Minimum Viable Product - #leanstartup

it's really very cool I want to thank you all in advance for being beta testers you don't know it yet but this is a first time this has slides I've put together on the Minimum Viable Product I've been looking for a venue to create the Minimum Viable Product about the Minimum Viable Product which is what this is and so I want to just encourage you especially with such an informal setting to really interrupt with questions and let's have a discussion about this concept so that I welcome your feedback get a sense for what makes sense what doesn't make sense what's necessary and not and as usual with these talks there's really only one ground rule which is that it please cell phones out please do Twitter while we're talking all I ask is use the lean startup hashtag this is really important because I get feedback from you if you want to give feedback that's great but also even if there's a notable concept they say hey that makes sense interested in tweeting about that it gives me a sense for what did people understand while I was talking and like was it just entertainment or was there actually some content of course what I strive for is some actual content so I'm Eric I want to really thank SlideShare and rich and KISSmetrics for putting mint together I'm really excited there was a time when I was going around Silicon Valley and talking about ideas that would become the lean startup and all I got was funny looks and I still get a lot of funny looks but now apparently there's at least a roomful of people who think there's something to it so this is really let me just say it's a really pleasant change from how it used to be so I assume everyone knows the blocks or lessons learned I'm Eric Ries on Twitter and really welcome your comments and thoughts so I always like to start with something really basic so I thought this time we'd ask a question why do we build products because most of us come from a product development background we kind of take it for granted that that's what we do is we build products and Steve like a number of you know where his work likes to say when people get confused they tend to look at their business card and do whatever it says and startups generate a lot of confusion and therefore a lot of looking at the business card and I know and my business card said VP of engineering or CTO when I got confused I said well I better build some technology today because that's that's what I do but I think of course to actually have any success and it start off we have to build that delight customers that hopefully attract many customers to us occasionally we try to make a lot of money and here as opposed to kind of the quick and dirty product that are just built to flip the Lean Startup is all about creating companies with a big vision where we actually want to change the world and do something significant because building cheap quick dirty apps is actually really easy you know that's all you aspire to you don't need any of this methodology that we've been talking about together so I'm gonna take it for granted that everyone who's interested in the Minimum Viable Product is interested in changing the world that certainly was my interest as an entrepreneur and what I thought I'd do is just take a couple slides and locate the idea the Minimum Viable Product even the greater methodology at the lean startup and show kind of how it relates to the other concepts that I and number other people have been writing about and then hopefully we can have some discussion so make sense so if you want to do these things there's kind of two possible approaches in my career I've always been torn between these two approaches the first is what I call maximizing chance of success if you have a big vision and you want to build a great product and change the world then the way to increase the odds that's that's going to happen is to build a product with as many features as you possibly can because each new feature that you add the theory goes well maybe you know they'll be they'll be that one extra customer who wouldn't use your product without that feature but that one extra feature makes them want to use it and so the more features you have the more likely you are to be successful and if you think about it if you kind of only get one swing with your startup this is a very rational strategy to say let's build the product right and a lot of people who you know come from an engineering or architecture or design background this is the way we approach products and of course the problem with that is that by increasing the batch size of our work to one gigantic huge batch we have kind of an all-or-nothing outcome and even worse we delay feedback until generally it's too late to do anything and so some people respond against that to take a different approach which is release early release often and a lot of people in the open-source world this is the kind of the mantra and I have certainly been there myself the idea here is okay if doing everything and all the features kind of the wrong approach let's try the exact opposite of that let's ship as quickly as possible and let's get as much feedback as we possibly can so what kind of put something out there who cares if it actually makes any sense we'll just listen to what people say and then we'll kind of keep responding to that feedback and iterate as quickly as possible and there's a lot of confusion out there because the Lean Startup we talk about having a big vision so some people think oh they're talking about maximize chance of success because of course we do want to increase the odds of success that's true but we also talk about continuous deployment and rapid releases and things that make people say oh they're just doing release early release often and what I wanted to kind of set up for you guys is this idea that the Minimum Viable Product is neither of these or maybe another way of looking at it is it's a hybrid of both the idea is that we want to take the minimum set of features that is necessary to get the early customers for a product to give us validation that our long term vision actually makes sense so with release early release often you can often iterate in a circle rank as you keep getting feedback they kind of turn you know your 3p Assateague people for their opinion you get 5 opinions and so you don't really know whether you're making progress