A Minimal Viable Product that worksHow to take the first steps without wasting your time

Olga Pavlovsky @Lplatebigcheese

What are we going to talk about today?

You & the why

Get some inspiration

(a little about me, and my best guess at why I’m in front of you)

and then…

The best method I have found to date of testing whether your customers really will buy that thing you’re convinced is great.

What are you trying to do?

Your product / Your service

The centre of your company.

The thing you do best. The thing no one else does better than you.

For who? Your customers. YOUR customers. Not someone else’s.

Your product is you. Like your company is you.

And. Therefore.

Your product must be aligned with your vision and your aspirations.

Do the right thing (for you)

Take a look at your life - where do you really want it to go? • where do you want to live? • what kind of relationship do you want to have with your

customers? • do you want to be managing a company of 50 people?  or do

you want it to just be you? • what exactly is the innovation you’re passionate about?  How

does the product address the innovation best?

How important is this?

How does it fit into your business model?

And where does the MVP fit with this? (clue - it’s the flip side)

High level business models - some examples

For most things in life there are stereotypes

Lifestyle business (i.e. freelancer or home online business)

Services company (i.e. IT consultancy, carpenter, delivery company)

Product company (i.e. Codacy, Swatch, Innocent smoothis)

Charity / not for profit (i.e. Save the Children, The Brooke)

Retailer (i.e. IKEA, Amazon, ASOS)

Market place (i.e. ebay, AirBnB, Nakes Wines, Plenty of Fish)

Let’s discuss the pros, cons and examples of these

Some inspiration

Everything is possible

Marcus Frind, Founder of the dating website Plenty of Fish

Frind has set up his company so that doing everything else amounts to doing almost nothing at all. "I usually accomplish everything in the first hour," he says, before pausing for a moment to think this over. "Actually, in the first 10 or 15 minutes.”

Plenty of Fish sold in July 2015 to Match Group for $575 million in cash.

Decide what you want. Use the MVP to see if it stacks up

Your Minimal Viable Product is simply a tool to help you decide if the business that you have in mind will actually work.

Your goal is simple yet profound: decide upon what you are going to spend a chunk of your life.

It’s important to be very, very honest with yourself during this process.

You might be asking yourself:

Why should I listen to you?

Learned between then and now

Mindset and motivation matter most.

Your business partners matter a lot. But you can not change them. Be positive, but be prepared.

Be truly resourceful, be creative, never prejudge.

Your vision and your pitch are vital. They will get you the first successes, not to mention the future successes.

Back to the MVP

Your goals and the MVP process

1. Create something you can SHOW to people (create MVP1)

2. Get an OPINION on whether you have a business idea that solves a real problem that people will pay for (show MVP1)

3. Set the list of features which will get REAL DATA (plan MVP2)

4. Make money with your MVP (create and release MVP2)

Your non-goals

1. Waste time

2. Waste money

3. Fail for completely avoidable reasons because you are listening to your social conditioning, bad advice from people who don’t know what they’re talking about or just forgetting your goals.

Many books will tell you an MVP matter, and go into deep details. What I wasn't to share with you is a process that I’ve seen work.

Most common mistakes I see founders making at MVP phase

1. Spending time on creation of the product instead of doing one big thing they don’t like to do: selling

2. Communicating features and not the vision when they talk about the product

3. Getting defensive about problems people point out, not learning from feedback

Everything in life is a trade-off. The MVP is really easy to hide behind. The sales pitch is not easy to refine and deliver. But you must do both to succeed as fast as you can.

Remember: the goal of MVP1 is to gather OPINION

Success is a process Front of mind: the design lozenge

The best process I have see to date

Research 1. Industry research (benchmark) 2. User research Strategy 3. Value proposition Planning & implementation 4. User journeys 5. Moodboard 6. Design 7. Technical plan

1. Industry benchmark

What are all the alternatives? Where is the gap? Is it real?

2. User research

Who are your target clients/customer? Early adopters? What are their motivations? What is their top problem? Can you solve it?

3. Value PropositionWhat is the value proposition for your target users? Which one is the easiest to deliver and attracts the right people?

This is the best tool I have seen to help you do this

3. Value PropositionThis is now your vision, on paper.

Invest time in the pitch.

