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Imagine looking out at your classroom, and every student is talking and typing furiously. It's noisy. Students are learning together and teaching each other.

There's a buzz of nervousness and excitement!

This is by far, one of Justin and my favorite in-class experiences because "60 Minute MVP" is engaging, fun, and fully-immersive, while teaching critical aspects of the entrepreneurial mindset.

Your students are going to build, and launch, an MVP in 60 minutes... with no technical expertise!

If fact, during this hour, your students will build...

A Landing Page

A simple website that describes the problem they're solving to the customers they want to serve.

An Explainer Video

A quick video that hints how their solution will solve the problem.

And a Currency Test...

...to validate demand for their product!

Your students will learn how to use a service called Celery to take pre-orders for their products to demonstrate real demand, without them actually having to charge money/store credit card information/etc.

For example:

And they'll do it all, in an hour.

What are Landing Page MVPs?

Over the course of an hour, your students will create a landing page (a simple, single-page website) that:

1. Tells their customers the problem their team is solving,

2. Uses a video to demonstrate how, the team will solve the problem and

3. Asks for some form of "currency" from their customers to validate demand.

You can incorporate this exercise into one class period in your syllabus; push your students to complete every step within an hour. They can tweak things later, the important thing is that they don't spend a ton of time trying to get everything perfect the first time around. As they will find later on, doing that for every experiment wastes a lot of time.

It's important to note, for this exercise:

They'll Learn More in 60 Minutes

...than they will in 6 hours of lectures:

1. The true meaning of MVP. They will learn exactly how "minimum" a minimum viable product should be. MVP doesn't mean "beta" - it means making least amount of investment possible, to test a business model's riskiest assumption.

2. How much they can accomplish when they work as a team. By dividing and conquering, your students will be astounded at how much they can collectively accomplish in one hour.

3. How many great, free tools exist for entrepreneurs. The internet is a crowded place, so we want to show them that there are free tools out there to help them develop skills they don't yet possess.

4. The upside of deadlines. Our students don't usually work under tight deadlines, but they will soon! We want to show them how tight deadlines push them to get everything done, and give them a positive experience executing under tight deadlines.

5. It is easier to launch a product than they thought. Most of our students are overwhelmed at the idea of launching a product, because their assumptions are wrong. We want to correct those assumptions so they believe in their ability to launch.

6. That the easiest thing about building a business is launching the product. In a future post, we will explain that the most difficult part of launching is actually the testing and validation. Getting something into the world is quite easy, which your students will understand after this experience.

Most importantly, they will learn...

When it comes to MVPs, done is better than perfect.

Your Job in the Class

You have an important role during this exercise. While we've documented all of the instructions your students need to follow (see the lesson plan for details), you'll need to be the chief cheerleader, time-keeper and discussion leader.

Here's what that entails:

1. Give your students the instructional videos. We've recorded step-by-step videos for your student teams to follow when creating their MVPs. Links to the videos and instructions are provided in the lesson plan below.

2. Play music. Ask them what music gets them pumped, and then play that. Create an energetic, intense, exciting environment for the students.

3. Keep shouting how little time they have left. Create a sense of urgency; don't write time on the board. Don't announce it in your normal tone. Shout it, wave your hands; stress how important it is that something get launched, even if it's not the perfect something. It is likely your students will want to focus on minor technical or design details. Because the goal is to execute in 60 minutes, you need to refocus your students on that goal and steer them away from their inclination toward perfection. Remind them that:

"Done is better than perfect."

1. Celebrate the hell out of each MVP as it launches. Show each team's MVP on the screen, and congratulate them on the incredible things they accomplished in 60 minutes.

2. Host a discussion with your students about what it was like to build an MVP in 60 minutes. You'll find your students reflect most, if not all, of the learning objectives listed above.

Note: when they step out of their comfort zone, they'll get the most out of this exercise.

Full Class Engagement

If you're looking for an immersive exercise that activates your class, complete with a chaotic, noisy, high pressure environment, that teaches real entrepreneurial principles, give "60 Minute MVP" a shot.

Justin and I both love it. We think you, and your students, will will too 🙂

Complete details, including all the instructions for you, and videos for your students are in the lesson plan below.

Get the "60 Minute MVP" Lesson Plan

We've created a detailed lesson plan for the "60 Minute MVP" exercise walk you, and your students through the process, step-by-step.

It's free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers. Please feel free to share it.

All we ask is that you leave us some feedback on it in the comments below so we can improve it!

What's Next?

In an upcoming post, we will share a companion exercise to the "60 Minute MVP" exercise. This will help students understand why it is critical to engage customers prior to launching!

Subscribe here to get our next classroom resource in your inbox.

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Exercise: 60 Minute MVP - Teaching Entrepreneurship

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Imagine looking out at your classroom, and every student is talking and typing furiously. It's noisy. Students are learning together and teaching each other. There's a buzz of nervousness and excitement! This is by far, one of Justin and my favorite in-class experiences because "60 Minute MVP" is engaging, fun, and fully-immersive, while teaching critical aspects of the entrepreneurial mindset.

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Minimum Viable Product (MVP) development Services

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e-Zest a leading technology partner for startups provides minimum viable product development services, Got a product idea? Meet our experts team of solution consultant and architects for product consulting.

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Landing pages exist to serve one purpose: getting website visitors to convert to the next stage in the buying journey. Although their purpose is simple enough in theory, actually designing a successful landing page requires some detailed planning and creative testing.

Regardless of what your business is selling or the conversion action you hope to instigate, it's helpful to get inspired by seeing what other great landing pages look like. And because there's no one "right" way of doing a landing page, you'll want to check out examples from lots of different industries for different stages of the buying process.

Want to get inspired? Check out the great landing page examples below.

Disclaimer: I don't have access to the analytics for each of these landing pages, so I can't tell you specifically how well they convert visitors, contacts, leads, and customers. But many of them do follow best practices while also implementing a few new experiments that could give you ideas for your own landing pages.

12 Great Examples of Landing Page Design

We love that on Lyft's landing page, they zero in on their drivers' main motivation: earning money easily.

We also love that, in addition to the "Apply Now" form, drivers can type their city and the number of hours they might drive for Lyft in a week to calculate how much they'd make. When visitors fill out that information and press "Calculate," they aren't taken to a new page. Instead, they see a dollar amount followed by a new call-to-action button to "Apply Now" (which, once clicked, takes drivers up to the form).

By offering these two conversion paths, they're able to address two different types of people in the conversion path: those who are ready to make the decision now and those who need a little more information before they convert.

Okay, so the whole idea of having a professional wingman to help you find dates and a meaningful relationship is already pretty cool. But when you're faced with the prospect of hiring one, it also raises questions. How does it work? How much does it cost? Is this really going to help me?

That's why we love this landing page for Thomas Edwards, the original Professional Wingman himself, which outlines exactly what a complimentary coaching session is going to achieve. Plus, it's clear that it's complimentary, thanks to the boldly-colored call-to-action button above the fold.

Once you click that button, you aren't taken to a new page. Instead, an interstitial form appears right there. And while it does request a lot of information -- some of it a bit personal -- it also sends the message that The Professional Wingman is going to take this seriously, but only if you do, too.

This landing page design has it all. It's visually appealing and interactive, offers scannable yet descriptive headers about Muck Rack's services, and uses quotes from industry professionals as social proof. Plus, the page is intuitive and easy to navigate.

The cool part about this landing page is that it can appeal to both of Muck Rack's audiences. The top of the page is split into two, featuring their two different services side by side. Once a visitor moves his or her mouse over either of the "find journalists" or the "build free portfolio" CTAs, a very simple form appears -- and that's important, so as not to distract the user from the task at hand.

There are a few things that make this Cigital landing page work. It has simple and relevant imagery. The headline is straightforward and the description of the ebook informs viewers of the specific value they will get by downloading it. There is only one call-to-action -- "READ THE EBOOK" -- that stands out on the page thanks to a bright yellow CTA button.

The only thing we'd change about this landing page is that we'd remove the navigation bar at the top. They tend to distract visitors and lead them away from the intended action. Not only is this a landing page design best practice, but we've also conducted A/B tests that've shown removing navigation links from landing pages increases conversion rates.

The hard part about using your homepage as a landing page is that you have to cater to several different types of audiences. But Khan Academy's homepage does that very well. This page is clearly designed for three different types of visitors: those who want to learn something, those who want to teach, and parents who are interested in using Khan Academy for their kids. Plus, how motivational is the emblazoned "You can learn anything" text at the top?

The remainder of the page is designed for viewers who are not completely familiar with Khan Academy. It colorfully and largely spells out the key benefits of using the learning platform -- all of which are easy to scan and understand. There's also a recurring CTA: "Start learning now." As soon as viewers feel they have enough information, they can click the CTA to get taken back up to the form at the top of the page without having to scroll.

A little bit of delightful copy can go a long way on your landing page. We love the playful little aside -- "(Hint: It's Wine)" -- that Club W included below the header of their corporate gifting landing page. It humanizes the brand and makes them likable, which could have a positive impact on their conversion rate.

The images below that header make a nice use of negative space, showing the user exactly what his or her gift recipient might actually receive, should they choose to gift with Club W. And, of course, there's that bold call to action -- "Email Us".

The one thing we'd change? The CTA prompts the users email software to open, which drives traffic away from the site and the browser entirely. A form might be more effective here -- not only would Club W be able to dictate what information it wants to capture, but also, it would keep the user on-site.

I like this page because it's simple in both copy and design. The image above the fold is a computer screen displaying an HTML bracket with a blinking cursor -- a whimsical, clear visual to accompany the form on the right.

The form itself is simple and only requires an email address, username, password, and a validation that you're not a robot to create an account. Or, you can just use your Facebook or Google Plus login, shortening the conversion path even further.

For visitors who need more information before creating an account, the landing page also offers a video below the fold that explains their concept and value by way of a real-life success story. Again, this helps make the potentially intimidating world of coding more approachable for beginners.

Those who need even more convincing can continue scrolling for additional testimonials and other forms of social proof.

I don't think we've ever lived in a time when, culturally, we've been so food-obsessed. Poached has turned that into a B2B model with a platform to connect proprietors and culinary talent.

When you visit the homepage, there's no mystery about what you're there to do -- the giant "Post a job" and "Choose a city" calls to action help with that. And once you click on one of them, you're taken to a no-frills form to become a member or log in, or a list of jobs in each city. It's colorful and comprehensive -- and, it makes us hungry.

Here's another example of clever, delightful design on a landing page. As soon as you visit Breather.com, there's an instant call to action: indicate where you want to find a space. Plus, it uses location services to figure out where you are, providing instant options nearby.

