What is Minimum Viable Product and examples of MVP

After idea stage when you start working on your product development, let it be a software, hardware product or a service that you are offering, the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a strategy used for fast and quantitative market testing of a product or product feature, popularized by Eric Ries for web applications.

What is Minimum Viable Product / MVP ?

MVP is a strategy which you can use to increase your chances of success.

Here’s the road map. Go talk to some customers who might have a problem. Tell them your theory about how you believe they could solve their problem based on your solution. Get them to validate your hypothesis… you might actually be wrong in your assumptions.

Obtain a preliminary commitment from the customer to purchase your solution based on the validated assumptions. Go raise some funding based on that commitment. Build and release your prototype product on an incremental basis to your beta customer partner(people who have agreed upon your hypothesis). Obtain proof of concept and testimonials/feedback. Raise another round of “go to market” financing to start adding features and polish the packaging and presentation.

All you need to do is to figure out a way to connect to your early adapters, find out what they want from your product and how your product will help them.

Examples of MVP

1. Lets start with Eric Ries, the godfather of MVP, (Read his book on Lean Startups) asked his blog readers to pre-order his book before he had written a chapter or inked a book deal. He was able to feel confident in the market’s interest and got enormous leverage in pitching the book to publishers.
2. Dropbox ‘s Initial Idea was to make an extremely easy-to-use file sharing tool. The MVP was  a product demo video of what Dropbox looked like put on their website before they launch any product, and ask to signup in case they liked what the video demo’d. It helped the company attract a 75,000 wait-list within 24 hours. Based on the overwhelming response, they slowly allowed select users to begin using Dropbox as they continued to develop the product, the idea was conceived by Drew Houston on a bus to New York when he planned to do some coding during the 4 hour ride but left his USB drive at home. Now Over 100 million users, $250+ million in venture funding, a rumored $5 to $10 billion valuation, approximately $240 million of revenue in 2011
3. Google‘s initial idea was to download all internet on one computer and build a search around that. And as their MVP strategy they downloaded Stanford’s data/links, Developed PageRank for that. Added Linux search there after.