and get very distracting very disorienting a lot of startups have been in that situation so we want to get feedback but we don't want to get as much feedback as possible that's actually not our goal our goal is to get only the feedback necessary to figure out are we on the right track or not and what's challenging about the Minimum Viable Product is that it's often a lot more minimum than you think so it's easy to convince yourself that in order to get feedback on a product we have to build a whole bunch of features that customers say are necessary but you know I know some of you heard me talk about in view you know we built a downloadable piece of software and we spent a lot of time figuring out what features the download had to have or not have and how much quality it should have and you know all that kind of stuff but we forgot the fact that in order to get people to use that product before we first had to convince them to download the product and when we finally shipped the product nobody downloaded what so we didn't actually learn anything about what customers wanted for any of the work that we had done beyond just the page that got people that said hey you should download this product after that nobody made it past so we actually got all the learning from that like three work that we did right at the end to like throw up a crappy landing page that was actually the minimum viable product for it we spent six months building a 3d avatar rendering system now she did not contribute to our learning about what customers would or wouldn't want so you know this is the basics of the Minimum Viable Product you got to believe that in the early days of a product early days of a startup only visionary customers what Steve might calls early evangelists or even going to give you the time of day those the only people who you're gonna get any feedback from anyway so let's just accept that that's true then minimum refers to what is the minimum amount of work we have to do to engage with those customers to start getting their feedback they have the ability because they're just as visionary as you are to fill in the gaps about what's missing so the performance might be bad the product might be buggy there might be all kinds of things missing but on the basis just of the vision of what you're selling they can make sense of it and since they're just as visionary as you are but I'm sorry they are just visionaries you are but they also feel the pain that you're trying to solve cutely but is they live with it every day so they're actually much more likely than you are to really understand whether the product works or not and of course we're not asking them what they think they want because of course a lot of customers don't know what they want what we're doing is showing them a concrete example of the product a prototype an early version a landing page sometimes just a paper prototype that gives them a chance to react against that product and of course even better if we can try to charge them money for that product then we can get a real signal for hey are we on the right track is there a problem that we're really solving here now and the idea here we'll be able to achieve a big vision but in small increments so I don't want anyone to come away from this evening thinking boy when I put this product out there and I get negative feedback that's it I either have to do what customers say or abandon my vision there are a lot of instances where you have to kind of keep doing the Minimum Viable Product over and over and over again before you finally get that positive signal doing what I call them lean startups pivots where we change just one element of the vision each time and that persistence is key to being an entrepreneur so don't anyone get me wrong but that's not part of the discipline way we want to build products with the MVP we just want to before it's too late and of course as soon as possible find out like are we completely crazy or are we on the right track and so it requires a commitment to iteration you can't just feel like we're gonna throw it out there and hope for the best and if it doesn't go exactly right you know give up that's not entrepreneurship I've shown this diagram a million times and I saw that Heaton actually has some posters for people to take home and they like of the Lean Startup fundamental feedback loop I just want to make sure everyone has seen this diagram because the MVP is one of the few tactics out there that operates at all three stages of this feedback loop simultaneously our goal in any start-up practice should be to minimize our total time for the loop right we have a set of ideas we translate those ideas into code or whatever our formal product is we see what happens when customers react to that and then we learn something for the next set of ideas most practices operate at one stage of this feedback loop and actually can be really challenging when we talk about ways to improve the efficiency of product development we have to be really careful oh we don't want to improve the efficiency of customer development product development but at the expense of learning now they don't want to add analytics if that's gonna impede our ability to learn or to build but a Minimum Viable Product is one of those things that allows us to get through the whole loop quickly and in fact one way to think about it if you have no product in the market today and you're asking yourself what is the Minimum Viable Product you think what is the absolute minimum I have to do to complete exactly one term through this feedback loop and since we're entrepreneurs you really have to work hard to minimize the amount of features we absolutely think that we need so I just want to talk through some quick examples I already mentioned that we built in view in six months and we actually at the time thought we were building a Minimum Viable Product because the previous company we had spent five years building the first version like five years of stealth R&D DeCosta than my forty million dollars to build and then we have put it out front of customers and discover and we made all kinds of tragic tragic mistakes it was way too like to do anything with it so we thought you know when we first sat down to do the Minimum Viable Product for in view I think we spent out a bunch of features that we thought would take two years we were really proud of ourselves