We love how Breather used simple, to-the-point copy to let the visitor know what the company does, followed immediately by the CTA to select a city. And if you need to scroll down for more information, you can see that Breather played with the microcopy with personality ("no commitment, ever"), reminding us there are real humans behind the design. That brings us a little closer to the brand. The negative space and soothing color scheme are also aligned with the product -- essentially, room to breathe.

Visitors to your website won't hand over their personal information without knowing what they're going to get in return. On its landing page, Startup Institute makes abundantly clear what will happen after you apply by listing a Q&A right beside the form. It might prompt some people to say, "They read my mind!"

To avoid hesitancy to fill out a form, use your landing page to set expectations upfront. That clears the air, and can also weed out the people who don't take your content, product or service seriously.

Who is your landing page's target audience? While most of Edupath's website content is directed toward students, there are sections dedicated to advising parents on helping their teenagers through college applications and SAT preparation. The landing page below is in one of these sections.

When parents fill out their teenager's name, email address, and mobile number, a link to download the Edupath app is sent directly to them. The folks at Edupath know students are likely to do something if their parents ask them to -- especially if it means they don't have to surrender their phones.

Plus, it's an easy, one-click process. This whole conversion path is a clever and helpful way to get the apps on more students' phones by way of their parents.

If there's anything we enjoy more than a fine whiskey, it's a whiskey club homepage that makes it easy to either join or learn more about membership. Case in point: Taster's Club, which immediately serves up those very two CTAs on its landing page -- which also happens to be its homepage.

For those to wish to learn more, clicking that CTA will immediately scroll the user down to colorful, image-rich details on what a Taster's Club membership includes. Keep scrolling, and you get user testimonials.

But clicking the "Join Now" button is where the real fun begins. After doing that, you get to pick your poison -- that is, the type of whiskey you like the most -- and view the membership or gifting options available for it. Once you make your selections, you're taken to an easy-to-navigate checkout page to enter your payment information. Good design and ease of use? We'll drink to that.
Want more landing page design inspiration? Check out some of our favorite HubSpot landing page examples .Editor's Note: This post was originally published in July 2014 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

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12 Great Landing Page Examples You'll Want to Copy

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Landing pages exist to serve one purpose: getting website visitors to convert to the next stage in the buying journey. Although their purpose is simple enough in theory, actually designing a successful landing page requires some detailed planning and creative testing.

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Today, lean startups and tech titans alike are increasingly using the minimum viable product (MVP) as a starting point for building successful software products. In the article 4 Reasons MVPs Fail we looked at the major risks you face in getting your product to market and how to overcome them. A successful minimum viable product helps you start the learning process as soon as possible, and not just to answer the technical questions of "how" but also to eliminate the business uncertainty of "why."

In this article, we'll take a look at some of the companies that got their MVP right and what they did to go on and launch some of the hottest products in the market today.

1. Dropbox

In his book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries, cofounder/CTO of IMVU talks about how Dropbox tackled the question of market viability by demonstrating their product in a video.

To answer the question of whether customers would want to use and pay for their file-sync solution and to justify the market to investors, Houston and his team had to "get out of the building" and put their proposed user experience in front of actual users to get feedback. Instead of digging into servers and building a high-availability, low-latency, always-on network even before they had any clue people would use it, the team decided to try something else.

They made an explainer video and started sharing it with their network to see how people would react. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video demonstrating your products user experience is worth a million. The 3-minute video demonstrated Dropbox's intended functionality and resulted in signups increasing from 5,000 people to 75,000 overnight - all of this in absence of a real product.

Dropbox's explainer video served as a brilliant validation of the market before the founders ever had to invest in the infrastructure and development needed for a high-tech product like theirs to reach a functional level in the real world. It walked potential customers through what the product is and clearly demonstrated how it would help them, eventually leading to why they would want to pay you for it.

When it comes to product development, it's easier said than done but when you're building an MVPs, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

2. Airbnb

In 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia wanted to start a business, but also couldn't afford the rent of their San Francisco apartment. There was a design conference coming to town, and they decided to open up their loft as cheap accommodation for conference attendees who had lucked out on the hotels nearby. They took pictures of their apartment, put it up on a simple website, and soon they had 3 paying guests for the duration of the conference, a woman from Boston, a father from Utah, and another man originally from India.

The up-close interaction gave Chesky and Gebbia valuable insight into what potential customers would want. This concierge MVP helped validate the market and prove people would be willing to buy the experience. With their initial assumptions answered, that people would be willing to pay to stay in someone else's home rather than a hotel and that not just recent college grads would sign up, they started Airbnb (then called AirbedAndBreakfast).

3. Groupon

Andrew Mason started with a website called The Point, a platform to bring people together to accomplish things they couldn't do alone, like fundraising or boycotting a retailer. But the site wasn't gaining much momentum, so they decided to try out something else.

Using the same domain, they set up a customized WordPress blog called The Daily Groupon and began posting deals each day manually. When someone signed up for a particular deal, the team would generate a PDF document and email it using Apple Mail. This simple website they "cobbled together" showed the team this was a market worth looking at with just a manual-first ("Wizard of Oz") MVP that helped them pivot their offering from what they had been doing previously.

They didn't invest any time into developing a coupon system and designing a new website. Instead, they took what resources they had and made a piecemeal MVP out of them to test the hypothesis of whether people would be interested in what they were offering. Starting from a customized WordPress website and manually emailing PDF documents to a mailing list isn't exactly what you'd call scaleable, but Groupon's MVP was successful in answering that question for them.

4. Buffer

Buffer is a simple app that lets you schedule your posts across your social network, essentially letting you space out your updates so that you don't flood your friends' newsfeeds at one point in the day with interesting stuff you want to share. When starting out, Joel Gascoigne, Buffer's founder, didn't want to get stuck building a product no one wanted to use. So he began with a simple test.

Buffer's first minimum viable product was just a simple landing page. It explained what Buffer was and how it would work, encouraged people to sign up and offered a plans and pricing button for people to click on if they were interested. When they did, however, they were shown a short message explaining they weren't quite ready yet and that people should sign up for updates. Joel used the email addresses received from the signup form to start conversations with the potential users of the app, gaining valuable feedback and insight into what they would want.

Next, they tested the hypothesis that people would want to pay for this by adding the prices table in between the landing page and the signup form. When someone clicked on the pricing plans button, they were shown the plans to see whether they would be interested in paying for something like Buffer. This showed Joel how many of the visitors to the site could potentially become paying customers. This zero-risk MVP helped Buffer identify the market and shape their product features in the coming development as well.

5. Zappos

Today, we know that people are comfortable with buying shoes online when Zappos had annual sales of more than $1 billion and was acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion in 2009. But in 1999, when co-founder Nick Swinmurn wanted to build an online retail store that stocked a great selection of shoes, the assumption that other people would use it needed to be tested.

Swinmurn began by putting up photos of shoes from local shoe stores on a website to gauge demand for an online store. When someone ordered the shoe online, he would come back to the store and buy it. Instead of first investing in infrastructure and inventory, this gave Zappos a chance to answer the question of whether their product would be accepted by the market.

This Wizard of Oz, man-behind-the-curtain technique is used to test market hypotheses. It comes from the idea of putting on the impression of full functionality, essentially faking it until you make it. Customers believe they are experiencing the actual product, but in reality the work behind the scenes is being done manually. In the case of Zappos, by Swinmurn.

The Wizard of Oz approach is great because it also allows for greater interaction with customers at this crucial stage when you're designing the product. The expedited learning, albeit at a small-scale, provides opportunities to test many assumptions you might be making about the product or the marketplace.

6. Twitter

Twitter traces its origins to the podcasting platform Odeo. When Odeo found the ground underneath slipping away after Apple stepped into the podcasting game with iTunes, the company started running hackathons to come up with ideas of where to head next. One result of this was an idea for sharing updates with a group of people via text messages, codenamed "twttr".

The first prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees, who eventually became so obsessed with it that they began racking up "monthly SMS bills totaling hundreds of dollars". This gave the team the push they needed to release Twitter to the public, but it was only at the SXSW festival in 2007 that their user base exploded when they showed off members' tweets about the event on TV screens across the venue.

7. Zynga

Zynga is a game studio that builds social games, popularized by the likes of Farmville, which surpassed $1 billion in revenue from in-game purchases in 2013. For their game development process, the company follows a mix of landing pages and adword MVP tests to gauge interest in a planned game or particular aspect of the game.

By running short ads in existing games and online that pitch potential game ideas and features, the company is able to gather data about which direction to steer development towards, preventing them from wasting any resources on building a game that people don't end up playing.

8. Foursquare

Foursquare is a location-based social network that lets users check-in with their location to share with friends and family. After their first such network, SMS-based Dodgeball, was acquired by Google, founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai set out to work on a mobile app based network they called Foursquare.

Backed by VC funding, they didn't let development time slow them down, however, and launched with a single-featured MVP that didn't bog them down in design and unnecessary features. They began with check-ins and the gamification rewards and focused on improving that side of the user experience, using feedback to mould their product.

Once they were comfortable with the basic functionality, they began adding extra features like Recommendations and City Guides years later. Additionally, they used existing services to help manage the service, for example using Google Docs to gather feedback and requests from users, which goes to show that you don't need to do everything yourself when you start in order to build a scalable business.

9. Spotify

According to Henrik Kniberg, Agile and Lean Startup consultant and author, Spotify uses a 4-stage iterative product cycle (Think It, Build It, Ship It, Tweak It). When they launched in 2009 with a landing page, they focused on the single feature that mattered most: music streaming experience. With the desktop apps, they were able to test the market in the limited beta run, giving them time to build momentum to tackle the music industry licensing concerns that were sure to come as they planned on expanding to the US.

They follow the same agile process today to help scale. Each one of Spotify's four stages are Lean since small teams are always working smartly to test assumptions. The "Think It" stage tests the merit of conceptual MVPs while the "Build It" stage releases a physical MVP only after it's been tested for quality. The "Ship It" and "Tweak It" phases ensure long-term quality and customer alignment by releasing the MVP gradually, learning from feedback, and iterating tirelessly. We go into detail about the process they follow in our article on Building Minimum Viable Products at Spotify.

10. Pebble

Pebble is an e-paper smartwatch, arguably the one that brought the "wearables" market to the mainstream today. After investor funding dried up, founder Eric Migicovsky turned to crowdfunding site Kickstarter for fundraising and ended up becoming the most successful project there, raising more than $10 million from interested customers looking to support development.

Migicovsky recorded an explainer video to demonstrate the prototype and asked interested customers to contribute. They reached the original goal of $100,000 in 2 hours and by the end of the week had raised $600,000. When the funding round on Kickstarter ended, more than 60,000 people had pledged $10.2 million to the project and Pebble went on to develop the watch for consumers. As of March 20, 2014, Pebble has sold over 400,000 units.

