You don’t have to get everything right the first time

Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop is a core element of the Lean Startup model.

Your goal as the Founder as is to go around this loop as quickly as possible.

Each turn helps you test ideas about your startup and learn from your early adopter customers. This Learn-As-You-Go approach lets you to catch flaws in your thinking and adjust your proposition with every iteration.

The Build phase

Once you’ve figured out the problem that needs to be solved, the next step is to develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP is made up of the minimum set of features you need to learn about your customer, your market or about the problem you are solving.

Remember the goal of developing an MVP is not to scale or generate revenue. It is to generate data to test your assumptions so you don’t waste time and money building something no one wants, and maximize the amount of learning per dollar spent.

What goes into an MVP

Each version of the MVP must make sense to the customer on it’s own. You cannot understand how the customer feels about a car by asking for their feedback on a single wheel. You have to offer them something that represents a real feature of the final product, like the skateboard in the above example.

When developing an MVP, it can be hard to decide what goes and what stays out. Figuring out the MVP can be a task in itself – you decide what is minimum, the customer decides if it is viable.

How Buffer tested their concept with a simple MVP 

Buffer app is a great example of using an MVP to test the concept before writing any code. Joel Gascoigne, CEO and Founder of Buffer tested the idea of a social media scheduling app by tweeting out a simple landing page.

The page contained nothing more than a list of benefits and an email capture form. Once potential users provided feedback on the base concept, next stage was to use a pricing list to see if the market was willing to pay for this service.

 It was only after enough people clicked on the paid option and left their email addresses did Joel start building the app.

Read the whole story here.

What next

Though the name MVP says ‘Product’ it is really a Process. The process of continually testing your ideas and assumptions and adapting your product with each experiment.

The MVP lacks many features that may prove essential later on. However, in some ways, creating an MVP requires extra work: we must be able to measure its impact.

– Eric Reis in’The Lean Startup’

Once you have your MVP in front of potential users, the next step is to measure the results. That’s for another post.