The ultimate guide to building an MVP

“The best way to describe the minimum viable product (MVP) is as a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and in order to provide feedback for future product development. So, building a minimum viable product is always a big risk.” The folks at Startup Basics list all the steps that can help you reduce that risk and successfully get started. (via @startupbasix)

The MVP is broken: It’s time to restore the minimum viable product

“The minimum viable product (MVP) is one of the most abused terms in the modern lexicon of software development.” Allan Kelly recommends narrowing the focus of your MVP down to three possible types:

A product that has only the features necessary to test the market, a product with its must-have features, or a product proof-of-concept. Most MVP’s diverge quite a bit from these types. Allan explores how we got to this point, and how to make MVPs useful again. (via @allankellynet)

You’re probably building your MVP wrong

When you create an MVP you can choose between experiments that can validate or invalidate your assumptions about your business model. N. Taylor Thompson explains that there are two types of MVPs – validating MVP’s and invalidating MVP’s – that can help you determine if you’re building the right product. Just be sure to pick the right type of MVP for your situation.  N. Taylor gives some advice on how to do just that. (via @ntaylorthompson)

4 steps to building a minimum viable product

If you’ve ever had an exec say “We have $5 million in funding and we have to get this right. How can you guarantee you won’t fail?” you may appreciate the value of an MVP. The trick is to remember that “the underlying principle behind a Minimum Viable Product is to learn quickly with minimal investment.” Elijah Chang shares the four-step approach he uses to define a minimum viable product to learn about your customer’s needs and the best way to satisfy them. (via @devbridge)

How to Plan a Minimum Viable Product: a Step-By-Step Guide

An MVP allows you and your team to invalidate (or validate) product assumptions and learn how your target users react to your product’s core functionality. Creating an MVP is an iterative process that helps you identify user pain points and determine the appropriate product functionality to address those needs over time. Iteration is key to properly using an MVP to learn about your customers and improve your product. Chris Ciligot describes the approach he uses to plan a minimum viable product for mobile apps. (via @ClrMobile)

Riskiest Assumption Testing

Some teams rely on hope when introducing a new product – as in “I hope people buy this!” Other teams have found the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to be a helpful starting point. Thomas Nagels would tell you that the MVP “may not be the best tool for selecting a starting point for your innovation.” He has found that the Riskiest Assumption Test (RAT) may be a better alternative for making product decisions. The RAT is “the process of finding the riskiest assumptions in your (business) model and validating them. High risk assumptions have two traits: a high probability of being wrong and significant impact when they are.” (via @thomas_nagels)

The art of MVP testing

Quotes such as “Done is better than perfect; Don’t worry be crappy;” and “Fail fast and fail often” are good in sentiment, but can lead to undesirable results if taken too literally. You want a speedy build-measure-learn cycle, but you don’t want to produce something so crappy that you can’t learn anything from it. Jan Jones suggests that even if you practice automated testing religiously, you should still go through your product firsthand and check each feature to make sure it works.  (via @dynjo)

MVP Testing — how to drive traffic to your website

Eze Vidra and Jalin Somaiya gave a presentation to a group of 20 entrepreneurs at Launchpad about MVP Testing.  They wanted to help early-stage startups focus on their most immediate goal and optimize for it through testing and iteration while leveraging the basics of online marketing. They wanted to encourage startups to spend some time working with an MVP so that they can check their customer’s reaction and demand and avoid building features no one wants. The presentation is self-explanatory and compliments the Lean Startup methodology and customer development  which encourage you to validate, test and iterate.  (via @ediggs)

What we learned by testing our MVP on Medium

Paul Graham advises that you should “Make something people want.” Great advice, but how exactly can you do that. A minimum viable product can help you determine what people want, but sometimes you want to figure that out with as little work as possible, which often means not actually building a product. Mithun Madhusudan suggests that you should think of “an MVP as a hypothesis that you need to test and validate with a degree of statistical significance.” Which can be accomplished with zero lines of code.  To give you an idea of how to do that, Mithun shared the story of how his team tried to validate his product Cubeit and what they learned. (via @mythun)

Testing pricing and willingness to pay in the easiest possible way

Cory Zue created an MVP of his printable place card maker and tested it with Google Ads in order to try and kill his dream of creating a profitable product as fast as possible. Cory wanted to find out if he could get people to give him their email address to use his product. Based on the 20% of people who gave him their email address, his test was a success, sort of. He knew his site was worth an email address, but he didn’t know if it was worth actual dollars. Cory followed up his initial test with another one approached with the philosophy of trying to do as little work as possible to kill the dream as quickly as possible. Here’s Cory’s description of the process and what he learned from the results so far.  (via @czue)