Minimum Viable Products

Your thing, your product for real and putting it into people's hands, or are you going to be putting together a prototype? What does a prototype mean? Is it something that you're building and Figma and it's just visual, but people don't actually store their data or what, yeah. What does it mean? Basically, at least from my perspective and the work that we've done and that I've done. I see an MVP.

As meaning the simplest easiest, cheapest thing that you can do that actually provides some kind of value to the person that you're providing it to. So, sometimes that means getting rid of some things that you might value. But that your customer doesn't and that's always a really difficult line to straddle. And I think, especially with entrepreneurs and startups, who've got like a mission, a vision, this beautiful thing they want to put out into the world.

It's hard to like lop off the bits that don't provide value to your end user, your customer. But that you know, is potentially valuable down the line is potentially valuable to you. Or things that you think are just good. Sometimes that means losing some polish being okay with bugs. Not always because there are customers for whom a bug makes your product not viable. It doesn't provide value. So it's, it is not something that they would be willing to pay for.

And that's the thing that's always like hard to straddle is to figure out. Where are the things that would make the best product not quite as good but it would still be good enough for enough people. To pay you. Or whether that is financially or compensate you with their time with whatever. To use your product. So. That means different things in different contexts.

You might be able to get around, like, depending on the value that you aim to provide, you might be able to do that with a mailing list. For example, if the. Value that you aim to provide is primarily informational. Maybe down the line. You need to have a custom platform because the information you provide is complex. And for people to really get the most out of it, they need a custom UI to navigate it. And to really break it down into different.

Whatever, like you can imagine, for example, starting off a course or something. With a newsletter, maybe a blog. But then eventually moving to a custom CMS or an LMS. A platform, a hosted platform, like a Thinkific or a teachable and then moving into something custom because you have specific requirements. But. That is always going to be dependent on. Your customer. And your relationship with them and the value that you can provide to them. So. Yeah, it might be it might be a newsletter.

Or in some cases, let's say you're providing infrastructure. Maybe you're building a platform for people to deploy apps onto. You cannot really do that with off the shelf tools. Like you're going to need to build something technical. You will have to write code if your. Customer is a developer who needs to deploy something. So where that line is really, really varies. It's also going to dictate. How you're going to move forward, what bootstrapping means whether you need to raise money or not.

All of these things kind of feed into your journey in different ways. And they change what an MVP means. So don't think of an MVP as a prototype. I don't think that's a real MVP. To me an MVP means something that actually provides value that people are willing to pay for. If people are willing to put dollars on the table. Or. There are contexts where dollars don't matter as much.

But where people are willing to give you either their time, their money or something else, a value to them to use your product. So yeah, and. In some cases that might be their time. But yeah, it could mean other things too.

Like, are, are you somehow gating off your product with information do they need to provide their I don't know, phone number or some other information and not in a sort of creepy collecting data about people way, but do they need to put in a certain amount of effort to, for example, get past a free tier and actually start using your product fully. You can gauge things that way. But to me, that's the, that's the, that's the real MVP.

Is when they are willing to give you something in exchange for whatever you've provided them whether that is something that truly looks like your end product or is maybe just a loose facsimile of what you intend to build down the line. If someone is willing to give you something of value to them in exchange for what you are doing and that it's the type of value that you want to provide down the line, whether the product looks the same. That's, that's an MVP.

So if we're talking about something like a web or mobile app, I think what you start with like any business, really, whether it's a digital product or not is kind of getting a sense of, is there a market for this or are there people who actually have this problem and would use my solution to solve that problem for them? And. Most importantly, are they willing to give me something for it? Ideally dollars.

So. Yeah. Before you actually start building anything, even if it is low fidelity MVP or, or something that is a simplified version of what you want to accomplish in the end, still want to sort of get a sense of. Do people care about this now there's different levels of this. Like, I think it comes down to what you're willing to put into it as well. Like if, you know, you've got five people who are friends of yours who might pay for it. That might be a good starting point like that. That's fine.

If you're willing to only put in a little bit of time, you're not putting a whole lot into it. But they're willing to pay for it. That's a good starting point. But always be aware that, you know, those people might not be the actual people that you want to reach down the line. So if you can reach other people. Do that. If you can't, start with what you got, but yeah, you want to get a sense of whether people are interested in what you're doing.

