This article is more about "how to find out what an MVP might be".
> An MVP is not just a product with half of the features chopped out
Right, it's supposed to be the absolute core of what is necessary. This requires actually knowing what your customers want. It's perfectly OK to say "I don't know what our MVP should be" and then go and try and find out what it should be. But until you have something that is actually viable as a product then you don't have a MVP.
> You spend months figuring out how to launch custom mobile apps for your clients, only to find out that what a restaurant owner really wants is a mobile-optimized website that’s easy to find on Google.
So you added an extra feature that's unwanted and failed to add a required feature. This is neither minimum, nor viable.
> Or, after using all the latest technologies to build real-time chat, you find out that restaurant owners can barely deal with email and don’t want to sit at a computer all day.
Adding an extra feature nobody needs means you've not built a minimum product.
> Or, worst of all, you might find out that restaurant owners don’t want the hassle of dealing with technology and maintaining mobile apps and have no interest in using your product in the first place.
Then you haven't built a viable product.
> Therefore, the very first MVP could be a mockup of such a mobile app
Not really, since this isn't a viable product.
edit - I think this is a common issue, people taking terms and then bringing in what they "really mean". A "minimum viable product" is a very simple description. If what you have isn't a viable product, then I really do not understand the point of saying you've built a minimum viable product.
Okay, so an MVP is a product with the absolute minimal set of features necessary. How do you find that core of features? How do you determine which feature you will add (or test) next? How should you build it? Who should you put it in front of?
The advantage of this article is that it provides some answers for those questions. You should build the riskiest feature next. You should build it in the absolute fastest way that will let you have reasonable confidence in the result of your experiment. You should expect to throw out many versions before you find one that works.
It still leaves many questions unanswered - how do you decide what is the riskiest feature? Is there an easier way to test what you'd like to test? But at least it gets you closer to having an actionable plan to reliably figure out market needs.
It's great to have a concrete definition of what an MVP means, but if the result of that definition is that the process of building a startup is "Do you have an MVP?" "Nope." "Do you have an MVP?" "Nope." "Do you have an MVP?" etc, then so what?
So this is not just a semantic quibble, but actually supports the thrust of the article. While you're doing market research experiments, you should call them that. When you actually strike gold, then you have an MVP.
Now that it's become well-known, people are totally misunderstanding what it stands for and why it was coined in the first place. So sure, you can argue all you want about the term being misnamed, but that doesn't help you or anyone else actually understand what it's about or why it's useful. It's not about building a product - it's about turning the idea of "product" on its head, and realizing that the only "product" you need to "build" is the minimum possible thing that will get you feedback on whether you're on the right path.
I think that's it in a nutshell. I agree with you that the article is sloppy with the term "MVP", and should instead be calling these steps in the process "experiments". On the one hand, their point about multiple experiments being required is an important one. On the other, it really should be the case that when someone claims to have built an MVP, that they have a product and have solid evidence that it's viable. (I suppose one can never know for sure that it was absolutely minimal.)
So an experiment is not an MVP, but experiments are what one does having set out to build an MVP.
> This article is more about "how to find out what an MVP might be".
This sounds a bit tautological. An MVP is the smallest possible experiment to test your assumptions. To find out what that experiment should be, you have to do an experiment to test assumptions...
Also, one of the key ideas in the article is this is not something you do once to build a single MVP. It's a process you use over and over again to develop every aspect of your business, including the product, marketing strategy, software architecture, etc. For example, to build a large software system, you don't write 100,000 lines of code, then hit compile, and hope it works. Instead, you do it incrementally. Write a few lines of code, test them, make sure they work; write a few more lines of code, test them, make sure they work, and so on. Or to quote John Gall, "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."
> Adding an extra feature nobody needs means you've not built a minimum product.
This reminds me of the No true Scotsman fallacy [1].
"No MVP should have unnecessary features."
"But that successful company's MVP had all sorts of unnecessary features."
"Yes, but no true MVP should have unnecessary features."
This sort of critique isn't wrong, but it's not useful. How do you figure out which features are necessary and which ones aren't? The best way I've found to do that is to pick your riskiest assumption and to test it. And to do that over and over again, incrementally building up your product as you go. If you don't like the term MVP for that, I suppose that's fair, but then please suggest a better term to replace it.
