A Different Outcome

• Groupon is one of the fastest-growing companies of all time. Its name comes from “group coupons,” an ingenious idea that has spawned an entire industry of social commerce imitators. However, it didn’t start out successful.
• In fact, Groupon wasn’t originally meant to be about commerce at all. The founder, Andrew Mason, intended his company to become a “collective activism platform” called The Point. Its goal was to bring people together to solve problems they couldn’t solve on their own, such as fund-raising for a cause or boycotting a certain retailer.
• Handmade PDFs, a pizza coupon, and a simple blog were enough to launch Groupon into record-breaking success; it is on pace to become the fastest company in history to achieve $ 1 billion in sales.
• Unlike a prototype or concept test, an MVP is designed not just to answer product design or technical questions. Its goal is to test a fundamental business hypotheses.

Why First Products Aren't Meant to be Perfect

• Minimum viable products range in complexity from extremely simple smoke tests (little more than an advertisement ) to actual early prototypes complete with problems and missing features.
• Deciding exactly how complex an MVP needs to be cannot be done formulaically. It requires judgment. Luckily, this judgment is not difficult to develop: most entrepreneurs and product development people dramatically overestimate how many features are needed in an MVP. When in doubt, simplify.
• The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how To demonstrate, I’ll share several MVP techniques from actual Lean Startups. In each case bellow, you’ll witness entrepreneurs avoiding the temptation to overbuild and over-promise.

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.
• 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.
• The complexity 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.
• They believed rightly, as it turned out that file synchronization was a problem that most people didn’t know they had.
• Customers often don’t know what they want, and they often had a hard time understanding Dropbox when the concept was explained. Drew, in contrast, believed that if the software “just worked like magic,” customers would flock to it.
• 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. While showing the video, the files he’s moving around are full of in-jokes and humorous references that were appreciated by this community of early adopters.
• 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.
• Today, Dropbox is one of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies, rumored to be worth more than $ 1 billion.

The Concierge Minimum Viable Product