Next is designing something putting together a user experience flow, like getting a sense of how they navigate through this product. If it is something with a user interface, which in our cases, web and mobile apps, that's kind of a given. Then you will do that. So make sure that you've got the screens mapped out, how they're going to move through your product. Again, this, this might. Be like, if you're doing it as a newsletter, for example, or you're using an off the shelf platform.

Like you might just want to map that experience out. You might not need to have specific visuals of what each interaction looks like, the way you would with a mobile app. If you are going to build something like a mobile app or a website. You do want to have a good sense of. These are the types of components we're going to need even if they're simple. Uses much off the shelf stuff as you can. There are plenty of libraries out there that make it a lot easier to build user interfaces.

Depending on what you're doing. You can use no code, low code builders. There's tools like Bubble, AppSheet. I don't know, there's a bunch of other ones. Bubble is the one that comes up most often for me, there's whole, agency's built around Bubble. So you can find service providers who will build you products on this. No code. Low-code tool. Yeah. So you get something designed put together. And then you build it on some level. If you are doing this with a low-code no-code tool. Great.

That's a, that's a good place to start. A lot of products in the context that we're talking about, will eventually need a developer. So be aware but do not be put off by the fact that if you start with a no-code tool You will. Often need to transition off of that and that transition may be painful. But it is worth doing it that way initially, if you can, because that is how you're going to validate that people are going to give you dollars for it. And that's what the MVP is for.

There are some things that are a lot harder to do with off the shelf tools, and that's when you build. And this is where things sometimes get a little difficult with folks who have a certain idea about what they want to see in the world. Which is you're going to have to... Building building tech is hard. Writing good clean code. Feel free to not be so clean at the beginning, right? Like you might have to scrap a good bunch of this eventually. Build something fast.

And be willing to sacrifice on the aesthetic. Depending on your use case. I find that a lot of effort put into aesthetics is wasted on productivity style tools. And it's, it's not wasted down the line. But upfront the people who you want as your sort of. Your initial cohort and who you're going to use to validate. I think you want people who care more about what they get out of it than the experience. That being said, experience can be a differentiator.

So if there are other tools out there that do what you want to do your MVP might be about saying, Hey, we don't do everything that they do, but we provide you a better experience. So in that kind of context, feel free to build something that is like really smooth looks really beautiful. Maybe does less, but that is the value that you're trying to offer to people.

I tend to find that with productivity tools, you, you want to sacrifice on aesthetic for sort of consumer tools you want to sacrifice on functionality. That's not always true but I think aesthetic takes more effort than people think and functionality in my experience often takes less effort than people think. Yeah, getting a really polished aesthetic and smooth user experience and web or mobile app is actually really hard. Like doing it well is really, really hard.

So if you can keep things minimal clean simple. Good, but without making it really beautiful and complex user inter interactions, user interface, elements that move around, that would be amazing down the line, but that would take actually a lot of time to build then that's, I think usually a good trade off. But it depends. And then, yeah. A thing that I think is really important is if you're going to, if you're going to build this thing, He want to measure what it's doing.

Like you want to be able to know, not just that people are using it and paying for it. But why and how? So it's really important that you have at least ideally, and in, from my perspective, you should have analytics tools installed in, in your products. Always. You can make decisions about what kind of data you want to send how you want your users to consent to that data being collected. But. Having something to get an understanding of what people are doing. So that you can find.

Faults in your product that you can then improve on. But also to identify where things really work, like are people doing a thing over and over and over again, and obviously loving it. Or are they doing it over and over and over again because it's not working and just gathering as much data. As you can intelligently, not, not just vacuuming up everything, but really aiming for the things that you.

Expect and have a qualified as pieces of information that are valuable to your end users and really getting a sense of those interactions around those. Yeah, those pieces of your product is, is super valuable. We like to use tools like Segment. We've been using RudderStack lately on a couple of products. And we use those tools to pipe data, into other analytics tools like Mixpanel.

