Author Archives: Stuart G. Hall

About Stuart G. Hall

Making a positive difference one day at a time. #London #Leicester

Your MVP should so just 1 thing

Posted on by
Reply

Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) are tricky:

  • How “minimal” should yours be?
  • What does “viable” mean?
  • How do you keep it simple, without ruining your reputation?

MVPs only need to only do one thing. To understand that one thing, you want to understand the definition of MVP.

A video version of this blog post is available here.

MVP is the New Beta?

Remember when “betas” were a thing – as in, “we’re working on our beta version”, “we just launched our private beta”, etc.?

In the last few years, that term has been replaced with “MVP” – “we’re working on our MVP”, “we just launched our MVP”, etc.

This is where the confusion around MVPs stem from…

MVP is not the new beta.

The original definition of MVP from Frank Robinson is:

A version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

In other words, your MVP is the version of your product with the highest ROI when you optimize for “validated learning.”

So how do you optimize for validated learning?

Test your “Riskiest Assumption”

For your business model to be successful, there are a number of assumptions that need to be true:

  • Customers know they have a problem
  • They want your help solving it
  • They will pay you to solve it
  • You can solve it
  • etc.

All of your assumptions can be prioritized in terms of “riskiness” where the assumptions that are most critical to the success of your startup, and/or are least likely to be true, are considered more “risky” than the other assumptions.

For example, “you can solve your customers’ problems” is critical to your startup’s success, but it’s very likely to be true (humans are natural problem solvers and since you’re a human, I’m confident you can solve your customers’ problems). On the other hand, “customers will pay you to solve the problem” is not only critical to your success, it’s also (unfortunately) less likely to be true – so you would consider that assumption more “risky” than the former.

Once you order your assumptions by their “riskiness”, to build an MVP, you build the simplest version of your product, that tests your riskiest assumption.

In other words, an MVP is:

A version of a product that allows a team to collect a maximum amount of validated learning of customers test their riskiest assumption with the least effort.

Notice how this definition changes the focus of an MVP from building a product, to running an experiment. That’s critical to understanding what an MVP is – remember that.

MVP or Not an MVP?

Use the following examples to test whether you understand what an MVP is…

Example 1: Explainer video

Dropbox famously gauged demand for their product via a demo video that, thanks to some video editing, demonstrated functionality they hadn’t built yet.

What do you think? MVP or not an MVP?

Let’s look at the definition again:

A version of a product that allows a team to test their riskiest assumption with the least effort.

Does a demo video of functionality that doesn’t exist represent a:

  1. Version of a product that
  2. Tests the team’s riskiest assumption with the
  3. Least effort?

If Dropbox’s riskiest assumption was “people want a new service to sync/share files” and if it took less effort to edit video than it did to write code for the functionality that didn’t exist, then yes, this is an MVP!

As long as the riskiest assumption is being tested with the least effort, it’s an MVP.

If instead they’d built a simple version of their product (i.e. a pilot, a beta, etc.) and measured how many people used it everyday, the wouldn’t have been testing their riskiest assumption, and they wouldn’t have done it with the least amount of effort.

Example 2 – PowerPoint Demo

Let’s say you are going into a pitch meeting with a customer using a slide deck with mockups of your software. You’re not going to demo any functionality at all, you’re just going to talk about the problems you’ll solve while showing them some pictures, what do you think, MVP or not an MVP?

Recall the definition of MVP:

A version of a product that allows a team to test their riskiest assumptionwith the least effort.

As long as you’re testing the riskiest assumption during that meeting (e.g. “customers will pay us to solve this problem”) with the least effort (a slide deck is less effort than even making a video), it’s an MVP.

Keep in mind that a slide deck is just like a video – minus fancy transitions. If a video meets your team’s criteria for an MVP, a slide deck might too – especially in B2B scenarios.

If on the other hand you went into that meeting hoping the customer would create an account on your platform and try it during the meeting – you’d be testing the wrong assumption, and you’d have done so with far more effort than a simple slide deck. A working prototype wouldn’t be an MVP.

Example 3 – Landing Page

If you imagine a landing page is just like a PowerPoint deck that you scroll through instead of click through, then you can already tell, a landing page can be an MVP as well.

Again, you want to use the least amount of effort to test your riskiest assumption – as long as you’re doing that, you’re building an MVP.

