How To Define A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) For Growth

As noted earlier, a proper MVP means something quite specific. But just like an MVP helps accelerate product-market fit, there also are ways to get to an MVP itself faster and with less risk. Here are three approaches to try as you work towards developing an MVP.

Before building an MVP, test your promise and offer

You don’t even have to have a single line of code written to start down the path of creating an MVP. Create a landing page complete with compelling bullet points that sell people on your product’s features and mocked-up screenshots that show them your vision. You might also want to create a video that narrates your screenshots and explains what problem your product will solve.

Include a sign-up field where visitors can add their email addresses to your list. You could even list different pricing plan options and ask people to choose the one that interests them, which will help you understand what they want from your product.

Create an AdWords campaign to drive people to the landing page, so you know which search keywords are creating the most traffic. You might be surprised by the results.

These preliminary steps won’t take the place on an actual MVP, but they can help determine if developing an MVP is worth pursuing.

Use a manual process to deliver your product or service

The trick with this approach is to give the illusion that you’re offering a fully functional experience even when you’re not. As long as you’re giving customers what they paid for, it doesn’t matter if you’re using a clunky process behind the scenes.

For example, when Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn hit on the idea of selling shoes online, which seemed outlandish in 1999, he first tested his concept by photographing shoes on store shelves and listing them for sale on his site. When someone bought a pair, he purchased them from the store and shipped them.

While that wasn’t a viable long-term plan, that simple idea allowed Swinmurn to see if he was correct in his assumption that people would buy shoes on the Internet without trying them on first. It turned out he was right. And as an added bonus, he didn’t have to invest heavily in warehouse stock and risk getting stuck with a lot of unsold shoes.

Use existing apps and services to approximate the experience

There are plenty of ways to use modern technology to create a process that you can later refine with unique software development. You can use existing tools to essentially develop a demo without sinking a lot of money into programming resources.

For example, Groupon started as a WordPress site where founder Andrew Mason and his small staff published deals as blog posts. They used an AppleScript to generate a PDF of a coupon that they emailed to everyone who had claimed a deal. It was a clunky way to operate, but it proved that the concept worked.