[Day 23] Zero to MVP in 30 Days — Minimum Viable Service

I’m facing an uncomfortable situation. Time is getting tight and I’m faced with shipping an MVP. But I already know that the product I’ll deliver isn’t something I’m particularly proud of. It just doesn’t provide the great experience it could. But that’s good.

“If You’re Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late” — Reid Hoffman

Why an MVP?

• It has to provide value to the creators
• It has to provide value to the users

Let me break that down a little:

Valuable for Creators

The are some benefits to an MVP, including:

• Getting feedback …
• … to find product /market fit
• No speculation
• Build for your users, not for yourself
• …

And there are some fears:

• Will this harm my reputation?
• Will it turn off prospects? …

Valuable for users

The product does what it should, it offers some benefits. The better it does that, the higher the perceived value. 
When you create a unique product, this is very easy. Let’s say the calculator wasn’t invented yet and you created one that does basic mathematical operations. The UI is ugly (or even neutral 💅), but clear since there are so few features. People would love it. You might have a roadmap to the perfect calculator, using voice input, machine learning and much more, but that would take hundreds of years to develop, so please just go ahead and release that first version as soon as possible.

“Good design makes a product useful “— Dieter Rams

Defining the chasm

The product has to be good enough for the users to make sense. Keep in mind that your first users will be early adopters who crave your solution and will use it even if some details are not perfect. 
You also have to ask yourself what you want those users for. If it’s just for feedback, than they don’t even have to love your product enough to suggest it to their friends.

You don’t want growth from an MVP. It’s about fining Product / Market Fit. You can’t achieve that without a good product.

There is no one MVP

The MVP methodology doesn’t say that you should only have one MVP and some time later release version 1. We’re in the SaaS business after all.
This is especially important because people who use your initial version, probably won’t see enough value in it to pay for it. They might find it very useful, but if you’ve done it right, people might just not want to pay for it. That’s why you have to move step by step, to build trust and for people to know that it’ll someday be a fully fledged product.

What does that mean for Find Better Questions?

I am not afraid of shipping a rather bad product. I do find that you could potentially ruin your reputation with a really bad product. I’m not talking about my personal reputation, but if someone downloads the first version of Find Better Questions and dislikes it, she might never come back. But only few people will use that MVP and thus only a tiny portion of potential customers might be turned off. I just have to be transparent with what the product cannot do, so that people will know upfront that it will get better in the future. I won’t make empty promises. More on empty promises tomorrow.

The plan for tomorrow

The product could be useable tomorrow, but it’s only a desktop app so far. Next up is the infrastructure around it.

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