Building to an MVP From Scratch

The leap from idea to minimum viable product (MVP) is never straightforward. When my co-founders and I started HappyPath, we knew we were jumping headfirst into uncharted waters. Prior to HappyPath, none of us had raised a penny of funding, hired teammates without a pre-defined job spec or built a viable business from scratch. Yet there we were, sitting at our dinner table, laptops open, furiously typing in a shared doc, trying to articulate every detail of a product and business we’d only dreamt of.

Throughout the past year, as our team grew from three to nine and our product iterated hundreds of times, we learned that building from scratch isn’t about being right the first time — it’s about failing fast, learning faster, and focusing on the essentials while adapting to a constantly changing landscape. These lessons have shaped our approach, offering insights that may resonate with anyone embarking on the journey of building something from the ground up.

The Importance of the Role-Player

From a young age, I thrived in team environments such as sports, music and schoolwork, driven by a desire to stand out and improve my own abilities. At the time, I didn’t fully understand the value of being a role-player, someone who elevates the collective effort instead of seeking individual recognition.

As I transitioned into my professional career as an engineer and later as a product manager, this individualistic mindset gave way to the pursuit of becoming a “glue guy.” I aspired to be the person who understood the boundaries of my skills and was cognizant of each teammate’s strengths, meticulously learning, blending and arranging to help teams achieve their goals. My managers encouraged this growth, giving me opportunities to lead small teams on projects building tools to facilitate better communication for application support teams.

Going From Dream to MVP

Whether you’re raising your first round of funding, launching a startup from your kitchen table, or helping a team innovate within an established organization, the leap from idea to MVP is daunting. Questions pile up quickly:

What features should we build, and how do we measure success?
When will we be ready to release a beta to real users?
Whom should we hire, and what skills should they bring?
How many people do we actually need?

How to Define an MVP

Building an MVP is like packing for a business trip with an evolving itinerary.

Budget, timelines and team resources became our first set of filters, naturally narrowing our scope. We evaluated every feature under one guiding principle: Does this directly help our users accomplish their most essential tasks? If it didn’t, it was an unnecessary item taken out of the suitcase. This focus freed up space for what truly mattered.

The process of constant prioritization felt ruthless but proved invaluable, with each reduction in scope clarifying and solidifying our MVP vision and product roadmap. As a byproduct of the rigorous feature scrutiny and detailed PRDs, we created a prioritized list of items that included new features or quality-of-life improvements to existing ones, laying the foundation for future growth.

So, How Do You Build Your Team?

Your team is your most important asset in the MVP journey. In the early days of HappyPath, we debated endlessly about hiring: Should we run lean or scale fast? Should we prioritize experience or potential?

Here’s what we learned, captured in the archetypes that define our team:

6 Hiring Archetypes in Software Engineering
The Savant.
The Corporate Beast.
The Rover.
The Conductor(s).
The Seasoned Swiss-Army Knife.
The Junior Powerhouse(s).

Bask in the Process

As you begin your journey, remember that an MVP is not simply a deliverable. Your MVP reflects the team’s ability to focus, adapt and collaborate under pressure. With the right mix of complementary skills and a well-defined North Star, your small team can turn limited resources into meaningful user impact.

When executed properly, good decision-making, paired with a little bit of luck and a relentless effort to understand your users, builds the foundation for long-term growth. Be present with your team, users, and product vision throughout this process; your MVP is proof that small teams, with big ideas, can achieve extraordinary outcomes.

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The road to success — On the minimum viable concept

Whenever you’re trying to create a product from scratch or thinking about a major new feature, you will inevitably bump into the term MVP (minimum viable product). The concept of MVP is there to help you build something that the users really want in the shortest, cheapest, and leanest way. This week, I went to a meetup where I heard some talks that planted the seed: to reach success, maybe it’s not only the product (or feature) we want to ship there that should be scrutinized along the “minimum viable” concept. Let me share with you the saplings that grew out of those seeds.

