The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [39]
The challenge was that it was impossible to demonstrate the working software in a prototype form. The product required that they overcome significant technical hurdles; it also had an online service component that required high reliability and availability. To avoid the risk of waking up after years of development with a product nobody wanted, Drew did something unexpectedly easy: he made a video.
The video is banal, a simple three-minute demonstration of the technology as it is meant to work, but it was targeted at a community of technology early adopters. Drew narrates the video personally, and as he’s narrating, the viewer is watching his screen. As he describes the kinds of files he’d like to synchronize, the viewer can watch his mouse manipulate his computer. Of course, if you’re paying attention, you start to notice that the files he’s moving around are full of in-jokes and humorous references that were appreciated by this community of early adopters. Drew recounted, “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.” Today, Dropbox is one of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies, rumored to be worth more than $1 billion.5
In this case, the video was the minimum viable product. The MVP validated Drew’s leap-of-faith assumption that customers wanted the product he was developing not because they said so in a focus group or because of a hopeful analogy to another business, but because they actually signed up.
THE CONCIERGE MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT
Consider another kind of MVP technique: the concierge MVP. To understand how this technique works, meet Manuel Rosso, the CEO of an Austin, Texas–based startup called Food on the Table. Food on the Table creates weekly meal plans and grocery lists that are based on food you and your family enjoy, then hooks into your local grocery stores to find the best deals on the ingredients.
After you sign up for the site, you walk through a little setup in which you identify your main grocery store and check off the foods your family likes. Later, you can pick another nearby store if you want to compare prices. Next, you’re presented with a list of items that are based on your preferences and asked: “What are you in the mood for this week?” Make your choices, select the number of meals you’re ready to plan, and choose what you care about most in terms of time, money, health, or variety. At this point, the site searches through recipes that match your needs, prices out the cost of the meal for you, and lets you print out your shopping list.6
Clearly, this is an elaborate service. Behind the scenes, a team of professional chefs devise recipes that take advantage of items that are on sale at local grocery stores around the country. Those recipes are matched via computer algorithm to each family’s unique needs and preferences. Try to visualize the work involved: databases of almost every grocery store in the country must be maintained, including what’s on sale at each one this week. Those groceries have to be matched to appropriate recipes and then appropriately customized, tagged, and sorted. If a recipe calls for broccoli rabe, is that the same ingredient as the broccoli on sale at the local market?
After reading that description, you might be surprised to learn that Food on the Table (FotT) began life with a single customer. Instead of supporting thousands of grocery stores around the country as it does today, FotT supported just one. How did the company choose which store to support? The founders didn’t—until they had their first customer. Similarly, they began life with no recipes whatsoever—until their first customer was ready to begin her meal planning. In fact, the company served its first customer without building any software, without signing any business development partnerships, and without hiring any chefs.
Manuel, along with VP of product Steve Sanderson, went to local supermarkets and moms’ groups in his hometown of