Develop a Minimal Viable Product

Develop a minimal viable product to test your idea in the market.

Many founders spend too much time working on a product in isolation, without knowing whether there are actually any real customers for the product.

If you want to create a sustainable business, you must find out as quickly as possible whether there is any demand for your product.

The quickest and easiest way to get real-world customer feedback on your idea is to create a minimal version of the product. This minimal viable product (MVP) should be as simple as possible and should contain only what is needed to give the customers a realistic experience of how your product would work – just enough to draw useful feedback from them.

The MVP can be a simple bare-bones prototype of your product, or even a smoke test: pretend to sell a fake product.

Take the founders of Dropbox. They knew that developing their idea into a product would take a lot of time, so they chose a simple and creative way to validate their hypothesis that there was demand for a new and user-friendly data-synchronising service: they created a video presenting their idea.

The founders had assumed there was a demand for such a product, and they were right: within one night, 75,000 people had signed up to their waiting list, and the Dropbox team concluded they were on the right track. Thus, they could confidently start developing the actual product.

Similarly, every start-up should first find out whether there’s an actual demand for their product before they start building it.