Lean Startup and its founder Eric Ries have been around long enough for professionals to begin coming up with their own takes on Ries’ central Minimum Viable Product (MVP) concept. Some of those new takes propose alternatives: a startup should begin with a minimum viable product or a minimum lovable product or a minimum viable brand.
And once the executive suite has decided which it will start with, how does the marketing team deal with that choice?
Starting lean Ries’ way is definitely connected to marketing, describing entrepreneurship as “operating under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” Ries shares three questions he asks himself that can help professionals be more entrepreneurial within their daily business activities: “ ‘who’s the customer for this?’ ‘What is the benefit to the customer, what is it that they hope to get from your work?’ and ‘how do you know that you have positively impacted them?’”[1]
Once an entrepreneur asks those questions, the sometimes difficult task of answering them begins. Many of their answers can be found through established market research processes, “Marketing Research is the systematic process of collecting, processing, and analyzing data to provide required information to decision makers,” says Marketing Research, book two in the SMstudy Guide to the Sales and Marketing Body of Knowledge (SMstudy® Guide) adding, “it can provide information for pricing a new product or for designing a new mobile app or for finalizing the new TV advertisement for a product.”[2]
The way “minimum viable product” is defined by developer sources and forums such as Techopedia puts it directly into the arena of marketing research. Techopedia says, “A minimum viable product (MVP) is a development technique in which a new product or website is developed with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters. The final, complete set of features is only designed and developed after considering feedback from the product's initial users.”[3]
This is a way—an inexpensive way according to its proponents—for gathering primary data. The SMstudy® Guide says, “When the needed data is non-existent, outdated, incorrect, or inadequate, the researcher needs to collect primary data.” Because startups often are presenting new products, innovative approaches or totally new services, it is likely that the needed data is non-existent.
“Primary data may be obtained from consumers, subject matter experts, random samplings of a target segment, organizations, and other sources,” according to the SMstudy® Guide. The release of a MVP is designed to gather information from consumers: Techopedia says each MVP “has enough value that people are willing to use it or buy it initially, demonstrates enough future benefit to retain early adopters and provides a feedback loop to guide future development.” That feedback loop is the key component for the MVP as a marketing research tool.
The phrase “enough value that people are willing to use it or buy it initially” becomes important in the dialogue surrounding Ries’ concept. “Sure, there are the same highlighted examples, but in today's highly competitive markets aiming for a product that customers will tolerate rather than love seems foolhardy,” says Brian DeHoff, co-founder, CEO of Aha! in a comment on a Quora thread.[4] Instead, DeHoff suggests striving for the Minimum Loveable Product (MLP), one that the consuming public will not just accept, but take to their hearts.
“Every startup should be brand-led and market-informed,” says Gerard Danforth in that same Quora conversation, suggesting that startups should, instead, aim for “the Minimum Viable Brand (MVB).” A practice he says, “helps ensure that the initial hypothesis is grounded in strategic intent and market insights.”
Greg Ettinger found that the apparent first use of “minimum loveable product” came from Spotify’s Henrik Kniberg’s description of the term—“So the squad needs to figure out the smallest possible thing they can build to fulfill the basic narrative and delight the users.” He concluded that when compared with Ries’ MVP, “Both describe the simplest version of the product that is narrative-complete (i.e. solves an existing problem) and capable of delighting users without being feature-complete.” The choice between the two becomes a matter of emphasis more than substance.
Whatever choice a business makes, SMstudy can help with books in the SMstudy® Guide on marketing research, marketing strategy, digital marketing and corporate sales.
For more interesting articles on sales and marketing, visit http://www.SMstudy.com.
[1] “Video: Eric Ries Talks to Beth Comstock about Entrepreneurship in the Age of Uncertainty” GE Reports. Retrieved on 5/23/16 from http://www.gereports.com/a-lean-mean-startup-machine-business-strategist-wants-companies-to-embrace-uncertainty
[2] Available at http://www.smstudy.com/Individuals/Buy-SMstudy-Guide
[3] “Minimum Viable Product (MVP)” (2016) Techopedia. Retrieved on 6/8/16 from https://www.techopedia.com/definition/27809/minimum-viable-product-mvp
[4] From Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-minimum-viable-product
