John B Petersen III

This is a common question we hear when meeting entrepreneurs, and on that I came across on Quora this weekend. The question asked “How long is too long to release a minimum viable product?” and specifically referred to how Blekko was in development for over three years before launching. Naturally, I felt the need to chime in and then subsequently turn this into a blog post.

I think we need to defer to Gandalf on this one:

“A wizard is never late. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.”

And so it should be with a Minimum Viable Product. Every startup is different and only the founders know precisely when is the right time to release their MVP upon the world.

To give a more actionable answer: a MVP by definition should require theminimum (really putting some extra emphasis on minimum here) amount of effort required to gain the maximum amount of validated learning to test the core assumptions.

That’s too many buzz words for me in one sentence, but I think it’s required to properly answer this question. The entire purpose of the MVP is to test the crazy assumptions that the founders have been dreaming up. Most of the people that approach us at NYC Dev Shop never explicitly identify the main assumption that they are trying to validate. That’s a problem.

Without knowing exactly what your core assumption is, how do you know what your MVP should do functionally let alone how long it should take to build before you release it? You are basically saying, “I want to build this solution even though I’m not really sure that I’m solving a problem for anyone but myself (sometimes not even for yourself).”

Once you have your core assumption identified, your decision making process is easy:

• Will my MVP in its current state allow me to test my core assumption? If no —> keep building
• Will this new shiny feature provide me with more validated learning? If no —>  defer to Phase 2
• Will spending countless hours on design and branding truly help me understand what people think about my MVP? If no —> be proud that you are embarrassed by your design

I had someone approach me with the idea of building a new MVP every single week for 10 weeks. I initially thought that the idea of throwing a bunch of stuff on the wall to see what sticks was a clever way to go about finding something amazing. After thinking through it a little more, I decided that I was very much against this. Putting an arbitrary time limit on an idea isn’t the correct approach at all. A week might be too long for a bad idea and certainly might not be long enough for a good one.

At the Dev Shop, our sweet spot is 3 weeks to 3 months of development, but of course it is entirely dependent on the project. Sometimes you can get it done in a weekend at a hackathon. Other times if you’re building a search engine or a Tesla, it could take a bit longer.

{This post is republished from the NYC Dev Shop Blog]

Sometimes, it is incredibly difficult to try to convince entrepreneurs that they should not be trying to “Conquer the World in Your MVP.” It is your job as an entrepreneur to be 3 steps ahead of everyone, so it’s completely understandable that you have a feature list 5 miles long. I get it.

You want your product to change the world. I’m all for it. In my opinion, you can’t dream big enough, but I need you to realize that Rome wasn’t built in a day. So I’ve compiled a list of some companies that I’m sure you’ve heard of but might not have recognized their lean startup approach or their MVP roots…

Twitter
1) Initial Idea — an individual would use twttr to communicate with a small group of friends via SMS
2) The MVP — The project was created internally within Odeo and originally allowed for messages to be sent to Odeo employees
3) Interesting — Dorsey, Ev and Biz purchased Odeo and all of it’s assets. The 1st tweet ever was from Dorsey: “just setting up my twttr”. The name Twitter was inspired by Flickr
4) Now — Currently preparing for an inevitable IPO rumored to be valued north of $11 billion

Groupon
1) Initial Idea —ThePoint.com = social media platform designed to get groups of people together to solve problems
2) The MVP — as The Point was failing fast, Andrew Mason made a pivot to use those groups to sell a deal for a half-price offer for the pizza place on the first floor of his office building
3) Interesting — the idea for The Point / Groupon supposedly originally came when Mason was trying to get out of his cell phone contract. The Point was originally not intended to make any serious amount of money. The group of “socially responsible” do-gooders went on to become the fastest growing billion dollar company in history
4) Now — On November 4, 2011, Groupon raised $700 million from its IPO valuing the company at $12.7 billion. As of 1/17 the company now has a market cap of $3.34 billion, not nearly where it IPO’d, but when was the last time you started a $3 billion company?

Microsoft
1) Initial Idea — to develop an implementation of the BASIC language for the Altair 8800
2) The MVP — Gates famously called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) offering to demo the implementation in order to win a contract with the company. He essentially sold a product that he hadn’t even built yet — the ultimate Lean Startup move!
3) Interesting — In 1975 (the same year Bill Gates and Paul Allen originally came up with the idea), Micro-soft pulled in $1 million in gross income. 40 years later there are startups that would kill for $1 million in revenues in their first year. The Microsoft IPO and rise in share price create 3 billionaires and 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees
4) Now — World’s largest software maker by revenues and one of the world’s most valuable companies