Go and tell everyone about it. Do it as soon as possible.

Listen to their feedback. Iterate.

Methodologies and guides

Customer Development - Steve Blank

(Ultra) Lean Startup - Eric Reis

Dream, Design, Surf - Marcelo Bravo

3. Value Proposition = features list

What does each feature of the product or service drive? Acquisition - Retention - Revenue - Remarkability

Refined feature listVALUE

PROPOSITION Specific to this

audience

GOALS to activate the value

proposition

LOCATION of user when needing your product’s help

to achieve goal

PROCESS What steps must user

take to achieve goal?

EXPERIENCE How can you make each of

those processes

really simple?

FEATURE What’s the

feature you’re going to build?

Acquisition Retention Revenue Remarkability #

Audience 1

(Name)

Goal 1

Device(s) in use:

Goal 2

Device(s) in use:

Goal 3

Device(s) in use:

3. Features list = refined features list

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter” - Hemingway, Cicero, Voltaire, Mark Twain and/or Blaise Pascal

4. User journeys

What do your users need to do to “get” the value proposition? Can you shorten and simplify this? What can users get in one click?

CATALOG | COLLECTED COVVERS

CATALOG | COLLECTED COVVERS

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Owner's view

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ADD INSIDE PAGES

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Visitor's view

5. Moodboard

Really useful, especially for helping you pitch your vision. Honestly, if done efficiently, this is not wasted time.

6. Graphic Design

Option 1: design the interfaces and make them work Sell the vision and help people imagine their problem is being solved

6. Graphic Design

For MVP1, graphic design should be as far as you go. For MVP2, design should be as simple as possible, but you should use a pro.

Option 2

Design a Brochure Use Hippoprint or MOO to print

Design a landing page with video, or a prototype Use Launchrock and YouTube

6. Graphic Design: tools for prototyping

There are literally hundreds of tools which can help you create sketches and wireframes which are “interactive”.

You need to choose one which matches your team capabilities and needs:

Ask: 1. Will I, or a qualified designer be using it? 2. Will I be doing this for the web or mobile? 3. Will I be branding it, or just telling a nice story? 4. Will the OPINIONS I gather from MVP1 help me decide to move onto

MPV2 where I gather real data by trying to sell people something?

Get out of the office and ask:

Do people really have the problem you’re convinced is there? How do they solve it now? Would they pay to solve it? How much would they pay to solve it? Observe: who will actually pay to solve it? How much?

Survey as many people as possible. Be honest with yourself about the results.

But remember: this is just OPINION

Now, go out and test MVP1 DO NOT go straight to MVP2

If all goes well, if you prove your assumptions through OPINION…

Then GO TO MVP2

7. Technical planThis is for MVP2 where you want to actually put something on the web or mobile to see if people will part with their time and cash.

You need to be aware of the following stack

Make the right choice given your confidence in the idea following MVP1, your team’s technical capabilities and financial circumstances

Product( (Shopify)

Super(fast Very(rigid

Framework((Ruby(on(Rails)

Speeds(you(up Flexible(for(a(defined(purpose

Language((Ruby)

Pretty(slow Completely(flexible

Remember our friend, the design lozenge

How much should you spend on MVPs?

MVP1: keep it to a few hundred pounds at most.

MVP2: try to keep it to one month of development, or maximum of two. [NB if you have a CTO or are really approaching this with a solid understanding of technology, the architecture will take more time. But I strongly recommend your first features take just a month or two to build).

Why should you keep the spend low? In my experience, two things usually happen: 1. You will throw the first product away 2. You will discover you could have done things much, much more simply than you did, and you’ll change a lot.

How much do real people spend?I have observed that there is a calculation that can be done to see if your MVP costs are aligned with your place in the product’s journey.

MVP cost = customer expectations + idea confidence + circumstances

£2,000 = (huge problem, low expectations) + (founder new to market) + (needs investment to continue building product)

£100,000 = (customers are CEOs of banks) + (founder has excellent connections) + (founder has cash to invest)

In both cases, it took about 12 months of full time work from day 1 for the businesses to be self-sufficient (i.e. allowing the founders to focus on them full time)

If you take two things away today

Make it this

And do what’s right for you

Thank you!

@Lplatebigcheese Olga Pavlovsky