and we had a series of meetings we said well okay we're very proud but what would it take to cut the amount of time to do this product in half so what would it look like if we did it with 12 mice and we made these incredibly painful feature cuts like all right maybe we can live without this case as an avatar based projects with avatars like having physics and walking around the room feature that if you actually never wound up building and then we would cut some other feature well maybe we can get you know just barely we could live without you know sound effects when you take a national job did that we got down to 12 months and then we did it again to get it down to 6 months and that was as far as we could go even though in retrospect if we kept going we might have realized wait a minute is a landing page a download button and we already would have failed so another way to think about it is how can you fail as quickly as possible so if it turns out that your product is no good we just find out as quickly as possible that there's no customers out there whatsoever and we learned our lesson a little bit this is 2004 remember when mu is new with election season this carry a V Bush and we had this brainstorm you know like contra has do one day I don't know who was wakes up in the morning ah a genius way for us to get a huge amount of exposure an insert in view into the mainstream discourse of our society we will create and wait for it's a great product ideas a series of Kerry and Bush avatars so you could have your very own presidential debate online with your friends which I'm never sure what I might get a big laugh from that product idea because I can't even tell you just how awesome it seemed if the moment you know something office that morning and said we are gonna build this thing and we were like Alex Alicia these visions of like salon.com was gonna say wow really witty take on presidency and then you know we were gonna have like all kinds of political reporters be like ah new Silicon Valley startup affecting the you know course of the election and all kinds of other nonsense and we were imagining people having these personal versions of the presidential debate and then posting the video of it online and kind of you know becoming like the YouTube sensation awesome so we really thought that's really cool and we said alright it'll only take us about two weeks to build the avatars necessary I do although like we all plumbing together so you can have your debate we thought that was really minimum viable product so we spent this is a company that have been around we've been in existence something about six months we were five people we had no money we spent two weeks of our lives building out that product that I just described and you already know where this is headed we put it out there and we sent it to our existing customers through that we had and we bought Adwords and we took all this advertising and thank God we didn't put out a press release but we did do a fair amount of marketing and our conversion rate of printable purchasing that product we had Christ it I think it a dollar ninety-nine so it'd be really affordable so we didn't want price to be a barrier we got exactly zero conversion I mean now talking about 0.5% 0.1% about exactly zero but this is always brought to anybody because actually it's a really bad idea no there's nobody in earth thinks this is cool but we hadn't bother to check that we were convinced we were right and so we were willing to invest it two weeks and so he said well it's probably the price that's the issue so we started giving it away for free we could not hey you gonna take this product I guess just a thoroughly horrendous idea again if you ask yourself alright he turned out to be a bad idea how could we have found out if it was a bad idea before we invested the two weeks in building it the answer again is really easy we could put up a landing page offering to sell people this product and we could have bought the st. edward's we were going to do anyway and driven people there and we could have measured the click-through rate on the button that said I want to buy this thing we wouldn't have done that test at the time because we were so worried about well what will we say on the second page you know we'll have to admit to people that we lied to them about having this thing or you know we had to have some got an error message or something sign up for mailing lists like we got hung up on the second step which as it turned out there was really no reason for us to do that nobody made it to step 2 they all died a step one so that's basically the the idea that I want you to take away from the room about how the product is look I don't mind product development and startups when we build products that only a few people like I occasionally you'll kill have that experience right you build a product you ship it and it's not as much of a success as you would like to have that doesn't bother me that much what really kills me are the products that nobody wants I mean think about it we invest time and energy and less people than the number of people required to build the product ever buy it those are results we can check out ahead time I don't care how visionary and like totally off the map box our idea is we can check it out with at least a few customers ahead of time to be like you know what I mean are we even remotely on the right planet with this product that's basically what the NPV is about and I just thought I'd share too quickly two positive examples of the Minimum Viable but actually working I don't know how many of you saw we started doing the series of workshops with O'Reilly around the Lean Startup concept the way that started was I was giving a talk at the web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco I think it was April 1st April Fool's Day a lot of people didn't believe it was really gonna be a talking started yeah but I really was going to and I was like all right I need to have something to sell to this audience because there's gonna be a lot of people coming to see this thing and have they always say when you're doing public speaking you should always be selling something I didn't have anything to sell it was really there were no Lean Startup product so I told people there was gonna be a workshop for the Lean Startup on a certain day there that it was nothing more than my