Creating A Minimum Viable Product

"I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance”

David Ogilvy

Well researched products can and do still fail. It’s well known that many customers will turn up at focus groups or answer questionnaires telling organisations that they would buy a particular product – until it actually comes time to buy it. To really test whether a product is likely to be successful, Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, recommends launching with a Minimum Viable Product. 

Ries states that too many organisations begin with an idea for a product that they think they really want – but don’t really know. He recommends that a company should not bother wasting time and money building products when we don’t yet know if they’re going to be successful. Instead he suggests maximising learning – spend time testing and refining a minimum viable product to test if it’s worth it. That minimum viable product will usually have core features only, the minimum that allow the product to be deployed but no more. Organisations can then learn from these customers, if and how they;re using the product, what features they use and don’t etc. In this way, organsations can test the product hypothesis and reduce the chance of failure.

How does this work in practise? For websites, an organisation could build a website with only one page, perhaps with a link for "more information" or to "purchase". But instead of linking to a purchasing system at that point, the information is simply recorded by the organisation. That’s exactly what Eamonn Grant, local businessman did when he launched his business Photobooth.ie. The company specialises in bringing photo booths to weddings but at the time Eamonn started the business, the concept did not exist in Ireland. Instead of building the product without knowing if there was a real demand for it, Eammon instead built a website with a landing page and an order form. He then drove traffic to the site. Without yet even having a product, Eamonn had dozens of orders in the first few months of the website going live. So began to take bookings. Then...he went about building the product!

In the example above, Eamonn spent a few hours and a relatively small amount of money building a two page website and driving traffic there. Using the concept of minimum viable product, the full website or the physical product did not yet exist until Eamonn was absolutely sure he had a product that people wanted. Now he could build the product in confidence!