Product

Recap: A minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the simplest version of the product that includes only the essential features required to deliver value to early adopters and validate core assumptions about the product’s viability. In my view, the same concept can also be applied to major features.

Core functionality only
A good MVP contains only the core features, no decorations or knick-knacks.

Rapid development and launch
A good MVP allows teams to quickly develop and release the product without overdoing the initial investment and risk.

Validation
A quick MVP can help you gather honest user feedback to validate whether the product is worth further investment.

Rinse and repeat
Based on the insights gathered from each release, the product can be improved step by step with additional features, design improvements, and optimizations.

Business

Many startups bleed out due to wrong or missing product-market fit. Similarly to what the MVP means to the product, you should also validate your product-market fit and broader business model.

Core offering and product-market fit
What is the core problem we’re trying to solve with our product? Is there a real need in the market for this, or are we just trying to find the problem for our solution idea?

Revenue and business model
Is our product for the B2C, the B2B, or the B2B2C market? Who will be our customers? What’s our revenue model? Direct sales, pay-per-use, or subscription? Are there enough customers who are willing to pay for our product?

Customer acquisition and retention
How will you attract new customers? What channels and what kind of communication might work? How much effort will it take to attack and onboard enough customers to become sustainable?

Operational and financial feasibility
Collect what you will need for product delivery, customer support, and other critical operations. Can the current model expand with additional demand? Uncover the essential costs required to run the business. Will your revenue cover all your costs, including product development, marketing, and operations?

Technology

Our goal is to establish a minimal yet functional technological foundation that can support the initial phases of a product without over-investing in complex, resource-heavy solutions. What design and data structure will support the needs of my MVP, and what is not needed? The idea here is to outline the path from the initial concept to the shippable product, removing the ambiguity.

Design
Don’t be shy with design discussions. Don’t just code something and let it evolve into a nice bowl of spaghetti. Even if you’re following an iterative approach, planning for the planned features and use cases is essential.

Infrastructure
Verify your infrastructure from multiple angles: how much does it cost now, and will it cost if your product scales? Can you leverage free credits or services?

Data structure
Software engineers tend to say that code is concrete. Once you’ve developed something, it’s tough to change it or to let it go. We tend to forget it, but the same is true (or even more accurate) for data structures.

Automation

In the beginning, you most likely will perform all operations manually. But that’s not sustainable in the long run. Identify possible areas for automation and tooling and the cost of development. And only automate what’s worth the investment.

Build or buy

There is an app for that! Chances are there are multiple free or paid services that you can use as Lego blocks to build your house. They might not be perfect, but they are cheaper than building something from scratch, especially in the beginning.

Analytics

Insight into the product’s performance, user activity, and system reliability is key to a successful improvement. Think about these aspects early on so that you can collect events and slice and dice this data to gather information that can be fed into your product, business, or technology roadmap.

If you would like to dig deeper into the technology aspect, then check out my earlier post to dig deeper into unnecessary complexity:

As you can see, this no-nonsense, down-to-earth, focus-on-the-minimum approach that characterizes the MVP concept is very much applicable to your strategy with business and technology as well. All aspects are essential for a successful product or feature launch.

Food for thought: What’s your approach to avoid unnecessarily complex products? How do you avoid building something as complex as a space rocket in your first release? What’s your secret weapon to verify product-market fit? I would love to hear from your personal experiences.

_{The original content of the note was published on Namasteandcabernet.substack.com. To read the full note visit here}

The emerging startup playbook

Over the past year I’ve unpacked the zero to $1 million journeys of more than a dozen breakthrough startups including 11x, Attio, Copy.ai, lemlist and Pinecone. And I’ve advised countless others during this messy period between having a product to sell and a repeatable go-to-market machine.

Many of these startups have seen breakout growth. Copy.ai started with four MVPs, then struck gold and scaled to 10 million users in only four years. Jam went from seven failures to 10x usage growth. Pinecone saw signups explode to over 10,000 per day.

