TL;DR: MVP is a version of a business model delivered with minimal resources. The ideal MVP does not exist, but the function is performed.
Author is watching a lot of startups that have been developing in stealth mode for months or even years and still can’t get to a state of readiness.
Startupeers built their first prototype and flew in search of an investor
Let it be said this way. A new business is always a big risk of failure. And the losses of failure must always be minimized.
The most obvious way to reduce the potential loss of a failed business is to reduce the investment to a minimum. In startup science there is a special term for this — Minimal Viable Product (MVP).
In a nutshell, Silicon Valley’s gurus articulates that the MVP’s mission is to find out for yourself and show others that the startup’s solution is needed by anyone at all. It is not required that someone is willing to pay for a solution. The only important thing is to understand that the problem, which the product solves, exists outside of the author’s head. Then, if the demand is confirmed, then lean and agile development methodologies with continuous ustomer development come into play.
In our work, we always practice the idea of MVP in its radical version. If a landing page or a series of interviews or business cards for a trade show are enough to test a hypothesis, we limit ourselves to such investments. And after confirmation of the hypothesis we invest in process automation.
It is important to understand that MVP does not oppose perfectionism, but is its ultimate possible implementation.
Here’s a helpful exercise: get all the stakeholders together and challenge them to remove or simplify all the functions. In the end, everything should come down to the main function that everyone must focus on.
This website is the manifestation of that idea. It presents only the most necessary information and services. Everything else in the way of technical debt is stored in the backlog and waits for its time for production or, on the contrary, for deletion.