Being a StartUp is risky and most fail. Really. Truly. Most StartUps Fail.
And these are the ones that actually Start. Many potential StartUps don’t even try because the risk is too high and most people are seriously risk averse, for all sorts of reasons.
So what is an MVP and how does it help a StartUp?
Minimum Viable Product MVP “yields the highest return on investment for the lowest risk”. What does this mean? Ultimately the StartUp wants to have as much information about what the customer needs/ wants before they invest large amounts of resources: time, money, effort into their product/ service.
The first step is to really understand what is it that your customer wants? What do they need? What problem are they trying to solve?
Curiosity is the key here. Listening is really important. It’s all about the customer
Second is to really understand how much pain does this problem cause? and what are the true pain points?
I’ve been working with StartUps for almost 10 years and over and over I hear people talking about how much they love what they do, and how much they love making/ supplying what they offer. And that’s great to love what you do.
What’s SO much more important is that other people have to want what you offer.
So before you go quitting your job for your StartUp, set up your MVP.
Creating an MVP is a strategy designed to avoid building products that customers do not want. An MVP isn’t a full version of what you offer, it is a prototype that gives your customer an idea of how your product/ service solves their problem. It is a version of what your product or service can provide.
For example: Steve Blanks tells the story of engineers building a drone that would take photos of farmers crops and identify where the soil was dry and needed water, where the weeds were and other aspects of the crop that the engineers thought would be of use to the farmers.
It would have been easy for the engineers to have spent months (maybe years) developing the drone with special features and then taking them to the farmers to see if they would pay for them – what would happen if the farmer then said “no thanks”? Wasted effort.
So what they did was to use a remote control plane with a camera fitted to take sample photos and then went to talk to farmers to find out if this could be
1. a solution to their problem? and
2. a solution they would pay for?
The MVP is the smallest, least time intensive thing is that you can do or build that will provide you the information from your customers.
The MVP is an iterative process constantly modifying to meet the needs of the end-user
