Summary
Highlights
Eric Ries introduces his first presentation on the Minimum Viable Product, advocating for an open discussion and feedback. He stresses the importance of using the #LeanStartup hashtag for Twitter feedback, which helps him understand audience comprehension beyond mere entertainment. Ries's journey with startup ideas, initially met with skepticism, has evolved, indicating a growing recognition of Lean Startup principles.
Ries questions the fundamental reason for building products – to delight customers, attract many, and make money, not just to create 'quick and dirty' apps. He distinguishes between two main approaches: maximizing chances of success by adding numerous features (rational if you only have one chance) and 'release early, release often' (iterating quickly based on feedback). The MVP, he argues, is a hybrid, aiming to get just enough feedback to validate a long-term vision without iterating aimlessly.
The MVP is defined as the minimum set of features required to validate a vision with early adopters. Ries emphasizes that MVPs are often 'more minimum' than initially thought, sharing an anecdote where six months of development yielded less learning than a simple landing page. Early visionary customers are key; they can fill in gaps and provide crucial feedback, especially if they are willing to pay, offering a strong signal of product value. The goal is to achieve a big vision through small, iterative steps, requiring a commitment to continuous iteration and learning from pivots.
Ries highlights the fundamental Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop as central to the Lean Startup. The MVP operates across all three stages, minimizing the total time to complete the loop. He illustrates this by questioning what the absolute minimum is to get through one turn of the feedback loop quickly. This involves minimizing features to accelerate learning and failure, if necessary.
He shares a humorous and painful example from his past company, IMVU, where they spent two weeks developing 'Kerry and Bush avatars' for a presidential debate game. Despite their initial enthusiasm, the product generated zero conversions, proving it was a terrible idea. This highlights the importance of validating even seemingly brilliant ideas quickly and cheaply, perhaps through a simple landing page and AdWords, rather than investing significant development time.
Ries then offers a positive MVP story: he announced a Lean Startup workshop without any concrete plan, then created a SurveyMonkey questionnaire and a PayPal link to gauge interest and collect payments. Despite his personal anxiety and fear of failure, the workshop surprisingly sold out. This demonstrates that overcoming psychological barriers and taking small, actionable steps can lead to validation, often with minimal actual work compared to the mental anguish of doubt.
He discusses the organizational setup necessary for effective MVP implementation, advocating for separate 'problem teams' and 'solution teams'. The solution team focuses on improving the current product, while the problem team uses MVPs to constantly challenge existing hypotheses and discover new, more effective directions. This prevents endless feature addition and ensures the company is building something customers truly want.
Ries lists various MVP techniques: smoke testing (marketing a non-existent product), search engine marketing with a small budget to drive traffic and conversion, in-product split testing, paper prototypes for early design feedback, and customer discovery/validation techniques from Steve Blank’s 'Four Steps to the Epiphany'. He also mentions intentionally removing features (like the iPhone’s lack of copy-paste initially) to get faster feedback, even if it leads to initial criticism.
Ries identifies three fears that impede MVP adoption: the fear of false negatives (receiving negative feedback), the 'visionary complex' (believing customers don't know what they want), and being 'too busy to learn'. He argues that negative feedback is still valuable and that the goal of MVP is not to ask customers what they want, but to test real behavior. Although MVPs can feel like overhead, they ultimately save time and resources by preventing the development of products nobody wants.
A Q&A session addresses how MVP applies to services like massage therapy. Ries explains that the initial MVP for a service would be to test how to reach and attract customers, even before delivering the service itself. He also tackles how to interpret negative feedback, using Facebook redesigns as an example. He emphasizes that observed customer behavior changes are more important than initial emotional reactions, and that MVPs allow for more intelligent questioning by providing data and facts.
Ries discusses adapting MVP for companies with few customers versus established ones. New companies benefit from intimately knowing their small customer base, while established companies can create MVP contexts for subsets of customers. He also touches on identifying early adopters, acknowledging the 'tragic Greek play' nature of needing to embrace and then potentially reject them as the product scales. The key is to understand if early adopter feedback skews the product away from the mainstream vision and to constantly expose the MVP to mainstream customers for comparison.