Anything more than that, and you’re getting closer to a “beta” product, than an experiment.

Example 4 – Facebook Advertisement

If you capture the essence of a landing page in a FB ad, with a title, image, description etc., then…what do you think: MVP or not an MVP?

What was that definition again?

A version of a product that allows a team to test their riskiest assumptionwith the least effort.

So really, as long as you’re testing the riskiest assumption with the least amount of effort…you get the picture.

If we go back to the Dropbox example we can even see that depending on their riskiest assumption, they too could have used a Facebook ad to test this out.

If their riskiest assumption was, say, “people have problems syncing/sharing files” the Dropbox team may have been able to test that with a Facebook ad!

Example 5 – Simple App

A friend and I gave ourselves 24 hours to build a proof-of-concept app that would help people get to their appointments on time. It had basic GPS, traffic and calendar integration, rudimentary UI, and we only built it for Android.It got written-up Forbes and as a result, we were able to collect the email addresses of 3,000 people who wanted the iPhone version.

What do you think? MVP or not an MVP?

To know the answer, we have to look where we always look…our riskiest assumption.

If our riskiest assumption was genuinely, “We can build the app”, then it would have been an MVP. The truth is though, our riskiest assumption was, “People will pay for this app” and there was no way for us to test that with this app.

So, no, despite the app being simple, newsworthy, and popular…it wasn’t an MVP.

If it doesn’t test the riskiest assumption call it a beta/pilot/POC – just don’t call it an MVP

What’s your Riskiest Assumption?

Now that you know what your MVP needs to do, you just need to figure out your riskiest assumption so you can build one.

Good news! My post next week will tell you your riskiest assumption and the best MVP is to test it!

To Recap

  • MVP is not the new beta
  • Definition of MVP = (Say it with me…) The simplest version of a product that tests your riskiest assumption.
  • Before you build an MVP, you have to know your riskiest assumption.

Want More MVP Help?

This is the first of a four part-series on MVPs:

  1. (This one) What is an MVP?
  2. What Kind of MVP Should you Build?
  3. My 8 Favorite Tools for Building MVPs
  4. I’ll Fix your MVP: Send me your MVP and I’ll tell you what, if anything, to tweak to make it perfect.

Stay tuned for those.

Bonus: Want me to Review your MVP?

Leave a comment with a link to your landing page MVP and if it provides a good lesson for others to learn from, I’ll post a video review of what you’re doing well, and what you might consider changing.

The videos will be public so you and the rest of the Customer Development Labs community will learn from them which this is an ideal opportunity for startups who are:

  1. Confident in their landing page MVPs and want other startups to see it or
  2. Not confident in their landing page MVPs and want help fixing it.

Comments or Questions?

Please fire away!

Credit: With thanks again to Justin Wilcox of Customer Development Labs, for allowing me to re-publish his article on stuart-hall.com.

Pinterest, a useful tool to promote products and services of your business?

Posted on by
Reply

Why bother with Pinterest to promote your business?

With Facebook and Twitter often the usual starting place for promoting your business on social media it can be easy to overlook the value of the ‘social bookmarking site’ better known as Pinterest. From a business perspective consider this fact Pinterest pins are 100 times more spreadable than a tweet, with the retweet average hitting only 1.4%. And, as for Facebook, the half-life of a pin is 1,6000x longer than a Facebook post. Also from a business standpoint, what makes Pinterest such a good network for marketers is that it is obviously visual in nature. Another interesting fact is that users on this network are 10 per cent more likely to buy something compared to other social networks. Finally, there is a powerful backend to deliver these benefits to growing your business available for making the most out of the platform, Pinterest for Business.

The first step therefore is to sign up to Pinterest for Business to get on the first rung of the ladder, and to check out the Pinterest Analytics which gives you access to important tracking information – it will enable you to assess which of your Pinterest strategies and work so you can improve your marketing efforts. But before you get going properly with using it for your business like any new social media platform it’s important first to get your head round the Pinterest community of users, and in more practical terms thinking about what your Pinterest ‘followers’ will be searching  search for (bearing in mind it functions as a visual search engine), and therefore to figure out the best way to create visual ‘pins’ (the name given to the images uploaded to Pinterest) which will resonate most effectively with your followers.

