structured

21.09.2021

We are in the last phase of our first venture and while doing a review of the progress so far we discussed our lessons learned. While we are very happy with the overall progress on key components and objectives, we all quickly agreed upon one missing ingredient: a passionate audience.

MVP - Minimum Viable Product and Main Value Proposition

A critical point during a venture is the transition from Step 1 which is the Ideation and Validation phase to the MVP. It is at this point that you need to focus on both definitions - the Minimum Viable Product as well as the Main Value Proposition. To understand and define our value proposition, we need to keep asking ourselves the following questions:

• Who is our customer?
• What is his problem?
• What is our problem-solving proposition?

Anything that is not targeting the above or is not solving the main problem, is not part of the minimum viable product.

The many benefits of early adopters

Our ideal early adopter is a customer with the following characteristics:

• He/she is aware of the problem and wants it solved
• Our proposed MVP is a valid solution to their problem
• He/she is eager to contribute to the solution
• He/she is passionate about his work
• We have a good communication path

At this point, the first benefits of the early adopters start to become apparent.

Validation

By looping in our users early into the venture we create a strong validation path for every change we make. A verbose user can for every decision contribute valuable info, in a very effective way. One needs to keep in mind, to separate the problem from the solution. Users tend to express proposed solutions rather than relaying only the problematic procedures, but this is a general problem with user feedback.

Clear releases

An early user base, forces the team to think in clear releases. While we want to be as agile as possible with the MVP we don’t want to be sloppy. Thus having a clear release pipeline and not breaking the product in-between rollouts imposes a solid feature release schedule and deployment policy.

Passion

Perhaps the most precious benefit. User passion, fuelled by the desire for a problem to be solved. This passion easily spills over to the development team and provides positive energy to move along. It is also a very strong indicator that you are moving into the right direction. If the early adopters are happy, passionate users of your solution you are on the correct path. If they don’t use your solution, or they don’t actively engage with the development effort you need to rethink the choices made. In our case we made the mistake of focusing on secondary goals at some point whereas we should stick with the main value driver and constantly iterate upon it during the MVP phase.