Google's BigQuery, which we then hook up to a Google data studio or Mixpanel and we can, we can just visualize stuff there. On websites it's really valuable to have Google analytics, there's all kinds of analytics tools. Each of those have different use cases. It's also useful to have like with with BigQuery, specifically having a data warehouse where you can just pump in. Your data from different sources is also valuable. You don't need to get complicated at the beginning.

Just, I would say hookup Segment and Mixpanel or RudderStack and Mixpanel. To me, those are, are the key tools. Just get a sense of what people are doing. Or if you're doing something that's not technical, that you're not actually building out like a full. A full coded custom product. Make sure that you're hooking into the analytics for the given platforms that you might be using, whether it is something like Bubble. I don't know if they have analytics built in you.

Surely it can integrate with other tools through them, but if you're doing a newsletter, for example, make sure you get a good sense of like your open rate and click through rates and that sort of thing, and really, really pay attention to what people are doing. And also ask them, like, if you can reach out to those people and get a sense of why and how they're using your product. Do that a lot. I think, honestly, my favorite thing is qualitative feedback.

When you can really get a sense of like how and why someone interacts with the product. I think that's amazing. Okay. So I'm going to give you a little sales pitch from our end, which is twofold. First off, if you're thinking of building a tech product. Whatever it might be. We're happy to talk to you and help you figure it out. You can book a free consultation. I'm happy to honestly chat about. How you could do that sort of thing, right? And if we chat for 30 minutes, I can give you some ideas.

If it's not something that you're already aware of, how to do. If you do have something a bit more substantial that you'd like to explore. We are really good at whipping out products quickly. That are usable that are a good starting point for someone to test their business model. We can also do bigger, more full-fledged products, but I really think that one of the things that we love is to test ideas with people and to get something off the ground.

That is a good foundation to build the rest of your product on top of. I think one of our strengths really lies in figuring out what the needs are of our clients as businesses but also exploring what their end users need. And figuring out how that intersects with technology and design and really figuring out what are the right tools, what are the right strategies to get from this idea to that initial value that someone gets out of a product.

So yeah, feel free to hit us up and we can do a free consultation or yeah, if you're further along, we're happy to help you get something custom up and running and into people's hands that you can start measuring and building off of. So, yeah, basically What did we cover? What is an MVP? It's the cheapest simplest path to providing value to your customer as a product. Not necessarily as your final product, but as a product.

Yeah, I think we talked a little bit about the structure of how you go about building something. Some of the options from a technical and non-technical perspective, the no-code tools, low-code tools. And yeah, I think that's that's pretty much it. I think that is most of what I have to say about MVPs anyway. Yeah. What that word means to different people is kind of interesting. Because it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So, yeah. Thanks for listening folks.

If you enjoy this stuff, please, please, please like, and subscribe on YouTube. Leave a review in your podcast, app of choice, and also subscribe in your podcast app of choice. That that is a thing that is also helpful for us. We would love to hear what you have to say. If you have questions also. Yeah. Leave us a question in the comments or let us know what you think an MVP is. And have you built one, what did you build and how did it go? And were you able to build something bigger off of it?

We would also love to have you. You there on the podcast. So if you want to talk to me on this podcast, You want to talk about your startup journey or your small tech journey, or you want to just talk about the tech world? Building products, that sort of thing. Then yeah, hit us up and we will get you on this podcast.

Also make sure to sign up for our newsletter, the small tech newsletter, where we will be sharing all kinds of stuff about building small tech products, including videos blog posts. Episodes that you may have missed on this podcast. And plenty of other stuff, but really mostly that stuff, but maybe other stuff, probably other stuff there's going to be other stuff.

So go to smalltechpodcast.com, where you will see information, there will be buttons and links and stuff that will guide you to the newsletter sign up. And we will see you in your inbox at some point soon. Also a quick reminder. Free consultation. Like let me know. I am so happy. I love talking to folks about their ideas and the possibilities, like the things that they could build. If you're someone who's interested in building a tech product, And you're not a developer.

Like that is, that is my favorite thing to do. Is basically talking to people who are not developers and helping them figure out what the possibilities are like, what can you build? And really you can build anything. This is just a question of time budget and some other stuff, but let's explore the possibilities together. So yeah, free consultation. Hit us up. So that's it for this week's episode folks, and we all want to do something good in the world.

So go out there and build something good folks. I will see you next time.