Test Driving The Lean Startup Process
This evening I attended the fourth installment of the NYC Lean Startup Meetup where we discussed the concepts of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Fraser, Kareem, and Greg put together a great presentation about what a MVP is and opened up the discussion to the group.
Incase you don’t know, Eric Ries defines a MVP as follows:
The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Validated learning? What’s that? It’s the customer validation process where you make a hypothesis for your “product”, test it, collect data, and learn from your results to tune your understand of what your customers needs are.
At the Meetup we discussed some examples presented about what an MVP is, but at times there seemed to be some confusion about what the purpose the MVP was really supposed to do. The concept isn’t to just introduce a new product, but also and primarily to create something that allows you to collect data to validate your hypothesis with the minimum amount of effort (time, money, resources). With that data and your validated learning you build a new product that is (most likely) a derivative of your current MVP.
Since I’ve been very captivated by the concepts of Lean Startup, I wanted to give it a try. I have a product idea for a problem I’d like to solve for myself. However, I want to validate my assumptions about the customers who I believe would use my product.
My product idea is a social utility that allows people to manage their casual plans (such as getting together for drinks, attending movies, or meeting up at the gym).
My first hypothesis:
Users do not use twitter, facebook (statuses or events), or evite to plan causal events. Instead they use email, im/chat, and their phones (text or calling) to make plans.
My MVP is a simple survey that asked about what methods users used to communicate casual plans. You can view it here: http://bit.ly/43GUkf How is a survey an MVP? It is a product that helped me acquire data to validate my hypothesis.
As you can see from the chart above my MVP validated my hypothesis that email, texting, and chat were more likely to be used than facebook, twitter, or evite like services when making casual plans.
Granted I did not have a large sample size and by no means is my survey considered scientific, however it does allow me to identify emergent behavior of my potential customers.
With this data and observation I can apply this to my next MVP which will have another hypothesis (most likely related to email, chat, and texting) and allow me to collect data in which I can validate my hypothesis against. If my hypothesis is flawed, then I will look to why and reform a new hypothesis and try again.
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