The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [37]
However, those early results were extremely significant in predicting IMVU’s future path. As you’ll see in Chapter 7, we were able to validate two of our leap-of-faith assumptions: IMVU was providing value for customers, and we had a working engine of growth. The gross numbers were small because we were selling the product to visionary early customers called early adopters. Before new products can be sold successfully to the mass market, they have to be sold to early adopters. These people are a special breed of customer. They accept—in fact prefer—an 80 percent solution; you don’t need a perfect solution to capture their interest.4
Early technology adopters lined up around the block for Apple’s original iPhone even though it lacked basic features such as copy and paste, 3G Internet speed, and support for corporate e-mail. Google’s original search engine could answer queries about specialized topics such as Stanford University and the Linux operating system, but it would be years before it could “organize the world’s information.” However, this did not stop early adopters from singing its praises.
Early adopters use their imagination to fill in what a product is missing. They prefer that state of affairs, because what they care about above all is being the first to use or adopt a new product or technology. In consumer products, it’s often the thrill of being the first one on the block to show off a new basketball shoe, music player, or cool phone. In enterprise products, it’s often about gaining a competitive advantage by taking a risk with something new that competitors don’t have yet. Early adopters are suspicious of something that is too polished: if it’s ready for everyone to adopt, how much advantage can one get by being early? As a result, additional features or polish beyond what early adopters demand is a form of wasted resources and time.
This is a hard truth for many entrepreneurs to accept. After all, the vision entrepreneurs keep in their heads is of a high-quality mainstream product that will change the world, not one used by a small niche of people who are willing to give it a shot before it’s ready. That world-changing product is polished, slick, and ready for prime time. It wins awards at trade shows and, most of all, is something you can proudly show Mom and Dad. An early, buggy, incomplete product feels like an unacceptable compromise. How many of us were raised with the expectation that we would put our best work forward? As one manager put it to me recently, “I know for me, the MVP feels a little dangerous—in a good way—since I have always been such a perfectionist.”
Minimum viable products range in complexity from extremely simple smoke tests (little more than an advertisement) to actual early prototypes complete with problems and missing features. Deciding exactly how complex an MVP needs to be cannot be done formulaically. It requires judgment. Luckily, this judgment is not difficult to develop: most entrepreneurs and product development people dramatically overestimate how many features are needed in an MVP. When in doubt, simplify.
For example, consider a service sold with a one-month free trial. Before a customer can use the service, he or she has to sign up for the trial. One obvious assumption, then, of the business model is that customers will sign up for a free trial once they have a certain amount of information about the service. A critical question to consider is whether customers will in fact sign up for the free trial given a certain number of promised features (the value hypothesis).
Somewhere in the business model, probably buried