just making that declaration in public and then I thought we'll all create a survey like you went on Survey Monkey it cost me 1995 great product by the way those haven't tried it and create a survey to ask people what would you like to see in a Lean Startup survey so that I would have a page like the link to from the talk I mean this was my thought process exactly how it works like I gotta have a URL to tell people who want the workshop go somewhere I'll send them to this survey and then at the end of the survey I thought well maybe there's some people who are in the survey had a lot questions about how much would you do willing to pay for a workshop and what should it be in all stuff and I thought are the last page of the survey you know Survey Monkey requires you to give them a URL where it's gonna send customers next I was trying to figure out what where do I want to send people that all right I'll create a PayPal link that allows people to pay money for the workshop and I'll send them there when they're done with the service my last page of the survey said something like there's going to be this sort of answer date here the topics and I remember writing this this is like six hours before I'm supposed to speak I'm like sitting there I don't know what are the topics because I wrote a bunch of topics that they would be able to at the workshop I did my best job to say what I thought it would be and I chose a price to charge for it that was way more than I thought anyone would ever be willing to pay to come you know time with me about the Lean Startup cuz I really didn't have an inkling yet of what this whole thing was gonna turn out to be and I put it up there and I got to tell you although I advocate Minimum Viable Product all the time it's a big part of my shtick it's easy to tell other people to do it it's actually really hard to do yourself I mean right because this is it's easy when I'm working with companies as a consultant it's not my baby it's not my vision so of course even like these features aren't needed cut cut cut like you know get it down to the minimum viable so this is a good example of me having to I was like I got to eat my own dog food or people on my blog are gonna comment call me a hypocrite I was really was thinking myself I really should've visualized the pain of not doing it because I was really embarrassed I was like God people are gonna say what you crazy person charging money for a workshop who are you to give a workshop I mean I had you want to believe all the objections I imagine people might have - am i doing this activity and of course I've been talking to publishers and media companies and people about well what does it take to do a conference and what it takes to do a workshop where people have told me all prep you have to do and you know how you have to be a very prestigious person there's all this these myths out there about what is required to do these kinds of activities so it really felt like us and I'm also defying the conventional wisdom and I mean I was basically I was ready to pee my pants anyway and because of a glitch in PayPal I didn't get the emails when people signed up people put down the deposit I got the first three okay three people I was like okay that's pretty good but I didn't get any more emails and I was totally devastated I thought oh I have you know utterly failed and I'm really embarrassed and people are gonna have to go do a follow-up survey to find out what it is that I did wrong and I took me a while to recover from that and I only happen to be setting up the next iteration when I checked my PayPal account discovered that we had sold out the whole workshop I just I think unbeknownst to me so I just I wanted at least tell you one success story of you know that whole exercise took me probably two hours of actual work and probably 50 hours of anguish and like mentally talking to myself about what I actually needed to do I spent way more time thinking about whether I should do the Minimum Viable Product then actually that's another just kind of tactical thing I'm gonna share a lot of Minimum Viable products are easier to do than to argue about so just think about as you're doing that if you could overcome your fear you know you can actually get this learning a lot of that work a lot more easily and I just decided I want to talk about this board example it's not so kind of just make sure everyone's seen this - this is the schematic diagram of front development and lean startup here we have customer development and agile development kind of put together in a whole company-wide feedback loop people vaguely familiar with that that concept I put up here because I want to remind you that it's important to have a separate problem team and solution team like there is no VP of Minimum Viable Product and it's you know it's not possible to do this kind of activity if startups are organized around functional departments so there's got to be a set of people in the company who are just every day working on making whatever your current product is better that's what we used to call engineering office in QA or at the solution team what's the current hypothesis and then every day let's continue to make that current version better those are people who are just who are trying to prove that the current hypothesis is correct Minimum Viable Product is that is one of the key techniques that should be used by the problem team there's a people in the company who are trying every day to prove that the current hypothesis about what customers were serving and what our product is is wrong you gotta have somebody who every day is trying to figure out what are we doing wrong what could a different hypothesis that might be more effective be and that's Rich's example it just was just amazing right again if all you do is solution team activity you can convince yourself for months on end can keep on adding features and just around that net one next feature it's gonna be success especially when that's what you're good at what's that said especially when that's what you're good at that's what you're used to getting positive feedback for that's what makes you get up in the morning like I'm gonna write code to that's why I got into this business in the first place and that's why I wanted to start at the top with why do we build products not so that we can feel good about our ability to build products that's