3 Awesome Minimum Viable Products (MVPs)

What are the best MPVs of all time? I've absolutely no idea... but Buffer, Dropbox and Zappos are three of my favourites.

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0:15 - Ground rules for a perfect MVP
1:00 - Buffer's MVP
1:58 - Dropbox's MVP
3:23 - Zappos' MVP

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35. 3 Awesome Minimum Viable Products (MVPs)
# #DevelopmentThatPays

Today, we're going to take a look at three of my favourite examples of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). Before diving in. let's establish some ground rules for a "proper" MVP It's got to be Minimal It's got to be Viable And it's got to be a Prod... Actually No, it does not need to be a Product. (I'll be showing you a great example of a "non-product" in a minute or two.) Some have argued that the word "Product" in MVP is unhelpful. Steven Cohn has made a strong case for the word "Experiment". I agree. But for now let's stick with the "P" and temporarily re-define it to.... Pre-meditated. Meaning that the MVP must be a deliberate attempt to learn about the market. This rules out cases that look like MVPs in retrospect, but were really full products that - to everyone's surprise - developed into something big. Let's get going. No. 3 - Buffer ------ Buffer is a application that makes it easy to share content on social media. Here's what they put on the their site. A test, certainly. But it falls short of an MVP in my opinion. Their next test was better. They slotted this page in-between the other two pages. Now visitors to the website are not just saying "This is interesting" They're saying "I want to BUY this". Okay, there's nowhere to input your credit card details. But anyone who got this far was at least prepared to think about parting with their money. As co-founder Joel Gascoigne said: "After this result, I didn’t hesitate to start building the first minimal version of the real, functioning product." Minimal - certainly Viable - yes Pre-mediated - check Buffer's current valuation is something close to $400 million No. 2 - Dropbox ---- Dropbox, as I'm sure you know, is a file synchronisation service. Edit a file on your desktop... ... and seconds later its updated on all of your other devices. Rewind to the early days. The team - entirely composed of techies - had the basic synchronisation working. That was the easy bit. The hard bit was going to be to achieve the same trick on pretty well every platform: Mac, Windows, iPhone, etc. Given that the team was all techies, you'd have put money on them diving straight in. But CEO Drew Houston did something surprising. He made a video. The video - just three minutes long - demonstrated the synch process end to end. But it was more than just a demo: it was full of techie in-jokes... designed to appeal to early adopters. It worked like a charm In Drew's words: “It drove hundreds of thousands of people to the website. Our beta waiting list went from 5,000 people to 75,000 people literally overnight. It totally blew us away.” Minimal - Yes Viable - Not a product that could be used, but a product that could be demonstrated. Pre-Meditated - Yes Dropbox went on to do quite well. It's current value stands between $5 and $10 BILLION. No. 1 - Zappos ---- It's 1999. Co-founder Nick Swinmurn wanted to build an online store for shoes. But would people use it Here's how he went about finding out. He popped down to lis local shoe shops he went into the shops and... ... I sh!t you not... he PHOTOGRAPHED PAIRS OF SHOES! The photos were uploaded to a super-simple website. If someone clicked on the button to buy a pair Nick would pop down to the store and... BUY THE SHOES! Zero infrastructure. Zero inventory. Minimal - definitely Viable - This time it's not even up for discussion. Most definitely: real customers; real money changing hands; real shoes! Pre-meditated Check. Zappos went on to do quite well: it was acquired by Amazon in 2009 for a cool $1.2 billion. Your thoughts, please! -

[QuintinTufoua]

simple and easy to understand video of how MVP works. Great job!!

[sebastianmaciejak]

I was shocked when I saw such a low number of follwers - it means surly you'll get them very soon. The quality of the video and substantive content. Great job!

[DouglasMcDavid]

Awesome - A Minimal Video Presentation! Very timely for an international group of mates at work at the moment.

[shamoomook]

Great vdo really help me understand more about MVP. Thank you so much!

[marasvenne]

So cool. We create videos to introduce a feature to our internal users as part of 'change management'. What if we create the video first.. as our MVP, before even building the feature. then - we are at least partway to 'change management' before we start. Love this video. (Had heard the zappos story, but not the others. thanks for posting!

[MyIcyBlitz]

nice video. I was wondering the whole day if the mvp had to be an actual product and you gave the answer in the first 50 seconds.
Thank you very much!

[ttillas]

Great video!Great commentator! Thank you for uploading!Will send you a link to my landpage as soon as it's out there. Haha

[GokhanElgun]

Very nice choices of MVPs. I did not know how Zappos started.

[ElDoctorCoctel]

Great video. A "olé" for you from Spain.

[cedricishimwe_ki]

wow Thank you so much. that was so insightful

[darrensapalo]

Super interesting video. Thanks for generating this content. :)

[PrettyPinkPeacock]

Minimum viable "practise"? although someone before did say "proof", and that's pretty good too.

[richardrandolph]

I'm not sure I'm right but it seems to me that the original iPad 1 was actually an MVP for introducing a brand new product category. When you compare its very sparse feature set with the iPad 2, it seems like the 1 was introduced just to gauge market reception.

[dunrie]

Great video and great sound quality, too.
Sorry to point out there's a typo at 0:28 - "minimimal" should be "minimal".

[fernandocastilloj]

Excelent video, there are 2 interesting MVP's in my perspective. Spotify and Minecraft that should be analyzed

[carljustinemosquida]

How did they drive traffic to their mvp's?

[llcooljuwon]

Very informative video, thank you very much for sharing.
Question: Would you consider a prototype (for an app) that enables user-testing to gather feedback to be a MVP?
I am currently developing one, not just to bring my idea to life, but to provide the target audience with the most important features/functions, and get their feedback to guide future development

Thank you

[kevinngaleu]

Fake it until you make it! great content! just discover

[kambizdoonboli]

Nice video. This is now featured on PencilTree

[renebastijans]

A little late to the game but... how about doing a Kickstarter campaign as your MVP? Technically, you don't have to build anything, perhaps a short video of some ppt slides will do, and any backers have to put in real money to back your project. Looks pretty minimal (ppt animation video), viable (pay money to back the project) and pre-meditated (learn about if people are willing to spend money on your idea) to me. Thoughts?