Not one of these journeys was preordained. And none followed what I’d consider to be the “conventional” startup playbook popularized over the past decade or so.

The conventional approach tends to look something like this:

-Build a minimum viable product (MVP)—you should be embarrassed otherwise you’ve shipped too late.
-Launch with a big PR splash—open your waitlist all at once to capitalize on the lightning strike.
-Push hard on cold outbound to prove you can spend money to make money.
-Write SEO-bait content for inbound leads—volume is what matters even if it is uninspired.
-Get to $1M in ARR to show product-market fit (PMF) and raise your Series A.
-Keep growing by hiring more reps—growth is an equation based on the number of ramped reps, quotas and average attainment.
-Goal marketing on qualified leads (MQLs) to feed the army of sales reps.
-Raise more money for external signaling—fundraises generate PR, close candidates and prove viability to prospects.

Each of these components makes intuitive sense. And collectively this playbook has served many startups quite well.

But the startups I’ve been spending time with lately — and in particular the startups that have gotten off the ground in a post-ZIRP, AI-first environment — have followed a different path. I’ll unpack what these next generation startups did instead, which collectively looks like an emerging startup playbook.

The emerging startup playbook

1.Build a minimum remarkable product that stands out.

People used to tell founders that they should be embarrassed by their initial product; otherwise, they’ve shipped too late.

That was fantastic advice when the predominant alternative was pen-and-paper or Excel. Now the alternative is mostly other modern software products.

2.Embrace storytelling to attract an audience.

Many startup founders stay in ‘stealth mode’ and steadily build up a waitlist until they’re ready to launch. Then the launch becomes a ‘lightning strike’ moment with as much fanfare as possible. Folks will open their waitlist all at once, work with PR to offer exclusives to top publications and drum up interest in early adopter communities like Product Hunt

3.Hire ops to test and grow potential channels.

Cold outbound became a part of the GTM playbook at nearly every enterprise software company. It might start with founders running their own outbound plays to find design partners. Steadily larger and larger teams would get built to turn outbound into a coin operated machine.

4.Lead with the product.

When startups wanted to supplement their lead generation beyond outbound, they’d typically turn to search engine optimization (SEO). The SEO playbook usually included creating a list of potential keywords, prioritizing the relevant ones that had the most volume and then writing lots of SEO-bait content to rank for those terms.

5.Strong retention and word-of-mouth = PMF.

$1 million ARR has long been a major milestone in enterprise software. Whether in fundraising conversations or popular blog posts, $1 million comes up as a near-mystical number that signals product-market fit and readiness to raise a Series A.

It’s not a terrible rule-of-thumb. The $1 million ARR milestone indicates customers are willing to pay for the product and that there’s some level of repeatability in finding, winning and serving these customers. It might have been particularly meaningful at a time when go-to-market was dominated by cold outbound plus inside sales.

6.Stay lean through automation and AI.

In a previous era, growing beyond $1 million ARR became more-or-less an equation in a spreadsheet. If you didn’t grow as fast as you hoped, it was usually because you hadn’t hired enough people quickly enough.

The spreadsheet-based approach to scaling has started to fade as go-to-market becomes more complicated and as startups embrace more efficient growth.

7.Embrace a unified GTM focused on your ideal customers (ICP).

Software businesses have been stuck with a mental model where marketing generates leads (MQLs) and then sales closes them. As we tied growth to a hiring plan, marketing became responsible for feeding new sales reps with more and more MQLs.

8.Maintain capital optionality and control your destiny.

To pull off the prior startup playbook, you’d need capital – the more, the better. Large fundraises not only provided the cash to hire armies of sales reps and xDRs, they provided powerful external signaling. Fundraises attracted press attention, which then attracted candidates and signaled viability to potential prospects. There were competitive dynamics at play, too, which big fundraises effectively taking the oxygen out of the room as smart VCs anointed a category leader.