that's too self referential we got to have some external reality that we're going back to on a regular basis that's what I want the problem team in startups to be doing there's a bunch of techniques I just sort of mentioned a couple these of all you know put these up on the blog at various times you know I talked about the smoke testing this is a big con Direct Marketing when you create a marketing campaign for a present exists yet I've written about search and developing on $5.00 a day where we just every day we spend 5 cents a click you know on a hundred people and bring 100 people a day to our website and then just that really focuses your mind on all right every day what do I have to do to convert more of those hundred people into customers so very simple you know am i improving that percentage every day or not in product split testing people interested in talking about from the mechanics of how to do split testing that something obviously written about a lot people prototypes for those from the design community if you've never done a paper prototype it's a very minimum viable product so you actually just create Photoshop mock-ups of what the product would look like and get an actual customer in your office and like walk them through what's gonna happen and just pay attention are their eyes glazing over they're like what the hell is this who are they saying something like when can I buy this product for God's sake don't let me leave without it if you've never had that response from a customer you can kind of not realize that that's possible that when you're telling an early adopter a true early evangelists what about a new product that's gonna solve a serious pain point from them that's the reaction that was my experience with the workshops for example customer discovery and validation everyone knows the four steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank the book about customer development the first two phases are really all about creating possibilities for product and then just I had this last one with just removing features and you know if you've heard everyone be like I can't believe they shipped the iPhone without copy-paste like how could it not have copy and paste that's the most essential feature ever and everyone who uses the iPhone first generation back before that copy and paste was like it's so annoying that it doesn't have copy paste but I love that one because by shipping the product without it they were able to be perfectly successful and there's a zillion features like that that even though they seem like they're really necessary and I knew that they would be embarrassed not to have really would have just gotten in the way of them getting the feedback sooner and last thing I just want to talk about three fears that prevent us from doing Minimum Viable Product cuz this actually doing it as easy like the mechanics of building these product is actually very easy it's a psychological problem it's a mental defect that we all have that causes us to build maximum product instead of minimum product so I just want to talk about three the first is the fear of the false negative I think this is actually the bit by far the most difficult one you don't really want feedback let's be honest okay I don't really want feedback like I have to remind myself and I give them these talks to tell people make sure you give me feedback because at the end of the day I don't really want it I want everyone to just think that I'm awesome and as I don't hear anything one way or the other it's easy to convince myself that you all think that yeah so like if I didn't ask for feedback it's not a problem if nobody gave me any what if I ask and I get a mixed bag you know I know some of you saw I did a survey recently using the KISSmetrics survey i/o tool which is another great MVP tool I did a survey of my Twitter followers to be like why are you following me what it is that you want and I got something like 150 responses all over the map of positive negative I only remember one response there was one anonymous troll who said something like you are a shameless self-promoter of content or something like that there's something about internet trolls that they can really hit you man vulnerability but the one thing that you're really worried about cuz of course I'm really stress about you know that with this whole thing startle thing like is it substantive is it actually helping people or is it just entertainment you know I don't mind entertaining you but that's really not and so that's all I remember I can remember anything else that anybody else said there's all kinds of positive a whole range of feedback but of course our minds latch onto the stuff that reinforces our feeders and so you gotta have an explicit agreement before you do a Minimum Viable Product that you're not going to go crazy with the feedback that you get if people say it's the worst idea ever and you're a complete idiot that doesn't actually mean that it's a bad idea the worst outcome for a Minimum Viable Product is like what we had at Indy nobody cares if you can get people to actually like yell at you and tell you you're a complete fool that's actually a very good response and means they actually you've hit on a nerve you've touched on something that they care about and conversely you can't be like super psyched because they say oh I just want feature XYZ that doesn't of course mean necessarily that you should just build every feature that people suggest because you know we all that can drive us crazy what I call a visionary complex like customers don't know what they want so what's the point of asking them I just think we cover this but remember our goal in a Minimum Viable Product is not to ask customers what they think they want that's just doing a focus group and you can get customers to say that they want basically anything what we want to do is test whether they actually want the thing that we're building the Minimum Viable Product around and then the third one this is this is my personal favorite too busy to learn so occasionally I get the response from people I'd love to do Minimum Viable Product but I'm too busy building my real product and so it will take longer if I do this in a series of pivots I'll waste a lot of time getting all this data and doing all this learning and so you know instead I'll just do my tunnel vision and keep building my product