The concept of ’Minimum Viable Product’ (MVP) on how to polish ideas is useful. An entreprener Eric Ries inntroduced the concept in his book ”Lean Startup”. The book is about the management method of startup companies.
Startup companies need to find customers who pay money before the funds run out. Suppose you have an idea of software which may profitable. If you spend all the money on the development of the software, your company go bankrupt when the idea is wrong. Therefore, it is important to make a small product with minimal cost, show the product to potential customers, and quickly verify whether they will pay the money.
Eric Ries expressed that it is important to quickly learn through the loop of construction, measurement and learning.
First, based on ideas, we will build products with minimal implementation. Second, we show it to the customer and measure the reaction. Third, we learn from the measurement data. Finally, we modify the idea based on the learning.
For example, if you make a product introduction page and accept a reservation for product purchase, you can see whether there are people who think that they want to buy. Dropbox of file synchronization software first made a 3 minute movie in order to verify whether customers will feel “file synchronization” valuable. This video became more talked about than anticipated, seen by hundreds of thousands of people, and the beta booking list increased by 70,000. By the data, they verified there are customers who need file synchronization.
Some people may mind that making products with minimal cost may result in poor quality. But Eric Ries says, “If you do not know who is the customer, you do not know what is quality.” The customers do not always think important what you think important. Even if customers tell us that it is poor quality, it will be an opportunity to know what customers value. *41
When transistor radio came out, vacuum tube radio was the mainstream in the world. Compared with the mainstream vacuum tube radio, the sound quality of the transistor radio was inferior. Some people who were making vacuum tube radios thought that “transistor radio with such poor sound quality can not spreaad”. But in reality, it spread over more than a vacuum tube radio in a few years. Customers feel value on they can carry it more than its sound quality.
Since lean startup is a methodology of venture management, the aim of realizing ideas is “to make the company survive by earning money” and what to verify is “whether money is paid”. What you should examine depends on what your idea is aiming for. For example, if you would like a lot of people to keep using the free software you created, you may want to verify “whether you have people to use” or “whether to continue using people who started using”. Dropbox’s movie type MVP has found that there are many people who start using it, but I can not verify whether they will continue to use or not. It will have been verified on another occasion. *42
*41: On the other hand, this argument by Eric Ries assumes that there are countless potential customers and that you can repeat the experiment as many times as you want. For example, in the case you have only one evaluator and you are trying to get a job by appealing your ability to that person, if you show a poor quality product, you can not get another chance. This is the difference between a situation where repeated experiments are possible and a situation where you can only try once. The methodology of experimental science presupposes a situation where repeated experiments are possible. If you can only make one attempt, you need to make hard decisions in the trade-off between your chances of being accepted and the effort you put into the appeal.
*42: The MVP in sports is the Most Valuable Player. So it’s often misunderstood that the V in Lean Startup MVP is “valuable”. No, it is “viable”. “Viable” is a word that means “capable of being done.” To make MVP means to create a minimal product that you can run experiments to learn. The expression “minimum valuable product” is an expression that the creator of product judge whether the product is valuable or not. It is wrong because it is the customer who judges whether the product is valuable or not.