Think of these as emerging best practices rather than a how-to guide. Some may not work for your specific business; you may also find yourself creating entirely new practices that better reflect the nuances of your product, market and team.

Regardless of where you land, it’s clear that we need to move past the dated (and expensive) approach of the recent past and craft a better future.

_{The original content of the note was published on Growthunhinged.com. To read the full note visit here}

Why And How A Minimum Viable Product Is Important For A Startup’s Future

According to a 2022 Microsoft report, 50 million startups are launched annually. This means that, on average, about 137,000 startups emerge daily—prompting a much-needed reality check.

What is an MVP?

For the uninitiated, an MVP is a basic version of the product that solves the core problem of the target audience. It is built with minimum features and demonstrates how the product will benefit customers by addressing their most important pain points. Once the MVP is built, companies collect feedback iteratively to improve the product and scale it by adding more auxiliary features that enhance the user experience.

The Lean Startup Methodology And MVP

At the core of the lean startup methodology is the concept of the MVP, encouraging incremental learning and scalable growth. By starting with a small, low-risk product iteration, businesses can gauge market interest, refine their offerings and attract early investors. Thus, an MVP enables you to get an idea of the market quickly and take the first small step as a startup with a lower financial risk.

Deploying The Perfect MVP Strategy

Certain clear expectations are required of your MVP. To do so, the MVP must contain a well-researched customer base, understand the pain points it needs to solve, align with the business objectives and remain the most simple and effective product built. The product owner or manager typically develops user stories and solves the problem.

Ensure adopted feedback aligns with immediate customer pain points.
From the user stories, identify and prioritize the features that directly address the most critical customer pain points. The aim is to keep the MVP as lean as possible, focusing on key functionalities that solve the main problems.

Balance what’s achievable versus what you want to achieve.
Keep it simple. Back in the day, one of my professors offered me some critical advice I follow to this day.

Make room for scaling.
Don't build everything today. Make plans to scale the product. Some features must definitely be left for future builds. This equally involves considering the technical infrastructure needed to support a larger user base as well as strategies for marketing, sales and customer support.

Few Of Many Types Of MVP And Feedback Models

Paper Prototyping
Paper prototyping is a simple and cost-effective method for creating prototypes of your product. You can sketch rough designs, flow charts and diagrams to visualize the product's features and functionalities with just a piece of paper and a pen.

Digital Prototyping
Digital prototyping involves using digital tools to create wireframes, mock-ups and prototypes of your product. Tools like InvisionApp, Figma and MarvelApp allow you to showcase how the product will work in real life and how the functionalities will be sorted.

Wizard Of Oz MVP
The Wizard of Oz MVP creates the illusion of a fully functional product but relies on manual execution behind the scenes. This approach allows you to test the product's concept and user experience without fully developing the technology.

Concierge MVP
Concierge MVPs provide users with a preview of the product's capabilities without building a fully automated system. Instead, representatives manually fulfill customer needs, allowing you to validate customer requirements and refine the business model.

Customer Interviews
Customer interviews are essential for getting insights into your target audience's needs, preferences and pain points. Product-oriented feedback is a major reason for conducting interviews with potential users.

In Conclusion

If your MVP passes the testing stage, congratulations—you can launch it into the market! Once you launch, keep the aforementioned feedback processes in place so that customers can give you constructive suggestions for improvement.