Amazon
1) Initial Idea — use the potential of the internet to sell stuff online
2) The MVP — sell books out of your garage because it would allow you to have a much larger selection than the brick-and-mortar stores at a fraction of the price
3) Interesting — In 1994, Jeff Bezos (inspired by the growth potential of the world wide web) created a list of things he could sell online including everything from music to clothing before finally deciding to go with books. Bezos used an extra door as a table in his garage to help fulfill the initial orders. To this day, many of the desks at Amazon are supposedly still made from doors.
4) Now — World’s largest online retailer

Dropbox
1) Initial Idea — make an extremely easy-to-use file sharing tool
2) The MVP — a product demo video of what Dropbox looked like with plenty of “easter eggs” and nerd humor helped the company attract a 75,000 wait-list with 24 hours. Based on the overwhelming response, they slowly allowed select users to begin using Dropbox as they continued to develop the product
3) Interesting — the idea was conceived by Drew Houston on a bus to New York when he planned to do some coding during the 4 hour ride but left his USB drive at home.
4) Now — Over 100 million users, $250+ million in venture funding, a rumored $5 to $10 billion valuation, approximately $240 million of revenue in 2011

Moral of the story: despite what Pinky and the Brain might think, you can not take over the world in one night. You need to be laser-focused on your idea, be prepared for the unexpected and remember that starting small can sometimes lead to some incredibly large and earth-changing results.

Based on a question from Quora  I’ve put together this of list of tips and advice for building an MVP. These are things I find myself saying on a daily basis in some capacity or another. There’s certainly some more to be added to thist list, but for now, here’s the Top 8…

1. Read The Lean Startup by Eric Reis. If you haven’t read it recently, go back and re-read it (this time specifically thinking about how it applies to your idea).

2. Identify, study, and love the problem you are trying to solve. If you don’t know the problem you are solving, STOP! If you don’t know who else is playing in your space, STOP! If you don’t know how you are going to be 10x better than others attacking your problem, seriously pause and consider if you really want to invest effort into something where you might be marginally better than the existing solution.

READ THE LAST 6 TIPS ON THE NYC DEV SHOP BLOG…

I am going to use jbp3.com as my own personal Minimum Viable Product. It is an exercise to improve my design and development skills and to do some fun things I’ve had in my head for a while. It is going to be a slow process, but it will keep me entertained for now.

The new redesign is a weak first step — I couldn’t stand that old design, so I just used a very basic Tumblr theme and then customized the HTML as much as possible within reason. There’s still a few ugly things I will be changing soon.

I have a rails app I’ve been working on behind the scenes that still needs some more work before I can push that public. For now, directing the Tumblr blog to the site will have to do until the rest is ready. Fair warning: you are not going to see a lot of progress any time soon for three reasons:

1. I am writing every line of code by myself and teaching myself everything I need to along the way
2. I’ve got a lot to learn to be able to implement some of the things I’ve been dreaming up. Luckily for our clients at the Dev Shop, our development team is so much more talented that I could ever hope to be :)
3. Sadly, redesigning and developing the new site is a super low priority for me (although blogging more frequently is not)

This site is going to be my nerd-hobby. As always, looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.

From Alec Hartman on the NYC Dev Shop Blog…

I get pitched a lot of good ideas, daily. Before an entrepreneur sits across the table from me they’ve done a ton of planning, a bunch of research and have undoubtedly spent hours dreaming about how their soon-to-be-application is going to look and feel. And without fail, every entrepreneur has an incredible list of features that they want to build and incorporate in the product from Day 1.

As a result, I often find that the core of the product I’m being asked to build is hidden many layers underneath user acquisition features, gamification features, and “features investors will like.” This is the biggest mistake we see with an entrepreneur’s idea of an MVP - they try to conquer the world right away.

It’s a super important lesson for any first time entrepreneur to keep in mind as they begin to build their product.

I finally got around to checking my mail which provided me with a few surprises — mostly not fun. Turns out, they actually tried to warn me a few times before they suspended my driver’s license for a parking ticket I swear I never saw.

On the bright side, I finally found and opened a letter I knew was hiding in the two-month-old mail pile. No, not the Christmas card of my brother, wife, and 6 month old baby Gavin, although that was nice. I am referring to a letter from Cyberdyne.

Shelby.tv has done brand personality right from Day 1, and this hand-written note accompanying my Shelby sticker was no different. Full disclosure: I am not an investor but I am a big fan of the team and avid user of the product :)

For anyone attempting to build a consumer-facing product, I first suggest you read this wonderful guest post by FAKEGRIMLOCK - Minimum Viable Personality. Then, take some time to watch @onshelby in action.

I am a student of all things tech startups and spend a lot of time studying and learning the ways of the force. I’ve been an outside observer of the Shelby team for almost a year now and it has truly been a great learning experience for me. Watching them go from beta to a full product launch in the app store while building a great team and having a ton of fun along the way has been incredible.

It’s hard not to root for these guys, and with that I am proud to show off my Shelby sticker. Stay classy Shelby.