Getting started

The first practical step is to set up boards, the containers which organise your visual pins, according to the categories most relevant to your existing and new customers. Like any marketing strategy this depends in part on making sure you know who your customers are, if you want to get the most of Pinterest. Secondly, consider the quality not just the quantity of the visual pins if you want to get the best return on your ROI. The advice from most experts is that Pinterest images should in general be long and narrow to take up the maximum amount of visual space and get noticed. A useful rule of thumb is to take a look at your favourite pins and see what these images have in common so you can start to figure out what types of images are most ‘repinned’ and shared. And along with images another great use of Pinterest’s visual platform is to create infographics, a nice TOLF (top of the funnel) attractor that will draw in first time prospects to see what you have to say as an expert on a particular topic for example.

Once you have got going in terms of your basic set up and forward strategy on Pinterest, like any social platform attracting followers involves participating in other boards by re-pinning other’s pins, as well as commenting, and repeating that process to be most engaged. In turn it’s key for you to add web links to your own pins so when new followers come to your boards they can click through to a specific landing page or call to action that can turn followers into leads for example. In terms of best practice, the 3 top ranking reasons for growing your followers are the number of accounts you are following, or following you, how many pins you have and how many boards you have.

Daily pinning activity

On a daily basis to generate more pins its recommended to post 5-30 pins every day, though not to upload them all at the same time. Plus, as part of extending the reach of your Pinterest presence, to make sure you link your Pinterest account with your Facebook and Twitter profiles so every time you pin your followers in those platforms are automatically notified. It’s also worth noting that in creating your campaign plans, including your content calendar, that you want to be thinking about the visual and video components alongside written content as an integrated approach to your social media marketing. That way you are both re-using content in many different formats, and also ensuring the potential TOLF prospect is able to appreciate a new product for example in many different formats for maximum benefit and sharing.

SEO and ROI

In terms of creating content for Pinterest like any other social marketing its important to make the naming of the Pinterest boards clearly named for potential followers to find. Plus of course to maximise the SEO value to add a few relevant SEO keywords to the titling and pin titles. Like any other social media platforms, it helps to take part in the sense of community by following other pinners, that’s a given. But one way you can up the value of that approach in a more specific to your business fashion is to invite guest Pinterest contributors, particularly for an event, with a high attraction rate for your customers. Other tactics to improve follower numbers is to use pins to create how to content, particularly useful say for a DIY or gardening business, but also for more technology intensive businesses which are looking for more creative ways to improve customer retention by coming up with more accessible ways to show customers how to maximise the ROI from their products, a key failure for declining retention rates for example. Indeed, this retention value to the business can also take advantage of the ‘Open Board feature of Pinterest, which allows users to contribute their own pins. All you have to do is give them pinning access by adding their name or email. This feature is great for marketing because you get your community involved in a personal way.

Rich Pin

Rich Pins

Rich Pins are just another feature of Pinterest that can be used to good effect, focusing on app, film, recipe, article, product and place, and what’s more all come with a rich feature set to boost your engagement and direct traffic to your site. In particular, Rich Pins supply real-time information on your pins and provide more ways to direct people to a website. To quote Pinterest: “Rich Pins show metadata right on the Pin itself, giving Pinners a richer experience and increasing engagement. A useful added value suggestion from Kissmetrics is to also collect all your article Rich Pins on one board: “You’ll want to put this board at the top of your page so your followers will see it first thing. This will help draw traffic to your site and make it easier for users to find your content since it’s all in one easy-to-find-board. They will thank you.” It’s obviously also worth adding Pinterest share buttons to your website and blog so that your visual content gets shared more widely, and attracts new followers to your Pinterest boards.

Finally, it’s important to keep measuring the success of your Pinterest using the Pinterest Analytics, available to business accounts. The analytics gives you information regarding your Pinterest profile, audience and website. Fortunately, there is plenty of support information and help videos, to ensure you get the most business value out of your Pinterest marketing strategy.

Article sources
1. Pinterest: Analytics for Business Help
2. Kissmetrics: The Ultimate Pinterest Marketing Guide
3. Search Engine Journal: 13 Ways to Get More Pinterest Followers
4. Peg Fitzpatrick: 12 Most strategic Ways to Use Pinterest for Marketing

Source: this article was written with help and inspiration from optimisation experts Convertize.

[ninja_forms id=1]