3 Awesome Minimum Viable Products (MVPs)

what are the greatest minimum viable product of all time I've absolutely no idea but here are three of my favorites hi this is Gary welcome to development that pays today we're going to take a look at three of my favorite examples of Minimum Viable products before diving in let's establish some ground rules for a proper MVP it's gotta be minimal it's got to be viable and it's gotta be eight actually no it doesn't have to be a product I'll be showing you a great example of a known product in a minute or two it has been argued that the word product in MVP is unhelpful Steve Cohen has made a strong case for using the word experiment instead and I have to say I agree but for now let's stick with the P and temporarily redefine it to premeditate it meaning that the MVP must be a deliberate attempt to learn about the market this rules out cases that look like MVPs in retrospect but were really full product that just happened to everyone surprise develop into something big let's get going starting at number three its buffer buffer as an application that makes it easy to share content on social media way back in the beginning they put these two pages on their website its test certainly but at this point not quite an MVP the next version was better they slaughtered this page in between the other two pages now visit us the website are not just saying this is interesting they're saying I want to buy this in fact there was nowhere for anyone to input credit card details or payment details of any kind but anyone who got this far was at least prepared to think about parting with their money as co-founder Joel gasoline said after this result and didn't hesitate to start building the first minimal version of the real functioning product minimal yup viable yup premeditated yes definitely this was definitely an experiment but first going on from this MVP to do really quite well current valuation is something close to four hundred million dollars moving on to number two is dropbox dropbox as I'm sure you know is a file synchronization service edit a file on your desktop and seconds later it's updated on all of your other devices rewind to the very early days of Dropbox the team entirely composed of techie types had the basic synchronization working that was easy but the hard bit was going to be to achieve the same trick on every platform Mac Windows Android iPhone etc etc given that the team was all technical types you'd have put your money on them diving straight in drew Houston the CEO did something surprising he made a video the video just three minutes long demonstrated the same process end-to-end everything but it was more than just a simple demo who's full of techy inner jokes designed to appeal to early adopters where you'll see in that not only are the changes from my Mac already here but if I may and it worked like a charm in Drew's words it drove hundreds of thousands of people to the website or PETA waiting lists went from 5,000 people to 75,000 people literally overnight it totally blew us away min all yes viable well wasn't a product that could be used but they've certainly was a product that could be demonstrated premeditated yep definitely an experiment Dropbox also went on to do quite well its current valuation stands somewhere between five and ten billion dollars it's time for my number one pick it's Zappos it's 1999 co-founder Nick Swinburne I hope I'm pronouncing that right wanted to build an online store for shoes but would people use it here so he went about finding out he popped down to his local shoe stores he went in there to each of the stores and he and I said you know he photograph pairs of shoes the photographs were uploaded to a super simple website if someone clicked on a button to buy a pair it would pop down to the store where he took the photo and buy the shoes what I love about this one is that behind the scenes there's pretty well zero infrastructure almost zero inventory and yet from the customers point of view everything appears to be perfectly in place minimal definitely viable well this time it's not even up for discussion definitely viol real customers real money changing hands real shoes being shipped premeditated yes of course Zappos went on to do quite well they were acquired by Amazon in 2009 for a cool 1.2 billion dollars but for Dropbox Chan's apples three of my favorite MVPs what do you think of my choices and you disagree with let me know in the comments down below I'd also like to hear about your favorites let me know in the comments and I'll feature the best ones in a future episode thank you very much for watching and I look forward to talking to you next time

Channel: Development That Pays

Views: 131,649

Rating: 4.9189687 out of 5

Keywords: Minimum Viable Product agile, Minimum Viable Product examples, Minimum Viable Product MVP, Buffer MVP, Dropbox MVP, Zappos MVP, minimum viable product definition, minimal viable product, minimum viable product, Development That Pays

Id: xPJoq_QVsY4

Length: 4min 54sec (294 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2016