I'm quite surprised by this, since to me there's little to disagree about. A "minimum viable product" seems like a very simple description to me.
> An MVP is the smallest possible experiment to test your assumptions.
I'm not sure where this is coming from, unless what you get out of it is a viable product, how is it an MVP?
I'm not saying you shouldn't experiment, or that you shouldn't build small things and try them out, but I see no reason to keep referring to something as a minimum viable product when it meets none of the three words.
> This reminds me of the No true Scotsman fallacy [1].
Again, I'm not really sure why what I've said seems so odd. If it's not the smallest viable product then how is it a minimum viable product? If it's not a viable product, again, it's not an MVP.
This is more like reading an article that says "A Scotsman doesn't need to be Scottish or even a person".
> This sort of critique isn't wrong, but it's not useful.
I feel it is, since I think the concept of an MVP is pretty important because at the end of it you have a viable product. If people are going to use the term MVP to describe proofs of concepts and mockups and a general process, then what term do you suggest should replace it for actually describing minimum viable products?
This is the point that IanCal and I are disagreeing with. An experiment should be called an experiment. What you get after you've done enough experiments to validate your assumptions is an MVP.
Maybe we need the abbreviation "MVPA" for "MVP Attempt".
By definition, a minimum viable product is always a product: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-...
The classic example of an MVP that Eric Ries uses is the explainer video Drew Houston created for DropBox before building the actual product [1]. The video worked as an MVP by helping Houston test his assumptions, but I don't think you could say the video itself was a "product."
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-prod...
The whole point of an MVP is to avoid spending time and other resources building stuff no one wants or the wrong solution to problems.
Therefore the article is a cheat sheet to lean thinking.
1. Draw a mockup, Table of content, vision statement
2. Talk to the target customer as often as possible to clarify every aspect of what you're building
3. If you want to sell your product, nothing says you're on the right path better than paying customers
4. You shouldn't stop validating decisions after you've hit some success eg. Facebook and Google conduct hundreds of thousands of micro experiments on live users to determine button placements, colour choice, increase sign up rate...
So in summary, don't drop the MVP mindset when you hit some level of success. Fail fast, and more importantly, fail often. Be a scientist.
While running a startup consultancy, the idea that MVP is a thing you make once before going on to make the 'real' product, was one of the two biggest misconceptions I saw. The other one was "lean means cheap".
I ended up realising that most startup resources explain these crucial things with misleading terms and a confusing way. Really, the whole process should mirror the scientific method - I started teaching my clients based on that, telling them to forget what they'd already heard. I'm writing a book at the moment about this (working title: The Rational Startup) but that's a subject for another HN submission :)
Unfortunately, it's easy to conflate feasibility with viability because anything that is infeasible is also nonviable: e.g. buying a ticket for last weeks lottery or tweeting demands at Charles de Gaulle. Fortunately, the Brikman's article does not fall into this confusion.
It's easier to determine what is feasible -- two app developers can build a restaurant app and put it in the app store -- than what is viable: build a restaurant app that people use. To be feasible, it only has to be technically possible for the developers to build an app. To be viable, it has to be useful enough that people use it.
One might say that viability is checking feasibility against non-technical goals. If the reason for building the app is to make money, feasibility is based on projected prices, costs, and sales. Viability about assessing those projections.
Brikman's position appears to be that a product is whatever can be put put in front of customers or potential customers. It's reasonably consistent with a world in which many things people tend to consider products are free or fundware. It's plausible.
But I can see why someone might choke on that, so YMMV.
Based on the definitions by writers who helped popularise the term, like Steve Blank and Eric Ries, I think this word should be clarified as "viable for the purpose of the entrepreneur". Then the definitions of MVP as a process or marketing experiment make more sense. A MVP does not need to be viable for the customer (e.g. a complete, but minimal product) , just as an experiment.
??
MVP is a tool to test an assumption:
Ask:
* What are you trying to learn with this particular MVP?
* What data are you collecting about your experiment?
* What determines success or failure of the experiment?
I am not sure you can figure out in advance what is your riskiest assumption (like to OP suggests), it's more likely to be obvious in hindsight.