another version of this is how does it's like sometimes like people ask me at India how could you afford to do all that Lean Startup stuff like you must have had a lot of funding and I actually just want to really recognize that fear that you know somehow it's more expensive to spend time collecting feedback it's more expensive to build a good deployment system it's more expensive to invest in collecting data because if you only look at it from the point of view of product development itself that is how fast are we able to build products that's true a lot of this stuff is more expensive there's a lot of overhead associated with doing them with MVP but the point is to get us through that full feedback loop of build measure learn so that we get to the learning faster so from that point of view since the biggest form of waste in startups is building something that nobody wants it can be a huge time savings but ever really requires you to take that global view so anyway that's the Minimum Viable Product that's what I want to share with you thank you Jim you know all this information but yeah they're gonna be trying to figure out how can I bring my I still make money huh yeah well so there's two answers to that question the first is before anyone can experience service they have to find out about it and make a decision to engage with that service and so that's why was it the first Minimum Viable Product to test is that how are you gonna reach customers what are you gonna have to tell them to get them to be interested like a lot of issues when startups have to do with positioning and what kind of market type you're in to use deep blanks parlance you know are you in a new market when you are you're building something radically new that no one's ever heard of before which case you don't even have language to describe it to them versus are you an existing market where you have language to describe but people believe that the incumbent is a perfectly good or every segmented market which is a hybrid of the two so you can work through all those issues just in the marketing of the yeah built a landing page and so that would be there because that's a server again I that's right here yeah yeah I guess it was what you had said earlier I said it stands for an attorney yeah yeah that's true the other and then the second part of the answer is the but you got to find a way to deliver a version of the product cheaply and quickly so you know think about how could we deliver a version of this product that's not as good as the final thing that allows us to learn faster and collect data faster and for you know I've seen people who build like test kitchens for a restaurant you know actually not in a real restaurant space in order to find out you know what like to really test out their ideas about what kind of food people like I've seen people free I knew a startup that was a fitness company that was trying to figure out a new way of delivering and I'm a gym experience and they took over an office park where they had like an actual built a physical gym out and they had a set of early customers who subscribe to a special personal trainer program and it was a little odd those customers they had to drive to its office park instead of a normal retail space but that allowed them to do the experimentation massage therapy for example again pretty mental therapist and you need fun yeah anything else so from what you're talking about part of the product is whether it's going to be a webpage Flyers whatever is how are you going to guess right yeah the product did think about Minimum Viable Product it's not the product that's important it's the learning that's important so I talked about that validated learning about customer feedback loop that that's kind of the unit of progress for a start-up questions what do we have to do to get validated learning that is learning about customers which is backed up by some actual empirical data well there's nothing about into getting negative feedback that's bad I mean I think that that the Facebook redesign the first couple ones that did especially the only thing that made it not a Minimum Viable Product is that they rolled it out with a big bang launch to everybody and hope for the best I mean I think that would have been a clear case where you won't want to pilot it with a subset of customers to find out what their reaction would be ahead of time but it's not the their emotional reaction that matters so with a lot of product changes customers hate it because they're used to something before and they'll just be like ah you ask them do you like this new thing I mean especially early adopters when you make changes that make the product more accessible to the mainstream they hate that what matters is what's the change in customer behavior as a result of that change so I mean it like something like newsfeed for example you know had a huge outcry of customers who thought it was going to be a bad thing but you know Facebook had the data from almost day one it was dramatically improving engagement with the product so you know the numbers don't lie in that kind of situation and so you just have to have enough patience and perseverance to say we're willing to take enough time to get the feedback we really look at what the data says really look at all the sources of data and let it run over time you can't just you know when it gets hot put your hand on the stove you don't Minimum Viable Product will not answer those questions for you but it will allow you to ask more intelligent questions so once you have that once you have those facts then you can start to discuss what the problem is if customers don't behave in the way you do I mean my goal for a Minimum Viable Product for all of you is that when you're making prioritization or future decisions you can make intelligent decisions now if you make bad decisions because you have bad judgment I can't help you but at least I can give you facts in the room that will make it more likely that your decision will be correct does that make sense yeah yeah another related topic can you talk about your thoughts of the difference in Viable Product for company that's basically just starting we'd have nothing no customers on the radar and how you have you execute those sorts of ideas how do you have your star peace yeah so I actually the companies would they say a pathetically small number of