Testing the Riskiest Assumptions

In his book, The Lean Startup, Eric Ries writes about how to choose what to test when designing an MVP:
"When one is choosing among the many assumptions in a business plan, it makes sense to test the riskiest assumptions first. If you can't find a way to mitigate these risks toward the ideal that is required for a sustainable business, there is no point in testing the others."
For most startups, the riskiest assumption is the existence of the market. For Dropbox, that assumption was that people wanted to use a file synchronization service. For Zappos, it was that people would buy shoes online. For Airbnb, it was that they would be willing to live at a stranger's house as opposed to in a hotel. And in each of these cases, they designed their minimum viable product to answer those questions.

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10 Massively Successful Minimum Viable Products

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Today, lean startups and tech titans alike are increasingly using the minimum viable product (MVP) as a starting point for building successful software products. In the article 4 Reasons MVPs Fail we looked at the major risks you face in getting your product to market and how to overcome them.

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Follow @davidtsalani
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is useful product strategy that is loved and used by many lean startup practitioners around the world. Many entrepreneurs, however, end up with MVPs that don't land anywhere near their expectations. Their MVPs have very low conversion rates and no paying customers.

This Minimum Viable Product guide will be useful if you want to build a web product your early adopters will love. In addition to that, it is packed with definitions, strategies and great MVP examples. How do you build your MVP? What are Concierge, Wizard of Oz and Piecemeal MVPs? What's the difference between low-fidelity and high-fidelity Minimum Viable Products? What are great landing page MVP examples? It covers these and many other questions.

I have divided it into two parts to make it easier for you. In part one, we are going to discuss problem discovery and smoke test development- things that are better done before you build your actual MVP. In part two we'll define and discuss advanced lean principles and strategies that will be useful when developing your "high-fidelity" Minimum Viable Product.

Deconstructing your idea into a business canvas/business plan

So, before anything, you have formed the business idea in your mind. You have estimated the potential market size of your idea. You have an idea an idea of who your customers might be. You have defined your revenue model etc. As "The Startup owner's manual" defines it, you have basically deconstructed your grand vision into the nine parts using the Business Model Canvas ( Petri's canvas the more advanced version of it, by the way, worth checking it out).

Then you probably ran experiments to test your "problem" hypotheses. This stage is critical and the MVP without the clear problem statement is bound to fail. Usually, this is the stage where the most startups fail. They create a landing page in hopes of testing the problem/solution fit. Kinda taking a shortcut without doing proper problem interviews, whereas they should be concentrating on the problems of their customers first. The result? Very low click-through rates.

Understanding your Customers' problems

If your MVP looks like a mess, what you are missing is the proper understanding of the problems your customers are facing, this is stage 2. Customer Development in general will never end and is critical to your startup. You just cannot omit that. So before you move on, check this great blog or buy this priceless book. Here are some additional resources you might like.

NB! When done with this stage, sit down and ask yourself the following question: "what do I want to learn from my MVP experiment?" Why is this question important? Having clear learning objectives will help you to design your experiment much faster. Also, having clear goals will help you to decide whether you should persevere or pivot.

Creating a Smoke test or Low-fidelity MVP

In stage 3, you can test your basic assumptions and design pass/fail tests. Will customers click on the buy button? How many views, comments and likes will my video or post generate? Your main goal here is to find out whether there is any interest in your concept.

Do landing page, introduction video, mockup or Facebook group count as real MVPs? Well, ask yourself: "would I pay for the product I have just built?" If you are still wondering how to answer this question, then the answer is "no". This however, does not mean that smoke tests should not be created. Smoke tests are a good way to test your initial assumptions and decide whether your MVP should be built at all. As mentioned before, the Smoke Test is a basic representation of your idea that will help you find out whether there is an interest in your concept.

Even though sign up forms are not "products," conversion rates from signup forms might be a good experiment to run, so you could try to test a "problem" in the market without building anything at all. Take a look at the best MVP smoke test strategies and examples below.

A Landing Page

There are tons of simple ways to build a landing page, run A/B tests and optimize your landing page without a single line of code. A couple of the best ones are LaunchRock and Unbounce. Not satisfied? 🙂 Find more here.

What's the best landing page MVP example? Buffer, the app that queues up your tweets and posts them automatically, started out as a simple landing page. As soon as people started clicking on paid plans, Joel, the founder of the Buffer, realized that it was the time to create a working app.

There are also tons of other great examples and daily boards full of landing page Minimum Viable Products. Check ProductHunt or Startupli.st for daily inspirations.

Explainer Videos

Instead of creating a promotional video, try to show your product in action (even if it is not built yet). Here are some great Minimum Viable Product explainer video examples:

Thalmic Lab's Myo device was able to attract 10,000 pre-orders or $1,5 million in sales in the first 48 hours with this video. They have now pre-sold over 30,000 units.

Dropbox was able to increase its beta waiting list from 5,000 to 75,000 overnight with this simple video.

Basic prototype or app

Check these great tools in case you are building an app or a prototype. You might want to check Axure, Balsamiq or Photoshare for mockups and this list for the best app makers (if you're building simple app). Also, visit ProductHunt for daily MVP app inspirations and examples.

Facebook pages, forums, online groups and communities

If you know your customers well, then you probably know what they like and where they go. Maybe your target audience cares about women rights (everyone should) or likes martial arts? There are unlimited targeting options on the web. Search , Reddit, etc., for sub-groups and communities. Create and promote your own group if you can't find what you are looking for.

Crowdfunding campaigns

Crowdfunding campaigns offer a great opportunity for validation if you are aiming at the mass audience. They are especially useful for physical products and innovations. You don't have to create the product itself, just remember to present your prototype or idea well. Check Kickstarter, Indiegogo or RocketHub for great MVP examples.

Surveys and questionnaires

This will not replace your problem interviews, but will help to polish your value proposition. Surveys can be done manually over the phone, or in crowded places in exchange of gift cards, smoothies or something useful to your target audience. There are also ways to install very simple surveys onto your website using Sodahead's pollware or Qualaroo surveys . Turn to Google forms or Survey.io if you are looking to create the form itself. Check FluidSurveys, Survio, AYTM, Survata or even mTurk in case you are looking to buy the respondents. Check for particular groups on Quora and Linkydink if you are targeting some specific groups of people. Looking for experts in the field? Go for Zintro. In any case, don't forget about survey design and keep it very short.

Idea and product spotting networks

There are websites dedicated to the search of new products and ideas. Think of submitting your idea to ProductHunt, Betalistor Quirky ; see if you will get some traction. ProductHunt, and Betalistwill be especially good for apps, and websites. Quirky, for real-world products.

Mockups, Presentations

Mockups and presentations are probably quite useless on the web, but very useful in sales meetings. We were able to sell great products like tulsu.fi just based on the mockups we presented to key decision makers.

Minimum Viable Product

In the first part you learned how to create your very basic smoke test or low-fidelity Minimum Viable Product. In addition to that, you read about critical stages that you have to do before the Minimum Viable Product. This is part two of the MVP ultimate guide. Here we are going to discuss principles and strategies when building a complex Minimum Viable product. Now comes the sweet part- you will present all of the things you learned in the form of the MVP.

What is Minimum Viable Product? Here is definition:

[MVP] is a concise summary of the smallest possible group of

features that will work as a stand-alone product while

still solving at least the "core" problem and

demonstrating the product's value.

-Steve Blank

If there would be one sentence with which to describe the basic strategy when building your MVP, then this would be one: your Minimum Viable Product should provide one COMPLETE FOCUSED EXPERIENCE to your early adopters.

In other words, the best is not to forget the word "viable"in the Minimum (Minimal) Viable Product. Here's a good example from the Spotify product development team.

Original Image: Making sense of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) - and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable by Henrik Kniberg
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If you want to sell a car (your successful end product) to your customer for the X price, a lot of times a badly designed MVP/landing page might look a lot like a wheel (see picture). Instead of creating a wheel (incomplete MVP), think of something that would provide customers with the complete experience of getting from A to B faster than walking. A skateboard might be a very simplified solution to that and it requires a lot of manual power, but it is that complete experience and a faster way to get to B. And, of course, it is much cheaper and faster to build compared to the car.

Remember , this would also mean restricting all the extra features on your skateboard like, for instance, the custom deck design (your MVP's extra features), etc. Do not worry, early adopters in most cases will ignore "the look," because they are searching for the solution to their problem and that is the only thing that matters to them at that point (PS! simple or minimal does not equal ugly)

The whole point here is that you learn with the least minimum effort! The MVP concept is not as much about the product, as it is about learning. Also, MVP is your critical step before moving onto finding your product/market fit and that's the ultimate goal. Why would anyone want to mess it up?

How to build complex MVP or high-fidelity prototype

As mentioned before, it is easy to build something that is very minimal and that you can call a "product," but it is very challenging to build something that is "VIABLE" too. Again:
Below, I have added some great strategies to overcome that challenge. These great strategies will help you build your ultimate MVP.
"Emulating real stuff" approach

"Concierge, Wizard of Oz and Piecemeal" MVPs. What is a concierge MVP? It is a method of manually guiding your user through your solution. One of the best examples of the concierge MVP delivery is Food on the Table. Food on the Table provides custom weekly meal plans and ties them down to grocery store sales. Thus, people with specific meal plans don't have to think what to buy the next day, all the grocery store items are selected by Food on The Table.

In the early days, Manuel Rosso, CEO of the company, had started up the service without even building the website. How? He would go to every customer in person with the recipes and grocery lists. In exchange, customers would pay the subscription fee. Thus, full service was provided to customers along with invaluable feedback from them.

The "Wizard of Oz" MVP seems to do exactly the same, only the customer doesn't see all the manual work. Your website or app look and "feel" like real products, but you carry out all the product functions manually. Zappos founder launched the website, but would carry out all the other functions like shipping manually until the experiment was a success and it was time to scale up the business.

Another great approach that I got introduced to in this post is called the "Piecemeal MVP." It allows you to do exactly the same as the "Wizard of Oz" and "Concierge" approaches, but here you will emulate all the missing features with the existing services.

My favourite example is from Steve. Steve Blank describes how he advised one team to change the approach when building their MVP. He was approached by a team of engineers that were planning to build precision agriculture drones. Instead of advising them on the drone features, he proposed to use the helicopter with a high-definition camera (I guess buying cheap drone was too expensive back then) and try to sell the data to farmers. The riskiest assumption in that MVP was not the drone technology, but whether the customer would pay for the data it provided. Great "piecemeal" MVP example!

"One Painkiller feature" approach

Many great businesses started either as a hobby, which allowed them to validate customer's problem throughout the time or as a single feature product (Dropbox, browser add-ons, even google). One of the best examples is Buffer. It started out with a very focused approach and one feature. Currently, Buffer has many more features, uses, and millions of dollars in sales.

