Building a product is a process and not an event. You build an MVP in iterations. Not testing your ideas is a quick way to fail and that is where pretotypes, prototypes, and MVPs come in.The term pretotype was coined by Google’s first director of engineering, Alberto Savoia. This is the most stripped-down version of your product to validate interest from the market. Basically, you are trying to answer the question, if we build it, will they buy it? In many cases, a pretotype is just a landing page. You may have heard of the popular stock trading app Robinhood. Before actually developing their app, they made a very quick and simple landing page saying zero commission stock trading. Get early access. It had a field to enter your email address and a signup button, that’s it. They got 10,000 signups on the first day and 50,000 signups in the first week. This greatly validated for Robinhood founders that if they build this app, the users will come.
A prototype is still a stripped-down version of your product to validate some things, but it has more details than a pretotype. Once you validate that people would be interested in your product, you create a prototype to test if what you’re building meets customer expectations as well as to validate its feasibility with engineers. Feasibility basically means can your product actually be built and work as expected? Considering the case of a restaurant, your pretotype is a basic website that tracked the number of page visitors. So your prototype could additionally have a sample menu on your website and track which foods people view more often. You could also offer the most viewed menu items for free to some people in exchange for feedback. How can you validate if your product would meet customer expectations and if it’s feasible to build such a prototype? This leads to the MVP.
An MVP is still a pretty scrappyversion of your product, but it has more details than the prototype. An MVP needs to create enough value that people will pay to use it or whatever the equivalent of paying is. In your MVP for a delivery restaurant, you would actually need to deliver food to paying customers. Though remember that you should try to build as little as possible, so you could use a third-party service for helping you with delivery and maybe even cooking. What is the minimum viable product you need to deliver that would generate enough value for your user and, ideally, they would pay you for it? Now that you understand who you’re solving for, what their needs and pain points are, you probably have some solutions in mind. You have this ideal scenario in your head that would solve all of their problems and make them really, really happy, but you have to start small. You need to first create an MVP, also known as the minimum viable product, for your solutions. This would be the feature set that you have prioritized as the most important for your product. So what exactly is an MVP?
The MVP 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. You need an MVP in order to validate your idea and get some feedback from your users. Is that something they would use? Is there even a product market fit for this? How can you not break your bank while getting these learnings? Well, you need to create a product that’s not polished at all. A product that has some very, very basic functionality. Let’s take, for example, a car. If you want to launch, let’s say a smart car for your users, you should not go through the trouble of producing a fully functional self-driving car just to see if users would be interested in purchasing it. That would be a total waste of time and resources. You should, however, start small. Your MVP in this case is not just creating a wheel or two wheels. Your MVP is the minimum version of the car that works. Let’s imagine a little skateboard, let’s say. Then, as you gain learnings and validation from your users, you can start building on top of it and add a steering wheel, then proceed to making it a bicycle, a motorcycle, all the way until it’s a car that self drives. For every iteration, there are lots of reiterations where you refine the feature set, and your final product may be completely different than what you originally had in mind. And that’s okay. It’s going to be based off the learnings received from testing. Here are some examples of MVPs by apps that you use very often. Airbnb, Airbnb is a San Francisco company which initially chose to target the audience of Craigslist. They wanted to provide an option for homeowners to automatically post to Craigslist. And that’s how Airbnb reached lots and lots of prospective users. They eventually created their own platform, and now they are the massive, massive company that you know. Amazon, if a customer ordered a book, Amazon would buy it straight from the distributor and ship it to them. Iteration after iteration followed, and over the years, Amazon started to sell more products, they bought warehouses, and personalized their website for each visitor. Now they’ve added all sorts of different products for their users.
Going on to create an MVP means that you have already identified the problem space, your user segments, the use cases you want to work on, and a roadmap that solves your user’s pain points. You probably also have an MVP in mind and are ready to work with your engineering team in order to develop it.
Remember, MVP is the minimum viable product.
Banji is a Product Consultant and a Lead Product Consultant with 3Line Card Management. He mentors, tutors and consults on Product Management.
Banji Oyetunji
Product Management Consultant
banoye818645@gmail.com
