4 questions to answer when speccing out your MVP
Every startup is different. They are usually addressing different problems, focused on different sets of people, and have their own version of what it means to be super successful.
However, although each startup’s product might be a different beast entirely, there are a few important things that apply irrespective of whether you’re building a babysitting app for working parents or building an enterprise product for a construction company. These are four questions I believe every startup team should answer as they prepare to take their product to the market.
Who are your first 100 users?
Do you have a clear picture of them? How do you know they are your users? And how are you sure?
Finding a niche is always better than fishing for an audience.
Better to design for a handful of users that love your product than to try and build a product for a general audience that merely just likes your product.
Peter Thiel, Co-founder Paypal & now Founder, Palantir.
I’ve seen many first-time founders that reach out to me approach their product as a general solution that the entire market needs. Sadly, this is hardly ever the case. A great rule of thumb is to find a niche, even if just a small subset of your potential users, that are most affected or would be most enthusiastic about using your product. It’s a lot harder to learn from your customers when they don’t have a problem to play with.
Taking the time to define who those ideal first users are can be time-consuming, but is always a deeply rewarding process because it helps the whole team get a clearer vision of your product, why it would be different, and why those people are the best segment to build for first.
Without this first group of people, it would be hard to fully understand what features to start with (more on this in the next point). This group would also be your designer’s go-to squad in researching behavior, testing prototypes and at the very end, testing the final version of your first product.
Starting with a niche and inviting them into the building process also gives them a sense of ownership of the product that is released. And organic publicity is always a good thing.
The problem with Silicon Valley is when you build an app you are expected to make the app go viral and reach millions of people. This is the worst way to think about it — it’s much better to get 100 people to love you. There was no way we could get 1M people on Airbnb, but we could get 100 people to love us. This is when we decided to do things that wouldn’t scale. Getting 100 people to love you is hard — getting people to like you is much easier than getting people to love you.
Brian Chesky, CEO & Co-founder, Airbnb
What is the major thing you’re solving for?
The result of taking the time to define your first set of users and their pinpoints and where your product fits in streamlines the product strategy and starts highlighting your value proposition.
What are the most pressing pain points of your users? And what are the three or two major features that you need to have in the product to help these set of users achieve their most pressing goals? What are the ancillary features that need to be added to give your product a rounded experience?
Anything more would be too much and would just increase your time-to-market.
In true iterative fashion these features will be refined along the design process by bringing the users into the process early to interview, test out the prototype and give feedback, so you end up with an MVP that doesn’t just offer the needed functionality, but also incorporates a good level of delight.
Products that target a large market don’t usually start by boiling the ocean. They build incrementally after finding a hugely valuable solution to a single pain point. It’s too easy to look at a company after it’s scaled and believe the opposite — that they started with it all.
Hiten Shah, Co-founder, Crazy Egg
How will it work behind the scenes?
I first heard about the Workshop-Storefront analogy from a talk Brad Frost gave on building and managing design systems, and it goes like this:
Every jewel shop has two sides: there’s the storefront where we see the jewelry all laid out nicely in clean transparent show glasses, with nice (or snobby) shop attendants to talk us through what kind of ring or necklace we want to get. And then usually on the other side of a door behind the counter, there’s a workshop where all the grunt work is being done to create the things we see in the store.
It’s sometimes possible for non-technical founders to become so occupied with the vision of the product the users will see that they forget to give much thought to the technology that would keep the product working.
“Design is only as good as the underlying technology”, as one of the grandmasters of design, Dieter Rams posits in his 10 laws of good design.
Are there existing APIs to build your MVP or will your team need to design custom APIs? Is the product a two-way product that needs constant input and customisation from the side of the business or can it be hardcoded? Or do certain processes need to be automated and purely governed by backend logic?
Many of the big-name startups eventually had to overhaul their tech stack after the product was out in the market so this is not to say you should have the technicals figured out end to end. However, having a sense of the tech & processes required to create the MVP would help inform the designs and ensure your designs don’t end up in Hand-off limbo.
The storefront doesn’t work without the workshop.
What do you need to measure?
What do you need to measure to give you informed updates post-MVP?
Now that you are clear on your MVP, your tech stack, and the back office processes required to keep your product running, the final step is deciding on analytics.
What features do you need to track? What user actions are going to be solid indicators of usage? What do you need to have visibility over to address before it becomes a big problem in-app?
And what are your users, the people you’re solving for, saying about what you have put out in the world?
Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and everyday plot the number of users. You’ll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you’ll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you’ll start to do more of that.
Corollary: be careful what you measure.
Paul Graham, Co-founder, Y Combinator
Bringing a product to market is always an intense, amazing process; and a real learning experience, irrespective of how the product is received by the market. I’ve learnt that keeping these things in mind at the start and throughout the creation of any product will strongly help ensure that the product is starting on its best foot.
Because at the end of the day (and the sprints) the joy of designers, developers and founders alike, is to see their product out in the market, impacting people’s lives.