Conclusion

MVP is all about experimenting and learning. Of course, there are no "rules" and templates when building your MVP. Lean startup is a mindset and should be applied to every stage of your product development. Very often you will end up with very low click-through rates or no interest in your product during the presentation to the potential customers.

Perseverance and constant learning are crucial in here. In the already famous story, Rovio made 52 games and was almost bankrupt before this was sketched. So, keep on learning.
We have combined technology, funding and early sales in one package. Go to FastMonkeys.com and see how we can help you.

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Your ultimate guide to Minimum Viable Product (+great examples)

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Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is useful product strategy that is loved and used by many lean startup practitioners around the world. Many entrepreneurs, however, end up with MVPs that don't land anywhere near their expectations. Their MVPs have very low conversion rates and no paying customers.

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Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) are tricky:

How "minimal" should yours be?

What does "viable" mean?

How do you keep it simple, without ruining your reputation?

MVPs only need to only do one thing. To understand that one thing, you want to understand the definition of MVP.

MVP is the new Beta?

Remember when "betas" were a thing - as in, "we're working on our beta version", "we just launched our private beta", etc.?

In the last few years, that term has been replaced with "MVP" - "we're working on our MVP", "we just launched our MVP", etc.

This is where the confusion around MVPs stems from...

The original definition of MVP from Frank Robinson is:

A version of a new product which allows a team to collect the with the maximum amount of validated learning about customers least effort.

In other words, your MVP is the version of your product with the highest ROI when you optimize for "validated learning."

So how do you optimize for validated learning?

Test your "Riskiest Assumption"

For your business model to be successful, there are a number of assumptions that need to be true:

All of your assumptions can be prioritized in terms of "riskiness" where the assumptions that are most critical to the success of your startup, and/or are least likely to be true, are considered more "risky" than the other assumptions.

For example, "you can solve your customers' problems" is critical to your startup's success, but it's very likely to be true (humans are natural problem solvers and since you're a human, I'm confident you can solve your customers' problems). On the other hand, "customers will pay you to solve the problem" is not only critical to your success, it's also (unfortunately) less likely to be true - so you would consider that assumption more "risky" than the former.

Once you order your assumptions by their "riskiness", to build an MVP, you build the simplest version of your product, that tests your riskiest assumption.

In other words, an MVP is:

A version of a product that allows a team to collect a maximum amount of validated learningof customers test their riskiest assumption with the least effort.

Notice how this definition changes the focus of an MVP from building a product, to running an experiment. That's critical to understanding what an MVP is - remember that.

MVP or Not an MVP?

Use the examples to test whether you understand what an MVP is...

Example 1: Explainer video

Dropbox famously gauged demand for their product via a demo video that, thanks to some video editing, demonstrated functionality they hadn't built yet.

What do you think? MVP or not an MVP?

Let's look at the definition again:

A test their version of a product that allows a team to riskiest assumption with the least effort.

Does a demo video of functionality that doesn't exist represent a:

1. Version of a product that

2. Tests the team's riskiest assumption with the

3. Least effort?

If Dropbox's riskiest assumption was "people want a new service to sync/share files" and if it took less effort to edit video than it did to write code for the functionality that didn't exist, then yes, this is an MVP!

As long as the riskiest assumption is being tested with the least effort, it's an MVP.

If instead they'd built a simple version of their product (i.e. a pilot, a beta, etc.) and measured how many people used it everyday, the wouldn't have been testing their riskiest assumption, and they wouldn't have done it with the least amount of effort.

Example 2 - PowerPoint Demo

Let's say you are going into a pitch meeting with a customer using a slide deck with mockups of your software. You're not going to demo any functionality at all, you're just going to talk about the problems you'll solve while showing them some pictures, what do you think, MVP or not an MVP?

Recall the definition of MVP:

A test their version of a product that allows a team to riskiest assumption with the least effort.

As long as you're testing the riskiest assumption during that meeting (e.g. "customers will pay us to solve this problem") with the least effort (a slide deck is less effort than even making a video), it's an MVP.

Keep in mind that a slide deck is just like a video - minus fancy transitions. If a video meets your team's criteria for an MVP, a slide deck might too - especially in B2B scenarios.

If on the other hand you went into that meeting hoping the customer would create an account on your platform and try it during the meeting - you'd be testing the wrong assumption, and you'd have done so with far more effort than a simple slide deck. A working prototype wouldn't be an MVP.

Example 3 - Landing Page

If you imagine a landing page is just like a PowerPoint deck that you scroll through instead of click through, then you can already tell, a landing page can be an MVP as well.

Again, you want to use the least amount of effort to test your riskiest assumption - as long as you're doing that, you're building an MVP.

Anything more than that, and you're getting closer to a "beta" product, than an experiment.

Example 4 - Facebook Advertisement

If you capture the essence of a landing page in a FB ad, with a title, image, description etc., then...what do you think: MVP or not an MVP?

What was that definition again?

A test their version of a product that allows a team to riskiest assumption with the least effort.

So really, as long as you're testingthe riskiest assumption with the least amount of effort...you get the picture.

If we go back to the Dropbox example we can even see that depending on their riskiest assumption, they too could have used a Facebook ad to test this out.

If their riskiest assumption was, say, " people have problems syncing/sharing files" the Dropbox team may have been able to test that with a Facebook ad!

Example 5 - Simple App

A friend and I gave ourselves 24 hours to build a proof-of-concept app that would help people get to their appointments on time. It had basic GPS, traffic and calendar integration, rudimentary UI, and we only built it for Android.

It got written-up Forbes and as a result, we were able to collect the email addresses of 3,000 people who wanted the iPhone version.

What do you think? MVP or not an MVP?

To know the answer, we have to look where we always look...our riskiest assumption.

If our riskiest assumption was genuinely, "We can build the app", then it would have been an MVP. The truth is though, our riskiest assumption was, "People will pay for this app" and there was no way for us to test that with this app.

So, no, despite the app being simple, newsworthy, and popular... it wasn't an MVP.

If it doesn't test the riskiest assumption call it a beta/pilot/POC - just don't call it an MVP Click To Tweet

What's your Riskiest Assumption?

Now that you know what your MVP needs to do, you just need to figure out your riskiest assumption so you can build one.

Good news! My post next week will tell you your riskiest assumption and the best MVP is to test it! Subscribe to get it in your inbox.

MVP is not the new beta

Definition of MVP = (Say it with me...) The simplest version of a product that tests your riskiest assumption.

Before you build an MVP, you have to know your riskiest assumption.

Want More MVP Help?

This is the first of a four part-series on MVPs:

1. (This one) What is an MVP?

2. What Kind of MVP Should you Build?

3. My 8 Favorite Tools for Building MVPs

4. I'll Fix your MVP: Send me your MVP and I'll tell you what, if anything, to tweak to make it perfect.

Stay tuned for those.

Bonus: Want me to Review your MVP?

Leave a comment below with a link to your landing page MVP and if it provides a good lesson for others to learn from, I'll post a video review of what you're doing well, and what you might consider changing.

The videos will be public so you and the rest of the Customer Development Labs community will learn from them which this is an ideal opportunity for startups who are:

1. Confident in their landing page MVPs and want other startups to see it or

2. Not confident in their landing page MVPs and want help fixing it.

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What is an MVP? - Customer Development Labs

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Updated] May 10, 2016 Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) are tricky: How "minimal" should yours be? What does "viable" mean? How do you keep it simple, without ruining your reputation? MVPs only need to only do one thing. To understand that one thing, you want to understand the definition of MVP.

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In this day and age, when startups talk about MVP the emphasis is always on minimum.

Everyone encourages founders to not wait too long to launch, to get it out there, to get feedback, and to start learning from the market.

That is great advice in general, and I am personally a big fan of going fast vs going slow. Yet, to me there is a subtlety that is lost in the message, which leads to misinterpretation and bad outcomes.

The minimum product that comes out still needs to be viable.

If a product is too simple, and falls below the bar, it won't be well received, and won't be likely to take off. If the product is too simple, doesn't solve the problem, and doesn't activate and retain the customers, it is not an MVP. It may be a prototype, and there lies the difference.

MVP is good enough, and can be improved to be great one day. Prototype isn't good enough.

Simple, but not simpler than it needs to be

Einstein said that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. He implied that difficult problems are just that - difficult, and ultimately, some things can't be simplified.

A great MVP isn't only simple, it is also sufficient.

It embodies the solution to the problem, or an elegant approximation to a solution that is good enough. Sure, it lacks features. Sure, it is raw and unpolished, but good MVP can be recognized as having the potential to be great - to fully solve the problem.

Viable literally means alive

If you look up the word viability in the dictionary you will see that it comes from the Latin word vita, meaning life.

Being viable literally means being alive.

How can a product be alive?

Products that we fall in love with have a vital quality to them. They feel great, respond right - they delight us with their UX, simplicity, and the way they solve the problem.

They feel different, they feel alive.

A branch of science called Complexity studies patterns across disciplines, and seeks to understand the dynamic of different systems.

Roughly speaking, Complexity distinguishes between systems that are in the state of chaos, dead and alive. Systems that are considered alive are close to the edge of chaos. They have enough interesting dynamic built in, but they aren't out of control.

The analog for MVP is that you can have a product that has too many features - it's chaotic and hard to understand. On the other extreme, you can have a product that just doesn't have enough built in. It is not good enough, it is not alive.

It is in the middle that you find your great MVP. It is minimal and vital. And key to vitality are feedback loops.

How to think about your MVP

It turns out that the key to vitality is feedback loops. This is what makes natural systems alive and this is what makes great software alive as well.

Strive to create a minimal product that has correct feedback loops.

Step 0: Talk to customers and confirm verbally that you are on to something.
Do the unscalable things to validate the market.

Step 1: Map out MVP based on your gut and understanding of the market.

Repeat steps 2-4 until done:

Step 2: Remove features that feel unnecessary.

Step 3: Combine features that can be combined, simplify.

Step 4: Check the flows and feedback loops. Are you solving the problem you set to solve? Is the system dynamic enough? Will it be alive?

What you are doing is you are focusing on a minimal set of features, but not at the expense of viability. Sometimes after removing a bunch of things you may need to add some things back.

Viability for different types of businesses

How exactly to make your MVP viable is as much art as it is science. But there is science to it, for sure. Let's take a look at different types of businesses to get the idea of what to look for.

Consumer utility/social: For consumer product activation and retention are two important feedback loops. The product is not immediately viable if users aren't activated. Similarly, the product won't be viable in the future if the users aren't retained.

