Don’t lose time building something people don’t want!
By: Mehdi Sijelmassi
Tags: MVP, Product Management, Startup, Product, Minimum Viable Product

Start small and test the market

The concept of minimum viable product (MVP) is one of the most important concept when building a product. It has started to get a huge traction within the startup ecosystem, thanks to the book written by Eric Ries ‘The Lean Startup’. Since then, the concept of the MVP has been in the center of the debates because of the confusion it has created. Marty Cagan, one of the most respected product expert, explains very well the confusion around this concept.

The vast majority of times I meet a team that has been working hard to create an MVP I am able to convince them that they could have achieved the same learning in a fraction of the time and effort. They have spent literally months building an MVP when they could have had this same learning in days (…). Marty Cagan

This is what we try to achieve everyday at Cube with the entrepreneurs we work with. When we first met them, we try to understand the underlying problem they want to solve and we try to build together a first version that would fix it. Our role is to help them understand that building a product is a never ending process. The MVP aims at testing the demand and confirming the assumptions previously made during the Discovery phase. Even though the discovery was perfectly done, the most reliable proof of concept comes from the actual market. Quickly releasing a functional but very limited product will help you get this out in front of customers fast to get feedback, learn and improve. Defending the same idea of starting small, Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn once said : “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” The meaning behind this quote is pretty simple and straightforward. The entrepreneurs should be prioritizing one great use case for your product and ignoring everything else. At first, this can be hard to adopt because it might be seen as counterproductive but it is the most optimized strategy. By focusing on one main feature, you will served that basic user need and you will then be able to go further by adding new functionalities one at a time.

Designing and building fast will give you the opportunity to fail fast as well. This can sound tough but it is actually a great news. Indeed, by failing fast you will most likely have some time and money left to pivot and find the right Product Market Fit. This is what happened to many companies. For example, PayPal first started as a product allowing its users to split the note at the restaurant using Palm Pilots. After launching the product to the market, they quickly understood that what users wanted was a way to exchange money through email in order to facilitate their eBay transactions.

Another perfect example is Slack. Before having millions of users and being acquired by Salesforce, Slack originated with a much different premise. It all started by a video game that was focused on socialization and exploration. While the game was popular, it wasn’t profitable, so the team instead started investing resources into a new product: a chat app designed for coworkers.