When entering a new market, you don’t need a perfect product or service. All you need is a Minimum Viable Product which will evolve over time with you and your customers.
When entering their respective markets, many entrepreneurs (or even large, established firms) have a tendency to attempt to offer the “perfect” product or service to their customers. This is rooted in the desire to offer a perfect product or service of value to their customer that will stand up against competitors. While this makes sense intuitively, it may not make sense businesswise. The concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) may help you achieve a lot more in less time.
The MVP is the most basic iteration of a functional product or service. This website, for example, is an MVP. If you are reading this in the second half of 2020, then you will notice that the site is completely no-frills. It is just a basic website created with WordPress’s design tools with hardly any customization at all. Alternatively, if you’re reading this in the years that follow, then you will see the result of continuous improvement (kaizen) over the years.
This website gets the job done by giving a brief overview of who I am, a short reading list of books that I’ve compiled since going live, and a simple blog that is easy to navigate. Over time, however, this website will not look or function as it does now. There will be slight modifications based on both visitor recommendations and where I want to take it. Over time, these small modifications will have a large impact on the website and I have no doubt that it will look and function completely differently in five years than it does right now.
You do not need a perfectly polished final product. All you need is the minimum required to get the job done. Additional features and offerings will come later as you get feedback from your customers. You can also take your time adding new features that you may have planned from the beginning but weren’t able to incorporate in the first iteration.
A great example of a successful MVP is Dropbox. The first iteration of Dropbox was a web-based platform where you had to manually upload files using a personal computer. They have continually refined their product over the years by listening to their customers to find out what they want. Now, Dropbox integrates directly in Windows as its own folder which will seamlessly sync across mobile devices for easy access to your files regardless of where you are or what device you are using.
The bottom line is to get a basic version of your product or service out into your market that will begin generating both revenue and feedback. Your product will undergo continuous improvement over the years and will likely evolve into something better than you may have originally imagined!
The concept of the MVP is one that I was first introduced to in Eric Ries‘s 2011 book “The Lean Startup.” Since then, I’ve read about the MVP in the Harvard Business Review (here and here) and other business oriented websites.
As with other posts, this began as a talk with a friend who has a product and is interested in starting a business with it.
Christopher Padilla 
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