Activation for most consumer products is one or more actions that the user has to perform to become engaged and have potential to be retained. For example, on Twitter, an activated user may be expected to follow at least 10 other users and post a Tweet. To become retained, the user is expected to come back at least once a month and read a tweet.

Marketplaces: For marketplace the key thing is to enable liquidity. For example, for Airbnb, it wouldn't be enough to just list the apartments or express a need for a rental. Both need to be in place. There needs to be a mechanism to match buyers and sellers. Most often it is done via Search and Discovery, but in different types of marketplaces matching can be done differently.

Again there needs to be the basic feedback loop around activation, and ultimately each successful seller and buyer need to experience the joy of the first transaction. What happens next is equally important for viability. Could Airbnb work if you removed seller and buyer ratings? Perhaps not. Maybe this feedback loop is critical to make sure that the marketplace can self-organize and weed out bad players. Including or not including ratings into the MVP is a critical decision.

E-commerce: For e-commerce business, the ability to find and buy products is critical. Purchase is the feedback loop. But a bunch of other things need to work correctly. For example, imagine an e-commerce site without the search capability. It might be fine if you have a handful of products, but not if you have a large catalog. Should search be part of your MVP?

For retention, you need to decide what will make the users come back. Is it promotions? Is it personalization? Perhaps subscription? Maybe a mix of all of it? What is the minimum investment you make in MVP that maximizes the chance of users sticking with you and coming back for more?

SaaS: For SaaS business, activation is signup and retention is non-churn. The first one relies on building features that are needed, and the second relies on repeat usage. The second feedback loop is a lot harder to get right in MVP, but it's pretty important.

Unlike consumer businesses that don't charge, SaaS products are paid. The fact that you are paying for something is already an incentive to use it, but it is not a guarantee.

For more details on building your MVP go read this awesome guide. Below is the image from the post.

Compute your MVP

There is a method to great MVP. It captures and brings to life the minimum, yet sufficient version of your solution to a business problem.

Don't rely on luck or minimalism to get you to YOUR MVP. Compute it.

MVP is a product computation on a napkin or a whiteboard. MVP is not about furiously typing code. Rather, a great MVP is about rigorously thinking.

We can't predict the future, but we can do better than roll the dice.

We can be intelligent about our MVPs, make them simple, build in feedback loops, and make sure they have a shot at being alive.

Please share your MVP experiences here. What worked / didn't work for you in your business?

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In this day and age, when startups talk about MVP the emphasis is always on minimum. Everyone encourages founders to not wait too long to launch, to get it out there, to get feedback, and to start learning from the market. That is great advice in general, and I am personally a big fan of...

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2. Pay attention to all the variables around your hypothesis. Your diet program might generate substantial interest right after a food filled holiday like Thanksgiving, but this doesn't mean that interest will be sustained throughout the rest of the year. The purpose of an A/B test is to simulate a real-life scenario and measure which product alternative performs best in that environment. Try to emulate all the conditions that you'd find in a real-life situation to get accurate data. If you are testing multiple variables in your A/B tests for e.g. different pricing and different names, make sure they don't interfere and that you can obtain an accurate learning from your experiment.

3. Develop an MVP with a prominent call-to-action. The effectiveness of each MVP is measured against a call-to-action. e.g. the number of people that signed up to get more information on the product, downloaded a file, clicked on a 'Purchase' button, or completed a certain task. How customers interact with your call-to-action will determine if your hypothesis was validated or invalidated. For example, your MVP could be a simple landing page that describes your diet program's value proposition. The call-to-action could be a simple form that collects sign-ups from your customers for future communications around your diet service. Choose call-to-actions that are relevant with the hypothesis you're testing e.g. a high number of sign-ups (call-to-action) doesn't reflect customers' willingness to pay (hypothesis).

4. Record what you've observed against your initial hypothesis. What data did you retrieve and what can you learn from it? How did the other alternatives perform? Is the data you extracted reliable? Can you make data-backed decisions as a result of this experiment, or should you run a second round of tests to confirm your findings? Imagine that your option A presents a $10 vegetable meal and option B presents a $20 protein meal. If customers choose option A, is it because the meal is cheaper or because they have a preference for vegetables? You'll need to conduct more experiments to figure this out. We developed the Learning Card tool as a simple way to gather the interactions that occurred during our A/B tests. Feel free to use ours for your observations, too:

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4 Simple Steps To Build Better Value Propositions With A/B Testing

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A/B testing is a popular technique used by digital marketers to convert customers. A slight tweak in copy or imagery on a landing page can make a significant impact on the types of actions your customers perform. But product managers and entrepreneurs also leverage this technique to validat

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If you came up with an idea of excellent service or app solving user problems, don't hurry to spend money on developing a fully-fledged product and don't prepare yourself for months and months of hard work behind the closed doors. According to lean startup methodology by Eric Ries new product development starts with finding an answer to the question "Do users actually need this product?". And MVP concept will help you do it.

What is MVP?

MVP (minimum viable product, sometimes mistakenly referred to as minimal viable product or minimum value product) is a product that allows you to receive a meaningful feedback from users, understand what they need and avoid creating something they won't use.

According to this concept the idea of your startup is a hypothesis. In order to check it you need to follow these steps of startup product development:

1. Clearly state your hypothesis.

2. Identify criteria used to test it.

3. Create a minimum viable product to test you hypothesis and launch it.

4. Check effectiveness indicators.

5. Draw conclusions and check the next hypothesis if necessary.

MVP for startups doesn't mean a product that is raw and was created in a hurry. Minimum here means that minimum time is spent on development and the product itself has only key features available. Those key features correspond to the hypothesis you are checking. A research showed that 60% of features are actually never used and consequently aren't vital to the end users. MVP concept allows you to reduce startup project launch time by concentrating on the key features only and start receiving feedback on your product.

But getting feedback is not the final stage. MVP is a part of the lean methodology which is based on following the repeating cycle of development, measuring, learning and getting feedback. That's why the next step would be improving your product based on the feedback from users and re-testing it. If it goes as planned, you can create a fully-fledged product and start winning the market.

Why startups need MVP development?

Even the most unique idea is simply a concept and not the end product. By building MVP you can:

1. Save up money by not investing into a project bound to fail.

2. Check whether the product you envisioned is appealing to users.

3. Find out using iterations which of the possible development courses will lead your product to success.

4. Gather information about potential clients and find early adopters of your product (also known as "lighthouse customers").

Steve Blank, the author of customer development methodology, says that the main reason why promising projects doesn't make it is that they fail to invest time and effort into deeply understanding their customers. Instead of learning about their vital needs through MVP product development and launch startup founders draw themselves in work centered around perfecting the initial idea which was not tested in the wild.

Companies that started as MVP products

Spotify

Spotify MVP developers sticked to the main function: online music streaming. After learning closed Windows app beta-testing results developers managed to secure deals with big record labels and gain substantial investments for their startup project. Today with 60 million current users Spotify is worth $8.4 billion.

Spotify is also one of the large websites using Symfony2 PHP framework.

Foursquare

Foursquare MVP product had only one feature: check-ins and badges for them. After studying user reaction MVP developers started expanding it and added recommendations and city guides. Today service brings together 50 million people that checked in 8 billion times.

Airbnb

Service offering short-time rent to travelers started with its owners renting their apartment to few participants of San-Francisco design conference. They made photos of the place to create MVP in a form of a simple website and soon were welcoming the guests. This way startup owners managed to check whether their idea of short-term rental would appeal to users.

Groupon

Before checking their hypothesis about group discounts, Groupon creators started a website called The Point aimed at finding like-minded people to accomplish some goal that can't be reached otherwise. But the idea needed to be more focused. So Groupon founders created a customized Wordpress blog to manually post information on group discounts. After users signed up for a particular discount, a PDF file was sent to their email address. This way Groupon founders managed to test their hypothesis (users like the idea of getting a good bargain) with minimum effort and investment.

MeinFernbus

Today MeinFernbus is a leading company on German long distance bus transportation market. In 2015 it merged with Flixbus with new company covering 76% of the respective market. But MVP we developed together with MeinFernbus IT team was quite simple:

1. User goes to the website.

2. Chooses route and date.

3. Buys ticket.

4. Prints it out.

5. Shows the ticket when boarding the bus.

MVP allowed to buy tickets only for several buses going between Freiburg and Munich. Some of the operations were manual and users could only pay with euro.

When MVP was successfully checked on practice, we started expanding it:

1. It became possible to reserve place for bicycles, use vouchers, return tickets and make changes to them.

2. The number of routes increased and project architecture was rewritten to work with higher loads.

3. A separate portal for partners and agencies was created and we developed apps for Android and iOS.

When buses started going to Switzerland, support for Swiss franc and new payment options were added. A complex system of financial reporting was created. Nowadays the company continues using procedure for buying tickets that was tested with MVP but underneath it lies a very different and complex system.

See our case study to learn more about MeinFernbus project.

CourseYard

MVP for CourseYard was an e-publication tool with formatting and inserting interactive content features.

We have also prepared a sample publication and developed an Android app for viewing publications on the go. See our case to learn more about CourseYard MVP project.

According to the research that studied 3200 fast-growing mobile and internet startups, in 74% cases the reason of the startup failure is a premature scaling: company revenue from new users turns out to be lower than expenses incurred by providing services to them. This problem emerges from the lack of knowledge about the needs and preferences of the target audience. But you can evade it: order MVP development and adjust your initial startup hypotheses according to the actual data gathered with MVP.
Studio stfalcon.com offers MVP application design, web and mobile product development for startups. Our team will be happy to help you succeed as a digital entrepreneur.
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Nuance Communications on Finding Early Adopters of Voice Biometrics

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This is the first lesson in the series: How Non-Technical Founders Can Bring a Product to Market. OVERVIEW: Over emphasizing building a product, without testing value proposition and understanding who early adopter is. Transcript: One of the most common stories that I hear from people who reach out to me is the following: "I'm really stuck, I'm tired, and I'm about to burnout.

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The Lean Approach: Minimum Viable Products

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Steve Blank says a minimum viable product, or MVP, can help you test your hypotheses about the market, and your customers, before you spend too much time creating and shipping the product. THIS VIDEO CAN HELP ANSWER: What is a minimum viable product? Why should I create a prototype?

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When you buy a bundle, you get all individual templates for 50% off the total price, and all future updates for free. All prototyping templates in both Keynote and PowerPoint formats + free lifetime updates All prototyping templates in Keynote format free lifetime updates All prototyping templates in PowerPoint format free lifetime updates Keynotopia is our secret prototyping weapon!

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QuickMVP: Software for Customer Validation & Business Viability Testing

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QuickMVP is a simple tool that helps you test any new business idea in just 5 minutes. MVP = Minimum Viable Product.

