Moving out of Airbnb
Looking at what modern-age MVPs stand for.
MVPs are one of the most abused terms in the modern lexicon of startup culture, and a lot is because of the above picture. The tacky design and the unloaded icons of the Airbnb initial MVP are propagated across books, seminars and in meetups to make people clear that as long as the product works, it can look and behave shit and the users would still love it.
The problem with the above picture is the context. That site was created in the early 2000s when the Internet was so much more deserted and there wasn’t as big of an audience as it is today. Things usually loaded slowly, and people were okay with that. The startup culture itself was new and consisted of interesting people finding new things to build on the Internet. The point is that the Airbnb MVP was perfect for the times it existed but things have changed now. Today people are much more tech-savvy than ever and with social media the notion of being pixel-perfect is more than ever now. The idea of an MVP fundamentally, therefore, comes to who you’re serving, what interests they have and what notion they have of the world they live in their daily lives.
The whole point of an MVP is to test the hypothesis of your startup, get feedback from the early adopters, fail and iterate fast enough to achieve Product-Market Fit and then scale from there. But what many miss out on from this is a fundamental lesson from Business Studies called the points of parity. The points of parity are basically the standard qualities that all businesses in the same industry must have in order to be competitive or on par. A standard quality UI design, a decent enough processing speed, and an appealing and to-the-face differentiating factor are significant today to leave an impression on a potential customer for an average startup, until and unless you’re creating something valuable like ChatGPT or Midjourney.
Launching something valuable, quickly
Despite the misuse of the concept by many people, it’s crucial not to abandon the notion of an MVP. Conducting a minimal market test remains a vital element in the process of creating a product.
What we fundamentally have to realise are two things. Firstly, you need to build something valuable in a quick span of time. It is difficult to achieve something valuable as well as something quick, and that's why it’s imperative to schedule all the specs of your MVP before you start, and cut down on stuff that is not important(and sometimes even stuff that is important). Condensing your expansive vision into a small MVP is tough pill to digest, but you need to look at the MVP as not a stepping stone, but a single starting step. This is very hard to digest, especially for first-time founders. Today’s startup culture, especially on social media, almost compares the launch of a product with the launch of a rocket(🚀 we’ve all used this to be fair). How many remember when Google launched? How about Facebook? So it turns out that launches aren’t that special, okay? So if you have this magical idea of your magical launch you wanna do, throw it away. It’s not that special. Think of your first product as a leaky bucket that you’re giving out to users to understand where all the holes are and quickly fix them.
Secondly, the core idea of an MVP is to test out your hypothesis. Going back to the bucket example, with the hypothesis of people using it to fill water, if you build a bucket with a rough and shredded material that makes the user prick whenever they hold it, no one’s going to even touch your bucket not because your bucket can’t hold water, but because it pains even to touch it. That’s where I would like to reiterate the concept of points of parity again. Today’s software tools are more powerful than they were 10 years ago, and people are much more with technology. An overall user experience is super-important today, for people are surrounded by so many products. Today, on average, a large enterprise uses 950 tools to get through day-to-day business, so it's very important to have a great customer experience in the early stages to make them feel valued and for them to be your evangelists and spread the word around similar users.
Conclusion
The fundamental idea is to understand that MVP is not a product with minimum features, but rather a tool with core functionalities sufficient enough to implement an idea and retain and excite early adopters.
So when someone asks for an MVP, ask yourself, “What 10% segment of this request could we build to discover if it makes sense to build the other 90%?” And make sure it would take under 10% of the time needed to build the entire product.
“MVP is not MVP until it sells; it must carry enough value to the users.”
