[HN Gopher] The Minimum Viable Testing Process for Evaluating St...
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The Minimum Viable Testing Process for Evaluating Startup Ideas
Author : yarapavan
Score : 89 points
Date : 2021-09-16 11:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (review.firstround.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (review.firstround.com)
| eaenki wrote:
| I find all this mvp stuff just over complicating everything and
| just complex fluff.
|
| What you need to know is if you can reach at decent scale people
| that will pay enough to give you a fat margin of profit for your
| product.
|
| So you need a product that does the job, you need a scalable
| distribution channel and you need customers to pay enough to give
| you 60%+ margins.
|
| That's it. There's no way around it. With both physical and
| digital products you can let people pre order them.
|
| You need distribution-product-price fit. When you achieve that
| you can pour gas on the fire.
|
| TL;DR Just create a damn landing page connected to stripe and
| take pre orders and make sure the price gives you lots of margin.
| Then spam The distribution channel. That's it.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| It's over complicated to you because you're already thinking
| about making something small and iterating. It's becoming
| second nature to a lot of people, but there are a lot of people
| who still think they need to make the "perfect" product.
| abrichr wrote:
| How do you figure out what problem to solve and the
| distribution channel?
| trjordan wrote:
| I love this. It puts into (better) words my long-held belief that
| ideas do, in fact, matter.
|
| Startups live and die by their ideas. The nuance is that ideas
| can be detailed or abstract, and those details can be some
| combination of right/wrong and relevant/irrelevant.
|
| I've got back and looked at some of the early pitch decks of my
| current unicorn employer, and they're shockingly accurate. The
| founders / early team have been saying the same thing since
| before launch. It's unreal how fast they figured out the core
| value prop, and so much of the growth of the company is living up
| to the promises of that early idea.
|
| Figuring out what really matters needs to happen early, and it's
| something that founders and early team need to internalize as
| much as possible. If you can get that deep understanding of what
| needs to be done, quickly, the company's odds of success go up
| so, so dramatically.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| I think this aligns with the Lean Startup process and has a lot
| of merit. I may very well have accidentally used a similar
| process to develop Mach 9 Poker. I sat on my original idea and
| iterated it in my head and by conversing with live poker players.
| After a few years, I finally had an epiphany and when I tested
| that idea, the players came around as very curious. I'm still
| modeling it and building it, but the path is solid (so far).
| dsugarman wrote:
| This article really vibes with me in general and is just a great
| piece of content.
|
| I was a little disappointed in the examples though, running a
| course is an MVP and delivering a meal is an MVP. MVPs don't need
| to be software, in these cases, the software is actually
| definitively not a minimal approach, proven with a non software
| example of the MVP.
|
| So is a test viable? I have asked people to pay for things I
| hadn't built yet and didn't intend to build if they wouldn't
| prepay, is that an MVT and not an MVP? Are waitlists and
| crowdfunding campaigns MVTs?
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| > running a course is an MVP and delivering a meal is an MVP.
|
| Yes I too was hoping for something a bit more radically
| different to my existing definition of what an MVP is.
|
| I definitely agree that it's easy to over engineer MVPs - I'm
| guilty of that myself, a lot, but many/most of the "MVT's"
| described here really just sound like non over-engineered MVPs.
|
| Nevertheless, the article is still useful as a reminder to
| really pair it down to the absolute bare essentials at the
| beginning. So essentially what we end up with is a "minimal
| viable MVP"!
|
| I was curious to see no mention of doing any kind of research
| via some sort of survey - to not necessarily canvass potential
| customers on whether they'd buy the product, but more around
| the problem space, what problems they currently have etc. To me
| this seems like quite a low-hanging fruit to help validate
| ideas?
| JackFr wrote:
| As Sprig was shuttered after 4 years and $56 million in
| funding, it doesn't seem like it was a good test.
|
| Being able to cook meals and deliver them doesn't seem like a
| test. Thousands of restaurants do that every day, and national
| chains do it at scale. The test needed to be is there a market
| at the price point necessary to sustain the kind of meal he
| envisioned and I guess the answer to that was no.
|
| What would have been enlightening in the article are examples
| of negative tests -- something one of the firms he was involved
| with tested and failed at, which led them to reevaluate.
| cameroncairns wrote:
| Further down in the article he mentions a failed test for a
| tour marketplace where locals will show you around, but I
| agree that I would have liked to have seen more negative
| result examples than just the one.
| p0ckets wrote:
| Paying someone to plan a trip for you is definitely not a
| product, so not a MVP. Running a course is closer to a full-
| fledged product (more than a MVP) for a company that sells
| courses to students, but Maven is a platform for creating
| courses...
|
| By the definitions laid out in the article waitlists and
| crowdfunding campaigns would be MVTs to address marketing or
| "building something people don't want" risk.
| [deleted]
| laserlight wrote:
| MVP vs MVT is a false dichotomy. It is made up by the author to
| sound smart and be convincing. From the article, describing what
| it calls MVT:
|
| "Build an initial product to bring all of your insights together
| and test them with your target customer."
|
| Yeah, that initial product is the MVP.
| phugoid wrote:
| Maybe we read different articles, but "Build an initial
| product" is what he said to do _after_ the hypothesis testing.
| laserlight wrote:
| I quoted directly from the article. MVP is built after the
| hypothesis testing, but it's still a test, a test of the
| independent hypotheses combined into a material product.
| conductr wrote:
| I think the point is that the P is not necessary if the T's
| fail. So, you're creating a stop loss for your
| time/money/blood/sweat/tears
| henning wrote:
| "MVP" is now a meaningless word that is used to mean "initial
| release" of something. The "minimal" part has been entirely
| forgotten. Silicon Valley people are incredibly stupid.
| jph wrote:
| A Minimum Viable Test works better when you use Key Risk
| Indicators (KRIs). KRIs are a lightweight tactic to list your
| risk estimations, quantify them as possible, and aim for
| mitigations. KRIs are very useful (in my experience) to
| accelerate projects because they are quick and easy to write and
| discuss, and they guide teams toward the best Minimum Viable
| Tests.
|
| https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/key-risk-indicator
| Cilvic wrote:
| I clicked through because it sounded interesting (and still
| does) but without any kind of examples it's hard to get
| started.
| jph wrote:
| Thanks, I will add these examples now:
|
| System risks e.g. unplanned unavailability count (UU#), mean
| time to recovery (MTTR)
|
| Marketing risks e.g. customer complaint count (CC#), net
| detractor score (NDS)
|
| Financial risks e.g. unbooked letters of intent (LOI$),
| investment value at risk (VaR$)
|
| Process risks e.g. dropout rate (s), error ratio (e)
| dr_ wrote:
| I read this when it was on Twitter. To be honest, it doesn't
| really sound very different than the MVP method. The whole point
| of the MVP is that it is minimally viable so the founders can
| test around it before building something full scale that the
| customer wants.
| aabhay wrote:
| the main difference is that a "minimum viable product" nowadays
| is basically just the product itself. It's hard for founders to
| distinguish between MVP and P when companies have such simple,
| growth-minded core ideas. Instead, this essay describes how to
| try as hard as possible to not build a product at all, and how
| that can lead to strong insights that precede engineering work.
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