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Balsamiq. Rapid, Effective and Fun Wireframing Software | Balsamiq

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Balsamiq is the company behind Balsamiq Wireframes, the industry standard low-fidelity wireframing tool.

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Infographic Maker Trusted By 11 Million Users - Piktochart

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With Piktochart AI, you can create stunning infographics, reports, presentations, and more in seconds. No design experience needed. Start for free.

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Animaker, Make Animated Videos on Cloud for free

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Animaker is an online do-it-yourself (#DIY) animation video maker that brings studio quality presentations within everyone’s reach. Animated Videos, Done Right!

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Gratis website maken | Eigen website bouwen | Wix.com

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Ontwerp een gratis website, precies zoals jij het wilt. Bij Wix krijg je het hele pakket - geavanceerde website maker, vele ontwerpopties, betrouwbare webhosting, domeinen, promotie tools en de beste SEO. Meer dan 100 miljoen mensen kiezen Wix voor het maken van een prachtige website. Ontdek hier meer.

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Moonfruit: Responsive Website Builder | Let's Make a Website

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Make your own responsive website or online shop with Moonfruit's easy-to-use website builder. Industry-leading customer support. No coding skills needed. Start with our 14-day free trial.

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Weebly is de makkelijkste manier om een gratis website, winkel of blog te maken

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Weebly maakt het verrassend makkelijk om een hoge kwaliteit website, blog of online winkel te maken. Meer dan 40 miljoen mensen gebruiken Weebly om hun unieke ideeën tot leven te brengen.

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Eric Ries

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bol.com | The Lean Startup, Eric Ries | 9780670921607 | Boeken

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The Lean Startup (paperback). Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. The Lean Startup is about learning wh...

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Whether you're creating a mobile app or a cat food delivery business, it's often helpful to start with a Minimum Viable Product. With an MVP, you'll spend more time building the things that matter, and be able to quickly test your assumptions--and the market. But how do you decide what stays and what goes?

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You don't want to waste your time and money building a product no one will want to use or pay for. So, first get out of the building and talk to your customers.

But there's a world of difference between talk and action. What your customers say, and what they eventually do. Talking, and putting the product in their hands. And yes: asking money for it.

You want them to put their money where their mouth was.

Sure, but what if you do not have a product yet? This is where the minimum viable product comes to play.

A minimum viable product is "that product which has just those features and no more that allows you to ship a product that early adopters see and, at least some of whom resonate with, pay you money for, and start to give you feedback on".

But why minimal? Because your time and money are severely limited. You want the biggest "bang for your buck": maximum learning with minimal effort.

Here are 7 inspirational MVP examples to get you started this week.

#1 Explainer Video

Explainer video is a short video that explains what your product does and why people should buy it. Often a simple, 90 seconds animation. Using an explainer video as a minimum viable product has served Dropbox very well.

Dropbox is a fast growing company with funding in excess of $250 million, ~80 employees, 50 million users, and $240 million in revenue. Drew Houston, the founder and CEO, has turned down an offer from Steve Jobs to buy their company.

But how did they begin?

They started with an explainer video - a 3m screencast published on Hacker news. The screencast was enough to give the early adopters a hint of the product experience. And enough to get many smart people to give them "the same feedback as if putting a product in their hand", says Drew on sllconf 2010.

New version of the video had the waiting list (of emails) jump from 5000 to whopping 75000 in one single day.

The explainer video served them that well that it is almost the only thing still featured on their landing page.

#2 A Landing Page

A landing page is a web page where visitors "land" after clicking a link from an ad, e-mail or another type of a campaign.

The job of a landing page is to quickly communicate the value of your offering, diffuse objections, and call the visitor to action.

Landing pages are where the excrement hits the fan. Based upon your interviews, surveys, and your product development you build a landing page.

Wait a minute, isn't a landing page a marketing instrument?

Sure it is. But it is also an MVP. The landing page validates your value proposition, product-solution fit, sales argumentation and can even validate your pricing.

And all that in an environment of brutal and merciless honesty: anonymous Internet browsing.

Here is what to do:

Craft your landing page

Set up a Google AdWord campaign and drive traffic to your new landing page. Even here you can let the AdWord engine rotate different messages and test what works best on your prospects

Set up Google Analytics. The most important thing to measure is conversions - percent of visitors that sign up (or perform another desired action)

Set up a chat to make it easy for the visitors to raise questions

Set up a service like Qualaroo to survey your visitors

#3 Wizard of Oz MVP

A "Wizard of Oz" MVP is when you put up a front that looks like a real working product, but you manually carry out product functions. It's also known as "Flinstoning".

Zappos shoes is the biggest online shoe retailer, with annual sales exceding $1 billion. In his Lean Startup book, Eric Ries describes how the founder started with a Wizard of Oz product.

The founder didn't start by stocking up big amounts of shoes and investing in an e-commerce backend. Instead, he went to local shoe shops. He would asked the owner's permission to take photos of shoes and put them online. Once the orders started flown in, he went to the shop, bought the pair that was ordered, shipped it, handled payments, returns... all of it himself, and by hand.

This was not a scalable business.

But it was an experiment designed focused on answering one question: is there already sufficient demand for a superior online shopping experience for shoes? And it allowed the founder to validate most of his assumptions with a very little investment.

#4 Concierge MVP

Instead of providing a product, you start with a manual service. But not just any service! The service should consist of exactly the same steps people would go through with your product.

Food on the table provides easy weekly recipe and grocery lists based on sales at your store. They need lots of stuff to make this work. A list of stores and groceries, weekly updates on sales, recipes, algorithms to match your preference to recipes to promotions...

It's a lot.

But the founders did not start by building all these assets. Again, from Riese's book, we learn what happened.

Before building anything, the two founders went to their local shop in Austin. They interviewed shoppers until they found one that was interested in their service.

She got a concierge treatment.

The CEO visited her every week. He came with a shopping list and selected recipes, carefully chosen based on (a) her preferences and (b) promotions in the local store. The list was updated on the spot based on her desires and feedback. Most importantly, the CEO would pick a check of $9.95 for this service.

This was no way to get rich.

But each week, they would learn more about what it takes to make their product a success. They kept adding more customers to their weekly visits, until they couldn't handle the load any more.

Only then they started coding.

One week they start sending lists and recipes via e-mail. A next one they wrote a piece of software to parse promotional store lists. Eventually, they started taking payments online.

Only after validating the basic product with customers of their initial store, they started adding stores, first in their region, to eventually grow into a nationwide business.

#5 Piecemeal MVP

This strategy is a blend between the "Wizard of Oz" and "Concierge" approaches. Again, you emulate the steps people would go through using your product - as you envision it.

But instead of delivering them manually, you emulate them using existing tools.

BJ Fogg, a professor from Stanford, has been studying human behavior for more than 18 years. And he has discovered a very simple way to help anyone install a new habit. All it takes is to pick 3 really tiny habits and stick to them for a week.

It is so simple, it took BJ a couple of hours to create a bare bones minimum viable product:

Sign up form was a Google Docs form

The instructions were described in a Google Docs document (which BJ was still editing as I was reading it)

An email reminder was sent manually every day. You had to reply, and write "y" if you've done your tiny habit, and another "y" if you wanted to go on the next day.

You'd then get a reply back with an encouragement.

I was one of the first users and I loved it. Along with a couple of thousands of others (3500 as of this writing).

He has obviously discovered a problem worth solving, and validated a very simple solution.

And what's really cool is that all these steps can easily be automated.

#6 Raise Funds from Customers

This is a special case of "sell it before you build it". The basic idea is simple: launch a crowdfunding campaign on platforms such as Kickstarter, IndieGoGo and RocketHub. Not only will you validate if customers want to buy your product, but you will also raise money.

And the benefits do not stop there. What you win in a successful crowdfunding campaign is a tribe of early adopters and raving fans. In this ReadWriteWeb article, Scott Steinberg advises to "embrace them and stay in constant contact. Not only are they likely to help you spread the word, but many times they'll also offer to contribute to your business in other ways".

Of course, crowdfunding will not work for just any type of product. Most products seem to have a strong consumer focus, and a value that is easy to communicate. Just have a look at the Kickstarter's 10 Biggest Success Stories.

#7. A Single Featured MVP

Emre Sokullu in a Tech Crunch post points out that some of the most successful applications started out with a simple feature: Google and Dropbox.

In fact, these two remain relatively the same as when they launched.

It is quite remarkable if you start to read the "about us" sections of successful applications. Many relate that their first mistake was to make too many features.

You can't be everything to everybody.

In their Signal To Noise blog 37 Signals points out the value of simplicity:

The key is to restate any hard problem that requires a lot of software into a simple problem that requires much less. You may not be solving exactly the same problem but that's alright. Solving 80% of the original problem for 20% of the effort is a major win. The original problem is almost never so bad that it's worth five times the effort to solve it.

This is the value of the single featured MVP. Chances are that if you cannot find that one killer feature that can stand on its own - at least in with early users - adding more features will not make the product a must have.

Conclusion

The 20 second summary of this lesson is: don't burn your money on a product no one will want to use. Get creative and think hard about what is the minimum thing you can do now to make sure that doesn't happen:

Select one MVP strategy you think would work for you

Create a simple plan to execute on it (remember the "minimal" in MVP)

But which one do you choose? It all depends upon your purpose for creating the MVP. Are you testing the appeal of an idea for a specific type of user? Do you want to learn which are the killer features? Do you need to generate revenue?

It comes down to tackling the biggest risk you have right now.

And then the next one. Ideally, this is the way you will go to market, one small experiment after another.

A minimum viable product is therefore not a product. It is a minimum viable go to market step.

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The Ultimate Guide to Minimum Viable Products - Scale XL

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You don't want to waste your time and money building a product no one will want to use or pay for. So, first get out of the building and talk to your customers. But there's a world of difference between talk and action. What your customers say, and what they eventually do.

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Powtoon | Create Awesome Videos Yourself

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Make videos in minutes with Powtoon. Use our library of styles, characters, backgrounds and video, or upload your own! Free. Easy. Awesome. Sign up today!

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3 Awesome Minimum Viable Products (MVPs)

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9 Landing Page MVP Tools You Should be Using

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"You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time-but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups-except they may start out heading toward Alaska." -- Evan Williams
It's the same story again and again. First, a team comes up with an idea.
Next, they build a minimum viable product (MVP) as a proof of concept, spending a lot of time arguing about which features to include or exclude from the MVP. Finally, if the MVP works well, they plan on building the full, mature, stable product.

So what's wrong with this picture? Why does it all go wrong for so many startups?

The problem is that these teams do not understand the point of an MVP. An MVP is not just a product with half of the features chopped out, or a way to get the product out the door a little earlier. In fact, the MVP doesn't have to be a product at all. And it's not something you build only once, and then consider the job done.

