How To Create An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) - STEP BY STEP

picture this you're a startup founder with a product idea but no clue what to do next or maybe your next steps are to sit in your basement and build for months because that's what's comfortable for you by the end of this video I hope you'll have a clear picture of how to get from your idea to a minimum viable product in a way that doesn't require you to sit in your basement for 6 months guessing at what to build next and if you stick around till the end of this video I'm going to tell you about a pretty clever minimum viable product that was used to validate an idea for a company that later sold for more than a billion dollars your first question might be what is this MVP minimum viable product a minimum viable product is the minimum thing that you need to build to show to customers or to have customers use to validate your next hypothesis this does not have to be software and often it's not a simpler or final version of your final product the purpose of an MVP is to figure out if the problem that you're trying to solve is worth solving at all and if the approach that you're considering is headed in the right direction without building an MVP you're taking a lot of guesses if you've talked to potential customers and they tell you they need a problem solved you don't know how badly they really need that solved because people will accidentally lie to you or they'll tell you something to make you feel better and showing people mockups or asking them hey if I built this would it solve your problem it's just messy data in addition even surveying or doing customer interviews you never really know until you put something in front of a customer customer and you see how they react to it something that actually tries to solve their problem in a minimally viable way you might be wondering when should you build an MVP and usually it's when you're trying to solve a problem that you think exists but you're not quite sure if it's a desperate pain point or you're pretty convinced it's a paino hopefully you have some data to back that up through conversations or you've seen it firsthand at a at a workplace or heard someone complained about it and validated that with other folks but you're not quite sure about the right way to solve it the idea behind it in MVP is to spend the minimum amount of time to get to the point where you're getting data and information back from customers that aren't just conversations obviously talking to customers is important but that mvp is the next step of validation now if I were building a startup today and I knew there was a desperate paino and I had 10 people lined up to try my product right to try the solution that I was looking to build I would still actually build an MVP I would build the minimum viable product to validate that next step because the problem with most startup Founders is we're way too overconfident that we know what will work that we know it's a problem that we know how to solve it when realistically everything should kind of be a hypothesis until proven otherwise and that's something that an MVP can help you do and remember an MVP may not require any code and an MVP is usually not just a simplified version of what you imagine being the final solution in this video I'm going to talk about three different approaches to creating an MVP and the first one is one I call human automation some folks called this The Wizard of Oz approach based on the quote from Wizard of Oz pay no attention to the man behind the curtain in essence this is where you have a service that appears to be automated might appear to be software but in fact you're taking in an input and then you have folks on the back end that are doing work you have humans that are slicing videos or sorting and cataloging things and then returning with the response one example for this is what if I wanted to sell sales leads to freelance web developers and I was going to go crawl and scrape the internet to try to get these leads to hand to these Freelancers I could either build a huge scraping engine spend a lot of time doing that or I could literally have human beings maybe some virtual assistants in the Philippines or somewhere else that's relatively inexpensive I could have them crawling the internet and doing it manually and Gathering these into a Google sheet or a CSV now is that scalable is it profitable no very likely not but what you're doing is you're testing the hypothesis will anyone pay for this will people remain subscribed does this solve a desperate pain Point without going and spending 6 months in your basement building a scraper so that was human automation the second approach to building an MVP is to use no code and one example I can think of with no code instead of actually building out a full software product is an idea I've mentioned on this channel before it's an audio and video project management tool something that you might use to produce a podcast or produce videos on this YouTube channel and this is not the editing and the cataloging of the videos themselves or the audio files this is a project management tool that you could use to collaborate with an editor so there's a lot of create read update delete pointing to some files in a Dropbox file the editor does this sets it to a status of publish and then someone else puts it into WordPress and publishes it or puts it into YouTube so it's just a lot of flags that are being moved on and off and a lot of email notifications that are going out to people to let them know about the next step in the workflow 5 or 10 years ago if I told you go build that even go build an MVP you would probably fire up your text editor and start writing some python or writing some rails but these days with no code this type of thing where it's a pretty simple create read update delete workflow notification you can build that in no code and the reason I know is because we've done that my producer Ron here at microcom has built both a podcast and a YouTube production system all on top of air table