The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [38]
Most entrepreneurs approach a question like this by building the product and then checking to see how customers react to it. I consider this to be exactly backward because it can lead to a lot of waste. First, if it turns out that we’re building something nobody wants, the whole exercise will be an avoidable expense of time and money. If customers won’t sign up for the free trial, they’ll never get to experience the amazing features that await them. Even if they do sign up, there are many other opportunities for waste. For example, how many features do we really need to include to appeal to early adopters? Every extra feature is a form of waste, and if we delay the test for these extra features, it comes with a tremendous potential cost in terms of learning and cycle time.
The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.
To demonstrate, I’ll share several MVP techniques from actual Lean Startups. In each case, you’ll witness entrepreneurs avoiding the temptation to overbuild and overpromise.
THE VIDEO MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT
Drew Houston is the CEO of Dropbox, a Silicon Valley company that makes an extremely easy-to-use file-sharing tool. Install its application, and a Dropbox folder appears on your computer desktop. Anything you drag into that folder is uploaded automatically to the Dropbox service and then instantly replicated across all your computers and devices.
The founding team was made up of engineers, as the product demanded significant technical expertise to build. It required, for example, integration with a variety of computer platforms and operating systems: Windows, Macintosh, iPhone, Android, and so on. Each of these implementations happens at a deep level of the system and requires specialized know-how to make the user experience exceptional. In fact, one of Dropbox’s biggest competitive advantages is that the product works in such a seamless way that the competition struggles to emulate it.
These are not the kind of people one would think of as marketing geniuses. In fact, none of them had ever worked in a marketing job. They had prominent venture capital backers and could have been expected to apply the standard engineering thinking to building the business: build it and they will come. But Dropbox did something different.
In parallel with their product development efforts, the founders wanted feedback from customers about what really mattered to them. In particular, Dropbox needed to test its leap-of-faith question: if we can provide a superior customer experience, will people give our product a try? They believed—rightly, as it turned out—that file synchronization was a problem that most people didn’t know they had. Once you experience the solution, you can’t imagine how you ever lived without it.
This is not the kind of entrepreneurial question you can ask or expect an answer to in a focus group. Customers often don’t know what they want, and they often had a hard time understanding Dropbox when the concept was explained. Houston learned this the hard way when he tried to raise venture capital. In meeting after meeting, investors would explain that this “market space” was crowded with existing products, none of them had made very much money, and the problem wasn’t a very important one. Drew would ask: “Have you personally tried those other products?” When they would say yes, he’d ask: “Did they work seamlessly for you?” The answer was almost always no. Yet in meeting after meeting, the venture capitalists could not imagine a world in line with Drew’s vision. Drew, in contrast, believed that if the software “just worked