An MVP is a process that you repeat over and over again: Identify your riskiest assumption, find the smallest possible experiment to test that assumption, and use the results of the experiment to course correct.

When you build a product, you make many assumptions. You assume you know what users are looking for, how the design should work, what marketing strategy to use, what architecture will work most efficiently, which monetization strategy will make it sustainable, and which laws and regulations you have to comply with. No matter how good you are, some of your assumptions will be wrong. The problem is, you don't know which ones.

In a post-mortem of more than 100 startups, CB Insights found that the number one cause of startup failure (42% of the time) was "no market need." Nearly half of these startups spent months or even years building a product before they found out that they were wrong in their most central assumption: that someone was interested in that product in the first place.

The only way to find that out-the only way to test your assumptions-is to put your product in front of real users as quickly as possible. And when you do, you will often find that you have to go back to the drawing board. In fact, you'll have to go back to the drawing board not just once, but over and over again.

This is not unique to product development. When you're writing a book or an essay, you have to produce many drafts and spend lots of time editing. And when you're writing code, you frequently have to refactor or even rewrite the code. Every creative human endeavor requires an enormous amount of trial-and-error.

In a trial-and-error world, the one who can find errors the fastest wins. Some people call this philosophy "fail fast." At TripAdvisor, we called it "Speed Wins." Eric Ries called it Lean. Kent Beck and other programmers called it Agile. Whatever you call it, the point is to find out which of your assumptions are wrong by getting feedback on your product from real users as quickly as possible.

Whether you're building a product, writing code, or coming up with a marketing plan, you should always be asking yourself two questions:

What is my riskiest assumption?

What is the smallest experiment I can do to test this assumption?

MVP-as-a-process, in action
Let's go through an example.

You decide to build a product that allows restaurant owners to create a mobile app for their restaurants in just a few clicks. It'll have a simple drag and drop interface, a bunch of pre-built templates, an events calendar, newsletter, check-ins, photo galleries, real-time chat, integration with review sites, social networks, and Google Maps. And most importantly, it'll offer a way to make reservations, place take-out orders, and use coupons, from which you'll take a small cut as a way to monetize your product. This is going to be awesome!

You find a few friends to join you as co-founders and, if you're a typical startup team, you'll raise some money, lock yourselves in a room for 12 months, and try to build all these features. If you're slightly more savvy, you'll cut a few features that aren't essential for the first launch, so you'll be able to launch your "MVP" in 8 months instead of 12.

And in both cases, you're most likely going to fail.

Why? Well, consider how many assumptions you're making that could turn out to be disastrously wrong:

You spend months figuring out how to launch custom mobile apps for your clients, only to find out that what a restaurant owner really wants is a mobile-optimized website that's easy to find on Google.

Or, after using all the latest technologies to build real-time chat, you find out that restaurant owners can barely deal with email and don't want to sit at a computer all day.

Or, worst of all, you might find out that restaurant owners don't want the hassle of dealing with technology and maintaining mobile apps and have no interest in using your product in the first place.

Waiting months to discover these critical flaws is too long. At best, losing that much time is an enormous waste, and at worst, it'll put your company out of business. In the words of Peter Drucker, "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."

Let's try the MVP-as-a-process approach and see if we can do better. We will build the product incrementally, at each stage asking:

What is my riskiest assumption?

What is the smallest experiment I can do to test this assumption?

At the very beginning, the riskiest assumption is probably that restaurant owners want to create mobile apps.

Therefore, the very first MVP could be a mockup of such a mobile app - maybe even one you did on the back of a restaurant napkin (how fitting!) Go around to restaurant owners in your neighborhood and ask them what problems they have with technology. Do they have a mobile app already? If not, why not? Do they want one? How tech savvy are they? Do they understand the benefits? Show them your mockup. Find out if that would be a good solution to their problems.

You might find out there is not enough interest from restaurant owners to make this a viable business. That's a shame, but the good news is that all it cost you was a few hours of conversation instead of months of development. On the other hand, you might find out that restaurant owners are interested not in mobile apps, but in easy-to-create websites. That's progress!

But you're not done yet. Now you must repeat the process to build your next MVP.

At this point, it's probably that the restaurant owners would actually be willing to pay for such a website. What's the smallest experiment to test this assumption? One idea for the next MVP may be to create static websites by hand for a few of the restaurant owners who expressed interest and see how they respond. Do they like it? Are they impressed that the website is already done? How much would they pay to have such a site launched today?

Perhaps, when faced with the immediate prospect of spending money, you'll find out the restaurant owners aren't actually that interested. Well, good thing you learned this from just a few days of work instead of wasting months of development.

Or perhaps you'll find out they are willing to pay. So you accept the payment for a few months of service by cash or check (so you don't waste lots of time building a billing system), launch their sites, and ask them to email you if they need to update any of the website info. Yes, this involves a lot of manual effort on your part. No, this won't scale if the number of customers grows. But when you're a tiny startup, do not be afraid to do things that don't scale. Scaling is a good problem to have, as it means you've built something worth scaling.

But in the meantime, you need to repeat the MVP process one more time.

At this point it might be that your marketing strategy works. You can't go around in-person to every restaurant in the world. What is the smallest experiment you can do to test this assumption? Your MVP could be a landing page that describes what your product will do, shows off the restaurant websites you built by hand earlier, and lets visitors provide their email address if they are interested in hearing more when you launch. You can then buy a few hundred dollars of ads on Google, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to drive traffic to your landing page and see what happens.

If potential users won't even give you their email address, then they probably aren't going to give you any money either. It's much easier to discover this by tweaking some text and a few images on a landing page than by rewriting thousands of lines of code in the full product! The earlier you can find errors, the less time wasted on building the wrong thing.

This, in a nutshell, is the MVP process. Whether you're developing a product design, marketing plan, or writing code, always ask:

What is my riskiest assumption?

What is the smallest experiment I can do to test this assumption?

Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman is the author of Hello, Startup and the founder of Atomic Squirrel, a company that specializes in helping new startups get off the ground. Previously, he spent more than a decade at LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Cisco Systems, and Thomson Financial. He has a BS and Masters in Computer Science from Cornell University. Notes
A hat tip to John Wanamaker, the father of modern advertising, who once said, "I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted. I just don't know which half." ↩

In the words of Fred Brooks, "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." ↩

Instead of spending months building a flexible system to generate websites, you could get the first prototypes done in days by using free static website templates, filling them in manually based on information you learned from the restaurant owner, and launching them on a free static host. You could even use tools like Google's Keywords Planner to show the owners how often people search for their restaurant or cuisine in the general area. ↩

See Distribution Resources for ways to drive traffic to your landing page. You can quickly make changes to the messaging on your landing page and ads and use A/B testing (see MVP Resources) to find out what resonates with your audience. ↩

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A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It's a Process

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"You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time-but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups-except they may start out heading toward Alaska." -- Evan Williams It's the same story again and again. First, a team comes up with an idea.

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So you've just taken some killer photos with your new DSLR, or you captured a great video with your iPhone - what's next? While it feels natural to just post media quickly to your Facebook Page, sometimes great photos or video need their own home in the form of a personal website.

But on the other hand, it's not easy to make a website layout that complements rich media. In order to make a great website, professional web designers take advantage of mockup tools to analyze layout, design and functionality. Taking advantage of these applications (some of which are 100% free) is a wise move - especially if you're interested in creating a professional website for your photography or video.

We've rounded up nine applications that can help you get the most out of designing your web layout. What's your tip for displaying photos or video on your website? Let us know in the comments.

Perhaps one of the more well-known and popular mockup tools, Balsamiq Mockups is a cloud-based mockup service (with accompanying desktop application) that enables you to quickly and easily create fun and interactive website mockups. With its trademark sketchy, hand-drawn look, Balsamiq Mockups lets you focus on solving larger UI problems rather than obsessing over the details.

The application comes with a huge collection of drop-in components and reusable libraries, and an easy drag-and-drop interface. Since it is cross-platform and has full offline support, you can create mockups anywhere.

Pricing for the desktop application starts at $79 for a single-user license, but a 50% discount is available when you sign up for a monthly subscription to myBalsamiq (plans start at $12 per month).

Mockingbird is another popular web-based wireframing application, with some great functionality baked in for linking and sharing your mockups. Designed for rapid prototyping, Mockingbird lets you create interfaces quickly with the drag-and-drop editor, either alone or in collaboration with a team.

By linking pages together, you can then create interactive mockups and wireframes - perfect for sharing with your clients, reviewing workflow and streamlining your user experience.

Mockingbird subscription plans start at just $9 per month for a personal account (which allows you to have two active projects), and team plans ranging from $20 to $85 per month, depending on the number of projects.

Mockup Builder is a free web application built in Microsoft Silverlight that is designed to let you create software and website mockups, then easily share them with clients or coworkers.

The library of available elements is diverse (supporting desktop, browser, iOS and Android components) but limited in quantity. For a free tool, however, Mockup Builder certainly has its bases covered and offers a great starting point for prototyping simple ideas and concepts.

When you're ready to share your mockup, projects can be exported as both PNG and PDF files or shared directly. Those with access can then leave feedback and comments on the project.

MockFlow is a "super-easy wireframing" service that enables you to create and collaborate on complex interactive wireframes and UI prototypes for your web sites and applications.

As with Balsamiq, MockFlow includes a cross-platform desktop application (powered by Adobe Air), so you can build your UI concepts in a streamlined, clutter-free environment with full offline support. MockFlow also includes a free mobile application that is perfect for presenting prototypes to clients and accessing your mockups on the fly. A number of other add-ons are also available.

MockFlow has two pricing options - a free plan that gets you one small project (four pages) with two collaborators, and a Premium package at $99 per year for unlimited projects, several add-ons and a few additional perks. With a price point at under $100 annually for the premium account, Mockflow is one of the more affordable professional solutions.

With more than 26,000 projects created, HotGloo is another wireframing and website mockup tool that's been around for quite a while. This web application sports a large library of components, a feature-rich, drag-and-drop interface and tools for both collaboration and review.

The service has one of the more polished web-based authoring environments we've seen, making this application a pleasure to use. With HotGloo, you'll be able to create entire user interactions - you can design, test, revise and review your complete application workflow. Other tools include the ability to create master templates (which can be applied across an entire project), smart element stacks for organizing your UI and role-based access for authors and clients.

HotGloo's pricing plans range from $14 to $54 per month, with a 15-day free trial for new accounts.

Invision is another online tool aimed at helping you design, share and test your user experience. More than just wireframes, Invision lets you create fully featured and highly interactive mockups with as much polish as you want to put into them. Great collaboration tools make it easy to share projects and work together as a team, and mobile support is quite good.