and he's not a developer and he built a pretty robust system that we've used to produce hundreds of episodes of my podcast startups for the rest of us and hundreds of videos on this YouTube channel and the idea here is depending on the MVP you need to build sometimes human automation is the best approach sometimes no code is the best approach if you are going to go the no code approach the main platforms most people use I mean there are hundreds of no code tools but the major players in the space are of course bubble air table zappier and make and you'll find find that you can build pretty robust especially project management type Tools in these no code apps the third approach to building an MVP of course is full code right if you're a developer yourself and you want to spend a few months building something and that is the minimum viable way to do it you might need to break out the elbow grease and write some code now if you are not a developer the odd are stack against you I'm just going to be honest like finding a developer co-founder is probably the path that I would personally pursue if you eventually want to build a SAS start up you're probably going to want a co-founder hiring a developer or an agency it can work but realistically what I've tended to see is if you're not a developer you don't know how to evaluate a developer or an agency so you trust them when they say they can build great software most people don't build great products and so after 6 months or 12 months you have all this technical debt you have to start over rewrite it from scratch I've seen multiple non-technical Founders have to go through this and I I'm not saying don't do it I'm just saying the odds are stacked against you when building an MVP how do you know it's ready and it's usually when you believe it solves the minimum pain point that someone might be willing to pay for or at least might be willing to engage with you around maybe they're not willing to pay for it yet but it's it's the first link on the Chain so to speak you have to think about what can't you ship without what is the core feature or features that you need there are a lot of features that you don't need in an MVP even if you're building software you don't need billing you can run billing manually you can literally have people venmo you money sign up for a PayPal subscription give you a check send them a righte payments link you don't need to build billing code in order to have a minimum viable product you don't need to be able to do refunds you don't need password resets oftentimes you don't need delete buttons anywhere you can go manually delete things there are so many things that you can cut corners on in an MVP and still have a viable product no matter how I was building an MVP today whether it's human automation or no code or writing code I would want to get the scope of of the MVP into writing and I would want to have conversations with customers validating that this is going to solve a problem that they think is worth solving and in a way you think that they might want to pay for and then scope that out try to keep it small and build it out some people ask how long should an MVP take to build of course it depends some people can get an MVP out in a weekend you hear the great examples of launching a quick AI rapper that you can use to chat with your PDFs over a weekend that was probably an MVP other times it might take you a few months of nights and weekends to Cobble something together I think if you're spending more than I don't know two or three months putting an MVP together it depends on if you're working nights and weekends or if you're working full-time but by the time you get into the hundreds of hours building one you may either be tackling a problem that's too complex or you may be overbuilding your MVP in a minute I'm going to tell you about a really clever MVP that was used to validate a company that later sold for more than a billion dollars before I do that I want to invite you to microcom remote we're going to be focusing on early stage SAS sales it's happening March 12th and 13th and it's an online event it's really inexpensive ensive and will be super helpful for those who want to learn more about early stage sales we're going to have four Keynotes filled with practical tactical advice on how to improve your sales game and speakers include Rachel Leo of fuse inventory Craig KT of kastos Daniel ebear of sales MVP and Sam Howard who's going to focus on sales messaging after the keynote sessions we have founder by founder where you'll get to chat with other attendees you can get your tickets at microcom remote.com so the MVP I want to tell you about that I think is really clever is zaposlite market for selling shoes so the founder initially went to local shoe stores took pictures of their inventory and posted them online when a customer bought a pair he would purchase the shoes at full price from the store and ship them himself directly this approach validated the business model and consumer interest without the need for a huge upfront investment in inventory or complex e-commerce system so he took a no code and human automation approach to validating zapo it's a company that later sold to Amazon for $1.2 billion building an MVP is not the first step in building a SAS in fact there are seven things I think you should consider before your minimum viable product check out this next video to get a full list make sure you like And subscribe to get more content like this every week thanks for watching

Channel: MicroConf

Views: 18,134

Keywords: MicroConf, Saas, Minimum Viable Product, mvp saas, business model, minimum viable product explained, what is a minimum viable product, minimum viable product software development, building an mvp, customer development process, startup validation, startup validation process, saas validation, how to validate your product, validating your saas, validate saas idea, no code mvp, create an mvp, mvp business model, mvp business analysis

Id: YwEEV0wHnaA

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 10 2024