_{The original content of the note was published on Forbes.com. To read the full note visit here}

Accelerating startup success: the role of MVP in agile software Development

In the fast-paced world of startups, the ability to swiftly bring a product to market can often be the key differentiator between success and failure. As entrepreneurs embark on their journey to create innovative solutions, the adoption of a well-structured product development strategy becomes crucial. One such strategy gaining prominence is the minimum viable product (MVP) in startup software development, coupled with the agile SDLC. This dynamic duo has proven to be a game-changer for startups looking to optimize their development processes and deliver value to customers efficiently.
The power of MVP in startup software development
MVP defined
At the heart of successful startup software development lies the concept of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP is a strategically stripped-down version of a product that includes only its core features. The primary goal of MVP startup software development is to quickly launch the product into the market to gather valuable user feedback, allowing for iterative improvements based on actual user experiences.
Benefits of MVP in startup software development
The benefits of adopting a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach in startup software development extend beyond the initial expedited time-to-market. One of the key advantages is the significant enhancement of cost-efficiency throughout the development lifecycle.
Developing a full-featured product demands substantial financial resources, which may strain a startup’s budget. In contrast, an MVP allows startups to channel their resources strategically.
Furthermore, the MVP strategy establishes a valuable user feedback loop. Early deployment of a product allows startups to garner real-time insights into user experiences and preferences.
MVP startup software development in action
To better understand the practical application of MVP in startup software development, consider a hypothetical scenario where a new social networking platform is being developed. The MVP for this project could include essential features like user registration, profile creation, and basic social interaction functionalities. Once launched, early adopters can provide feedback, guiding subsequent development phases.

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Crucial Foundations: Unveiling the Importance of Minimum Viable Products (MVP)

In the dynamic world of contemporary business, the idea of minimum viable products (MVP) remains a key part of advancement and strategic development. This article delves into the importance of MVPs, investigating their critical role in product development. From the essential standards of MVPs to the various advantages they offer, this discussion intends to unravel their importance. As we journey through the subtleties of MVP implementation across different businesses, we shed light on the normal difficulties organizations experience in this pursuit. Lock in for a comprehensive investigation of the essential foundations of MVPs in the consistently developing business development landscape.
The Core Concept of MVP:
At the essence of current product development, the minimum viable products (MVP) is an essential methodology that reforms how organizations develop. An MVP isn’t just a downsized variant of a product; rather, it is a fastidiously organized model that exemplifies the fundamental functionalities vital for tending to the necessities of the interest group.
Benefits of Implementing MVP:
The advantages of implementing minimum viable products (MVP) are complex, with a fast cycle and a powerful feedback loop being the foundation of this approach. Through the arrival of a fundamental product rendition, organizations can quickly gather important criticism from clients. This iterative cycle works with consistent improvement, guaranteeing that ensuing emphases adjust intimately with advancing client inclinations and market requests.
Additionally, MVPs contribute to cost productivity and resource optimization. Traditional, full-scale product development without approval can cause significant expenses.
Moreover, MVPs offer the priceless benefit of early market approval. By sending off an insignificant rendition, organizations can notice true client collaborations, checking the product’s reasonability.
MVP in Different Industries:
The flexibility of the MVP idea extends across different industries, reshaping how products are developed and brought to market.
Tech, New Businesses, And Software Development:
In the tech domain, MVPs assume a critical role in testing software ideas and functionalities. Organizations dispatch an essential variant of their product to a select user group, working with the distinguishing proof of bugs, grasping client conduct, and refining the product before a full-scale launch.
Consumer Electronics:
The consumer electronic industry decisively utilizes MVPs to test models, highlighting insignificant elements. Manufacturers influence this way to deal with survey client responses, assess the possibility of the product, and make essential changes before entering large-scale manufacturing.
Healthcare Innovation:
In the healthcare sector, accuracy is vital, and MVPs are key for plotting new medical devices or software apps. This approach permits healthcare associations to guarantee that the result satisfies rigid administrative guidelines while tending to the particular requirements of medical care experts and patients.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, embracing minimum viable products (MVP) isn’t simply a decision; it is an essential basis for associations exploring the complexities of current business. Through a careful comprehension of the central idea, outfitting the advantages, and skillfully tending to normal difficulties, organizations can employ MVPs as powerful instruments for development, market approval, and supported development across different enterprises.

_{The original content of the note was published on Enterpriseappstoday.com. To read the full note visit here}