The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [43]
If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.
Even a “low-quality” MVP can act in service of building a great high-quality product. Yes, MVPs sometimes are perceived as low-quality by customers. If so, we should use this as an opportunity to learn what attributes customers care about. This is infinitely better than mere speculation or whiteboard strategizing, because it provides a solid empirical foundation on which to build future products.
Sometimes, however, customers react quite differently. Many famous products were released in a “low-quality” state, and customers loved them. Imagine if Craig Newmark, in the early days of Craigslist, had refused to publish his humble e-mail newsletter because it lacked sufficient high design. What if the founders of Groupon had felt “two pizzas for the price of one” was beneath them?
I have had many similar experiences. In the early days of IMVU, our avatars were locked in one place, unable to move around the screen. The reason? We were building an MVP and had not yet tackled the difficult task of creating the technology that would allow avatars to walk around the virtual environments they inhabit. In the video game industry, the standard is that 3D avatars should move fluidly as they walk, avoid obstacles in their path, and take an intelligent route toward their destination. Famous best-selling games such as Electronic Arts’ The Sims work on this principle. We didn’t want to ship a low-quality version of this feature, so we opted instead to ship with stationary avatars.
Feedback from the customers was very consistent: they wanted the ability to move their avatars around the environment. We took this as bad news because it meant we would have to spend considerable amounts of time and money on a high-quality solution similar to The Sims. But before we committed ourselves to that path, we decided to try another MVP. We used a simple hack, which felt almost like cheating. We changed the product so that customers could click where they wanted their avatar to go, and the avatar would teleport there instantly. No walking, no obstacle avoidance. The avatar disappeared and then reappeared an instant later in the new place. We couldn’t even afford fancy teleportation graphics or sound effects. We felt lame shipping this feature, but it was all we could afford.
You can imagine our surprise when we started to get positive customer feedback. We never asked about the movement feature directly (we were too embarrassed). But when asked to name the top things about IMVU they liked best, customers consistently listed avatar “teleportation” among the top three (unbelievably, they often specifically described it as “more advanced than The Sims”). This inexpensive compromise outperformed many features of the product we were most proud of, features that had taken much more time and money to produce.
Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs. Our customers preferred the quick teleportation feature because it allowed them to get where they wanted to go as fast as possible. In retrospect, this makes sense. Wouldn’t we all like to get wherever we’re going in an instant? No lines, no hours on a plane or sitting on the tarmac, no connections, no cabs or subways. Beam me up, Scotty. Our expensive “real-world” approach was beaten handily by a cool fantasy-world feature that cost much less but that our customers preferred.
So which version of the product is low-quality, again?
MVPs require the courage to put one’s assumptions to the test. If customers react the way we expect, we can take that as confirmation that our assumptions are correct. If we release a poorly designed product and customers (even early adopters) cannot figure out how to use it, that will confirm our need to invest in superior design. But we must always ask: what if they don’t care about design in the same way we do?
Thus, the Lean Startup method is not opposed