Chapter 6: Test Flashcards
How should your first product be?
Your first product should be built with only the bare minimum to test your hypothesis.
You need to look at what you want to test.
When are you wasting work on your MVP?
When you build extra features that serve no purpose in answering your hypothesis.
Think of how much IMVU wasted by simply making their product adaptible with more IMs when they would have gotten the same data by just building it for one IM.
Why should your first product not be perfect?
Because at first, we are looking for early adopters. These are people who get suspicious when the product is too polished.
Why are we looking for early adopters?
Because early adopters are looking to be the first to try out new things.
They don’t care when a product lacks features, they just use their imagination to fill out the lacks.
They seek to be the first to try something new and they will help us move in wich direction they want the product to go.
The landing page MVP
An example of an MVP could be that you use a landing page that interested people would get to when they take a look at your product. You can then measure how many clicks on “Download”
Example: Make up a hypothesis of how many you think will click on download.
Then build the landing page and test how many clicks on download. You can now see if its a great hit or you need to make a change in your strategy.
The Video MVP
When dropbox made its MVP the team didn’t make a product but a video of how it would work. Because of this, they could get validation of whether people would like the product or not by not even building it.
This MVP was a huge success and they now had validate-learning from real-customers who loved it and they could now move forward.
The Concierge MVP
A startup called Food on the Table was meant to locate deals and match up customers’ preferred meals.
They didn’t build software for this but got a single customer who they served and learned a lot about.
After a few weeks where they learned about and served this customer, and they got another one nearby.
By doing this they saved money and time and could work with the customer very directly and ask for feedback and learn what it will take to, later on, build software that could help the customers.
In what way did they build their MVP and what questions should it answer? (Aardvark)
They build it so it was they who answered a few customers’ questions so they could learn about customer behavior.
They question this MVP should answer where questions like: “What would this product require to get customers to engage with the product and tell their friends about it?”
What is: “The wizard of Oz MVP”?
When companies need to develop huge algorithms and needs to program these products it often is really expensive and takes a lot of time.
Instead, they should use humans.
An example is Aardvark, who used humans instead of ai for their product.
By using humans they were allowed to see what customers were demanding from the product and what it would take to build this program.
What is important to know, to know what quality is?
It’s important to know the customer, because if you don’t know the customer you don’t know what they would like and what quality is to them?
When they learned at IMVU their customers asked for expensive features, such as walking, how did they tackle this?
They build another MVP on top of their MVP by letting customers “Walk” by teleporting around to where they would go. By this, they gave their customer what they craved most by not giving unnecessary details.
In fact, it got ranked in the Top 3 of what its users liked the most.
It’s not necessary to give customers the most expensive when they say what they want. Just give them what they want and no more.
Does the customer care about how long it takes to build something?
No, they care about their needs in the product getting served.
What should you be alert to when building an MVP?
When building an MVP, you need to work with discipline. It can sometimes get undisciplined because you don’t build the best but make sure to keep discipline up in the office at a high level.
A simple rule when you build your MVP
When building an MVP, remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.
Should I be afraid a competitor would steal my Start-up idea?
No, there are too many good ideas and too few great people to work on them. Competition doesn’t have time to work on your vision. Try sending it to them and they will likely reject it. They simply don’t have time.
