The Startup Chat – Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The Startup Chat aims to help entrepreneurs and startup people succeed.

The Startup Chat on Feb 19, 2010
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

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Topics

Hiring, Bootstrap, MVP, survey.io, Team, Sharefeed, AppWhirl, Startup secrets, Insipration, Social Game MVP, Enterprise, Next steps

Summary by @csabacsoma

Introductions

Jeremy L. I’m the founder of starstreetsports.com – we have our MVP up – It is a sports stock market. Located in Boston.
A sports stock market – it is a virtual assets market place where you (soon with real money) can buy and sell share of the players and teams of your choice.
If anyone wants in to poke around shoot me your email, or just enter it at http://starstreetsports.com and I’ll let you in

Ericzoo Generalist of http://Twidl.it Twitter: @ericzoo

Richard J. Richard Jordan, Founder & CEO of AppWhirl, Inc. – we automate the production of mobile apps (though we have quite a bold idea of exactly what a mobile app is) and we’ve bootstrapped through our minimum viable product

Nathan J. I’m Nathan Brauer – founder of HelloLogic, a UX consultant and web developer. I’m both a writer and an editor for AEXT.NET. Twitter: @hellologic

Vicky P. I am Vicky Parmar, Student of Computer application, based in mumbai, india

Nathan Nathan – Undergrad Business Student at the University of British Columbia

waterfallrain Shontae cs student/consultant

George R George Revutsky, ROI.works Search Marketing (seervices co.) transforming into MyNextCustomer

Richard J. I’m Richard Roberts, I live in Yokohama, Japan. I am making a records management compliance app for Google Docs. Was a finalist at Startup Weekend Tokyo in December.

Gangadhar S. I have started hLog – an app for documenting health data

omarjead So I am Omar, and I am working on a few different projects using the lean startup and customer development methodology. Currently, I am working with a company that is trying to build an ecommerce site to compliment their bricks and mortar store. I would like to learn more about how the MVP practice applies to ecommerce

Nic Hi, Nic from NYC… work with adaptiveblue as senior web dev, but I really like startups, oh and it’s 2am here… http://getglue.com

Santosh Santosh Dawara, Founder, Engineer at http://Dubzer.com, we are pre-launch, in India, presented at DEMOFall’09 (Alphapitch). Our Appn helps you collaborate and share blogs, content in the right (human) language

Pradeep E. Pradeep – R&D at Intridea, Inc (http://intridea.com) – we have a bunch of products – http://presentlyapp.com, http://crowdsound.com and a few more stealth

Syed Everyone Syed here working on a site which is 1-1 meetups, i am looking for a cofounder.

dru w. Hey guys- I’m Dru. Took a leave of absence from UC Berkeley last year during what I call my quarter life crisis =D …. now I do business development for http://www.heyzap.com/ (We monetize and distribute flash games) Twitter: @druwynings

Steven L. Twitter: @StevenLoi

Ashley Twitter: @beforeyouknowit

cwe Twitter: @chadwetsell

Andrew S. Twitter: @littleidea

Hiring

Gangadhar S. So Hiten – what topics did you want to touch today?

Hiten S. Hiring actually
it’s hard to find really really good developers, and the bar at our company is really high

Dharmesh S. I’ve found hiring has gotten even harder with the improved economy.

Hiten S. Dharmesh: agreed

Gangadhar S. how does one find good techies who will match your value system and expectations?

Jeremy L. I’ve got the same challenge… seems like a lot do… Best advice I have is you just gotta try… really really hard

Jal but it’s always a dilemma. You need professionals to create the first product when you don’t have enough to pay them

Jeremy L. yep… I’ve been able to put together a great team (at least the start of it) and make some progress without any money, but could certainly be moving faster with it

Santosh Jeremy : did hear web startups up and running in a $1,000?

Jeremy L. Santosh: nope didn’t hear it… saw some tweets about it though

Mikko K Gangadhar S: I’ve had great success using the sports type scouting. Pick them early, make sure basic values match and then cultivate
just like in sports, everyone wants the top talent, and there is really not so many

Jal Jeremy: Yep. It’s all about cherry picking the first employees

Gangadhar S. Mikko – sure. The issue is that I am in a place where not many are interested in startups….they look for stability of fortune 500/1000 companies

Bootstrap

Jal How do you initially fund yourself for an Internet Business?

? Jal: via consulting

Gangadhar S. ok..how do startups afford health insurance? That has kept me from going full time on my venture?