Whether you're creating high-fidelity prototypes or interactive wireframes, Invision makes authoring and sharing projects easy. The wireframing tools include a large element library, and more detailed mockups give you complete control over images, colors and layout via a streamlined and clean editing environment.

Invision boasts a network of more than 30,000 designers, including some big-name companies. Subscription plans range from free (for up to two projects) to $75 per month for up to 20 active projects. There's also a 30-day free trial on all accounts.

JustProto is a wireframing web application with a few features we haven't seen in other products. Like many similar offerings, JustProto has a large library of wireframe elements and widgets, accessible via a simple drag-and-drop interface. However, there are a few other key features that set JustProto apart from the crowd.

Not only can you share projects via a single share link, JustProto also enables you to collaborate in real-time with other designers, chat with clients and collaborators, and keep a history of all chat communication. With JustProto, you can create fully featured, interactive wireframes in real-time and then gather instant feedback.

JustProto plans range from $19 to $99 per month, with custom packages available for large-scale and enterprise customers. A free 15-day trial period is provided, and there's no credit card required to sign-up.

Proto.io is an application prototyping platform designed specifically for prototyping mobile applications. This web app helps you to create mobile mockups with ease for iPhone, iPad, Android and a number of other devices. Proto.io gives you full control over colors, fonts and layout, and it comes with a large element library to make building rich prototypes easier.

Proto.io also lets you share projects and collaborate with other designers. Proto.io mockups can be viewed directly on your mobile device, giving you a better feel for how your application will look and function in a real-world setting, or you can view projects via the Proto.io web player.

There's a free plan available, which is good for one small (five screen) project, and paid subscriptions are $24 and $49 per month, with fairly generous offerings on disk quota, screens, collaborators and other resources.

Last, but not least, inPresso Screens is a prototyping tool for both desktop software and websites. One of the things we like about inPresso is the ability to skin applications using popular window manager themes from a variety of operating systems. This is great if you're mocking up a desktop application and you need to get a real feel for what the final product will look like.

inPresso is available as a free desktop application or via subscription, with some pretty important distinctions between the two. The free version gives you a desktop tool for authoring application prototypes and wireframes which can be saved and edited locally. In addition to the base tools, the subscription package also allows access to an online library of UI elements, and enables instant online publication and sharing of your prototypes as well as a web player for presenting prototypes to your clients.

The desktop application itself is cross-platform and annual subscriptions are only $29 per year.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, kryczka

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So you've just taken some killer photos with your new DSLR, or you captured a great video with your iPhone - what's next? While it feels natural to just post media quickly to your Facebook Page, sometimes great photos or video need their own home in the form of a personal website.

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In last week's post, I described the one thing your MVP should do - check it out for good and bad examples of MVPs.

To recap...

An MVP tests your riskiest assumption, with the least effort. Click To Tweet

Based on the above, a couple things about MVPs become clear:

1. To know what MVP to build, you must know your riskiest assumption.

2. As your riskiest assumption changes, your MVP will change.

In other words, creating your MVP(s) is a journey - one that starts by validating your riskiest assumption.

Once you validate that riskiest assumption, a new assumption will become the "riskiest." That means you'll create a new MVP, or modify your current one, to validate it. You'll continue this process until you acheive Product-Market Fit.

Of course to start the journey, you have to know what your current riskiest assumption is...

What's your Riskiest Assumption?

Determining your Riskiest Assumption can feel like black magic. With so many assumptions to choose from...

You can build a product that makes customers happy.

You can find customers who will buy it.

The customers will pay enough for it.

Etc.

How do figure out which one is "riskiest?" How do you even evaluate the "risk" of an assumption?

After helping thousands of startups at accelerators and 1-on-1 validate their business models, I've seen a clear pattern of "riskiness" has emerged. A pattern so clear that I've been able to create a simple tool that quickly tells founders:

1. What your Riskiest Assumption is.

2. What MVP should you build to test it.

3. Where you are on your path to Product-Market Fit.

Just answer the questions in the Riskiest Assumption Assessment and then take a look at the 5 Phases of Product Market Fit below to understand exactly what your next step should be.

If you want a hand taking that step, the Assessment will also tell you the most helpful exercise for you in my upcoming workbook series, " FOCUS Framework: How to Find Product-Market Fit" (launching May 3rd).

What MVP should you be building? Let's find out... Click To Tweet

The 5 Phases of Product-Market Fit

On your path to Product-Market Fit, there are five phases of assumption validation you'll progress through. In order of "riskiness", those phases are...

1. Finding Early Adopters for your product

2. Offer Testing: You can reach your Early Adopters

3. Currency Testing: Your Early Adopters will pay you

4. Utility Testing: You can satisfy your Early Adopters

5. Scaling to Fit: You can achieve Product-Market Fit

Based on the results of your Riskiest Assumption Assessment above, identify which phase you're in now to learn more about the MVP you should build, and see what's ahead of you on your path to Product-Market Fit.

1. Finding Early Adopters for your Product

The riskiest assumption, for every startup, is that there are people actively trying to solve the problem your product will solve for them - these are the people we refer to as your Early Adopters.

In particular, your goal during this phase of testing is to validate:

1. There are people already trying to solve the problem (Early Adopters)

2. You know how they describe the problem

3. You know the emotions they experience associated with the problem

4. You know where/how to reach them

5. The deficiencies of their current solution

Experiment to Run: The best technique for validating these assumptions is the customer discovery interview.

Interviews will answer any questions you have regarding the assumptions above, and set you up for success in validating the rest of your assumptions.

Metric to Measure: What percentage of customers you interview report taking steps to solve the same problem w/n the last 6 months? Once 60% of your last 10 interviewees report actively trying to solve the same problem, in my book, you'll have found your Early Adopters.

2. Offer Testing: You can Reach your Early Adopters

During your interviews, customers will tell you where and how to reach other Early Adopters. Your goal in this phase is to validate what they told you.

In other words, you're testing that you can find more Early Adopters, you know what to say to them when you find them, and that they're eager enough for a solution to the problem that they ask you for more information.

MVP to Build: To validate this assumption, you're going to test a combination of marketing channels and marketing messages based on the results of your interviews.

Potential MVPs:

Ad campaigns

Cold email outreach

Cold calling campaigns

Becoming member of forums/communities

Social media outreach

Attending conferences, meetups, etc.

Metric to Measure: Once your Early Adopters' response rate to your "Solution Offer" (i.e. click on your ads, respond to your emails, etc.) is high enough that you can clearly see a path to Product-Market Fit, you're ready to test the next assumption.

3. Currency Testing: Your Early Adopters will Pay you

Once you've validated you can reach your Early Adopters, you need to test if they'll "pay" you sufficiently to solve the problem.

In this case "payment" can be in the form of actual cash, or it can be something else that leads directly to your Product-Market Fit (e.g. usage of your product, personal data, etc.) depending on your business model.

MVP to Build: To validate this assumption you're going to actually ask for "payment." While you won't usually take the payment (because your product hasn't been built yet), you're going to ask for it and measure how many Early Adopters try to pay you.

Examples include:

Landing page with pre-order functionality

Requesting a Letter of Intent after a solution interview

A mobile app w/ just enough functionality to measure the number of downloads and opens

Metric to Measure: Once your Early Adopters "payment" conversion rate is high enough that you can clearly see a path to Product-Market Fit, you're ready to test whether you can start solving the problem!

4. Utility Testing: You can Satisfy your Early Adopters

Now it's time to test whether you can actually solve your Early Adopters' problems. While it can be tempting to automate your first couple attempts at a solution, there's usually a more efficient way to to test this assumption.

MVP to Build: manual solutions are the best way to test whether you can solve an Early Adopter's problem.

While they make take more of your time to solve a customer's problem, manual solutions are much faster to build, and even faster to iterate on, than automated (i.e. software) solutions.

Examples include:

Metric to Measure: Once you're solving the problem sufficiently well that your Customer Lifetime Value and your Viral Co-Efficient are high enough that you're tracking towards Product-Market Fit, you're ready to start scaling your solution!

5. Scaling to Fit: You can achieve Product-Market Fit

Once you've validated that Early Adopters exist, you can reach them, they'll pay you, and you can solve their problems sufficiently, the only assumption left is that you can scale until you achieve Product-Market Fit.

MVP to Build: now is the time you get to automate your solution, scale to multiple marketing channels, and branch out to your second and third customer segments.

Examples include:

Beta version of your software

Software-based pilot for a large customer

Running outreach campaigns in multiple channels simultaneously

Multiple, simultaneous, landing page test targeting different customers

Metric to Measure: At this point you're measuring that all your previous metrics (e.g. response rate, conversion rate, Lifetime Value and Viral Co-Efficient) are all still tracking towards you achieving Product-Market Fit.

Want Help?

I know that's a lot to digest, but you now have an overview of the entire path to Product-Market Fit.

If you'd like more detail on any of the phases above, including:

How to define your Product-Market Fit metric (i.e. how do you know if you're on track to achieving Product-Market Fit?)

How to conduct your customer interviews

How to do marketing channel and messaging testing

How to do payment testing (without losing/upsetting your customers)

How to manually test your solution

How to scale your solution

I've spent the last 18 months developing and testing that upcoming workbook series I mentioned - the FOCUS Framework. It includes 40+ experiments, exercises and tools, all inspired by my experiences teaching Lean Startup and Customer development at accelerators, and to founders 1-on-1, around the world.

FOCUS officially launches May 3rd, and if you're interested, you can get a $20 off launch-day coupon here: http://focus.customerdevlabs.com.

Recap

Based on the "Your MVP Should do 1 Thing" post, you know that:

An MVP tests your riskiest assumption, with the least effort. Click To Tweet

In this post you learned:

1. Your Riskiest Assumption

2. What MVP you should use to test it

3. Where you are on your path toward Product-Market Fit

4. What phases of Product-Market Fit validation are ahead of you

What's Next?

In the following weeks I'll be continuing this MVP series:

1. What is an MVP?

2. (This one) What Kind of MVP Should you Build?

3. My 9 Favorite Tools for Building Landing Page MVPs

4. Is your Landing Page not Converting? Here's why.

Subscribe to get all of these posts in your inbox.

Like last week, if you leave a comment below with a link to your landing page MVP and if it provides a good lesson for others to learn from, I'll post a (public) video review of what you're doing well, and what you might consider changing.

Thanks to those who submitted their last week. I'll be compiling everything for the final post in this MVP series!

I'd also love feedback on the new Riskiest Assessment Tool. Let me know what you like, and what you don't, in the comments below.

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What MVP Should you be Building? - Customer Development Labs

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Updated] May 18, 2016 In last week's post, I described the one thing your MVP should do - check it out for good and bad examples of MVPs. To recap... Based on the above, a couple things about MVPs become clear: To know what MVP to build, you must know your riskiest assumption.