean sturtups methodology to validate your business model in a very cheap and simple way.

The first steps were to create a landing page only offering information about the service that was wanted to be offered. The creator of Buffer asked his friends to help him promote his new website by sharing it on Twitter. A few days later they had succeeded 100 interested emails in more information.

Now, would people be willing to pay for this service? With the feedback obtained with the first communications to that mailing list, they created another landing page with a price list and more than 500 more requests arrived. Un 5% of all registered users they accessed the paid product, since there was another free option. Seven weeks of work later, the platform finally saw the light of day.

How do you create an MVP?

1. Identify a hypothesis. This is the starting point. You have a series of thoughts, hunches or whatever you want as a business idea. Define who your ideal customer is or Buyer Persona and you'll be ready to jump to the next phase.
2. Validation of hypotheses. Go out and validate your ideas. How? , you'll wonder. There are several ways to do this. The most common is to go out (literally) and look for people within the ranges that you think may be your ideal customer to chat with. From that first information, you shape the hypotheses and discover if people would be willing to pay for your product.
   Keep in mind that this phase is only for learning. Another more innovative way is to test this through social networks with a few photos and by writing online to people personally.
3. Measure, measure and measure. What can't be measured doesn't exist. You have to be in full control of every interaction you make. In the digital field, you have many tools to carry it out. The more information you can collect, the lower the margin of error to make decisions based on that data.

And you? Are you ready to create your first MVP?