customers as a huge advantage the awesome thing about having a pathetically small number of customers is you can get to know them really well I mean almost of the techniques that big companies use to do customer research surveys and you know in depth like analysis data mining and all that it like they do because they have too many customers to keep track of and therefore they have to do that stuff to try to make sense of all the information they have when you're just starting out your the advantage of really only having a small number of people that you need to talk to and the cool thing about having an established company especially we're taking a big risk ever time on the facebook you can recreate those experience that that context by creating about an MVP that only a subset of your customers are exposed to so that you can get back into that mentality which is I really want to understand how people respond to it you know that's why I think in-person interviews for MVPs generally better over survey is better over you know data mining split testing is kind of also is good it's awesome split testing and in person or on the phone interviews we have so much brain power dedicated to basically mind-reading so you can read my body language my tone of voice and really get a sense for not just what am I saying what am I thinking that's what we want to know when we look at the data for MVP way and our host yeah I mean that's that's exactly what we want to do so so a lot lot of companies have this kind of chicken-and-egg strategy issue I mean if you had it with our customers aren't their party developers their customers wanted content you know content developers who only want to sell where there's customers already so there's often these situations where you say well actually for my company to be successful I got to get like 10 different things to happen in sequence MVP doesn't just make that problem go away what we say and Jack we do a SlideShare is perfect what if you understand that that's the sequence that's gonna happen then all right what features do we absolutely need to get bloggers to start to upload presentations to SlideShare we know we're not going to get the people that want to kind of browse around and looking for validation those people don't have a severe enough problem to be our early adopters my guess is if you went back and looked at that very first version for bloggers I bet you there's at least one feature that none of them ever used that was designed for the mainstream audience that he didn't like could have lived without you could have shipped sooner if you you know if you knew then what you do now I don't know I wasn't there but I'm just imagining Oh what's up yeah good all right so that's that's exactly right we want to have you know this isn't a this is an art not science so it's not like I can sit here and say for any given product there is some calculate able optimal set all I can say is most entrepreneurs your instincts for what's the Minimum Viable Product are like 10 times off so you know maybe you're one of those rare on hers that has that kind of gut instinct for creating an MVP but just in case just check out whether it's possible that you could accomplish your strategy and learn something interesting with half the features and then you want to be really bold maybe try with half again and just imagine what would that look like for customers would they would they laugh at me that's great showing the product to customers when they laugh and say I can't believe you were dumb enough to ship this without feature X it's a great outcome because I know that feature X is pretty important and as soon as you get that data you'll immediately rationalize that feature X was always at the top of your fight begin with so you got to make sure you write this stuff down ahead of time so that you could notice when you're wrong otherwise human brain is very good after the fact rationalization well it's it's a really hard it's a really hard thing that there's just it's a fact of life with the technology lifecycle adoption curve that every successful product has to vote has to embrace and then reject its early adopters it's like a tragic Greek play you know it's not this isn't going to end well but it's what we have to go through it's a it's a side effect of the dynamics of technology adoption so the key thing is first of all in the beginning if technology kentucky type people are the only people that will use your product then embrace that back congratulations that anybody would use your product back that's great news and you can learn a lot from those people you just have to keep in mind what your longer-term vision is and if your long-term vision is to build a mainstream product then you have to be constantly alert for is the feedback I'm getting from these customers like skewing me too much towards what they want or you know is it going to prevent me from going to mainstream customers and the easiest way to check that out is to be regularly exposing your MVP to mainstream customers and have them tell you like for example if you have an early adopter community your early adopters should say is the easiest to use product they've ever used and your mainstream customers should be like this is so hard to use I don't even know where to start like that's a good sign that you're meeting the needs of your early adopters but you're gonna need to get much more usable for the mainstream market and then you got to ask yourself does the problem that these early adopters have are there other people out in the world who have a similar problem but slightly less severe right so or who are blocked from using this product by their abilities that's the classic thing when you have really technical technologically savvy early adopters like there's plenty people who would like to use Linux because they don't want to pay for their operating system but lack the technical sophistication if someone can build a version of Linux that they can use you know you'd be a huge start-up and you could take Linux out if the early adopter community is just so far no one's been able to actually do that so Richmond you want to do

Channel: Eric Ries

Views: 64,585

Rating: 4.9337749 out of 5

Keywords: startup, lean startup, mvp, product development, metrics

Id: E4ex0fejo8w

Length: 41min 33sec (2493 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2009