Richard J. Gangadhar: that’s part of the entrepreneurial thing – the risk
it’s a risk for all of us, and it’s not something everyone can take

George R. health insurance – depending on where you are, Kaiser has pretty inexpensive plans

Gangadhar S. Richard – you are saying that just wing it…and hope that you do not fall sick?

Richard J. fortunately for me my wife was able to get insurance for kiddoes and us, but there was a lot of time without it… it’s tough, but part of the startup thing

Minimum Viable Product

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product

Hiten S. Alright MVPs, who has attempted one recently, either full web app or MVP feature?
me: http://sharefeed.com is probably our latest

George R. Ok, Minimum Viable Product – every time get ready to launch publicly (we have 55 paying Closed Beta Customers), I get this urge to FIX SOMETHING…

ericzoo Our MVP is over at http://twidl.it. It combines images or photos and status updates.

Richard J. We have attempted an MVP see http://www.appwhirl.com

Mikko K Just for fun: http://colawars.tv/ (after the design was completed took 20 minutes to do)

Hiten S. So, how do you guys assess whether your MVP has been “successful” or not?

Nic also curious what tools you use to determine “success”

Richard J. you don’t know it really needs fixing till your customers tell you

Mikko K we use MVPs internally, so the best metric is how much easier it makes our life

Jeremy L. I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of what I expected… means we’re sticking on the path and continuing development, building out a set of features right now

Pradeep E. Hiten: we use our own products, so if we enjoy using it, then it’s usually worth pursuing
and post beta-launch, it’s all about analytics and retention

Richard J. Hiten: we found that we got higher penetration rates than expected, got word of mouth virality and saw the monetization model work (people paid)
but we tracked it very primitively

George R. that’s the thing – we don’t have good then best analytics installed in our product (its a SAAS) to REALLY know how it’s being used.. I mean we can infer…

survey.io

Hiten S. Would it be beneficial if I went over my own experience with a MVP we created at KISSmetrics?

(many) Yes

Hiten S. Alright, so I’ll start with the story about http://survey.io
Basically our business mission is to help people understand their customers better

Nathan J. …did you start survery.io? Didn’t realize that…

Vicky P. survey.io looks interesting

Hiten S. So, there is a quantitative and qualitative aspect to understanding customers
With the main KISSmetrics product, we knew it was going to take time and a ton of effort to get it right and we also started doing some qualitative stuff, like surveying of early customers

George R. Minimum Viable to me – is when they pay you, use it, it does what it says it does, even if it is a basic feature set, and they don’t ask for the money back

Vicky P. hiten: OK so does that mean that survey.io is a platform for businesses to connect with consumers and understand their perspective?

Hiten S. and we really didn’t know what questions to ask (I am being a little dramatic about that point) but hear me out
so, we had a few assumptions about surveying

George R. got a survey.io from another entrepreneur – I think it could be useful for early customer feedback for sure

Hiten S. 1. People don’t know what questions to ask their customers
2. They don’t know how to analyze the questions
3. The way that surveys are sent to customers is not as effective as it could be

Hiten S. so we set out to build an MVP to address those 3 assumptions and prove them right or wrong we addressed them in the following way:
1. Create a single template of questions that is easily applicable to all companies on the web – that’s where Sean Ellis’s (http://startupmarketing.com) expertise came into play. He helped us spec the questions based on his years of experience as a marketer.

Hiten S. 2. By using the expertise that Sean had with his “first survey” template, we could easily tell people how to analyze the results (especially since it is a template)
3. We figured we’d make it an embed and also allow for people to use a publicly available link.

Vicky P. Hiten: Just a doubt from my side, how is survey.io different than the normal Google doc surveys that one can create? I mean what’s the USP of it.

Richard R. It is very easy to use Vicky P. Just did one today. Slick.

Vicky P. ok

Richard J. Vicky – check it out it’s SOOOO easy – just go to survey.io while Hiten is telling us – it’s so quick you’ll be back without missing much

Vicky P. Richard J.: Doing just that sir

Hiten S. So, survey.io was built by one of our engineers in about 5 days based on those assumptions and features
So here are the things we learned about these assumptions

omarjead survey.io is deff cool, but it does not address my market…I am anticipating the release of KISSmetrics survey for ecommerce

Richard R. Wow, impressive dev time!

Richard R. It took 5 weeks with 3 devs for mine. B2B and more complex problem domain for mine I think.

Hiten S. It was a MVP, so speed was everything, we wanted something we could build with 1 engineer in less than 7 days we were just trying to validate our assumptions that’s why you can’t edit the questions yet

Richard J. i like the yet

ericzoo what was the feedback from the MVP early users?

Hiten S. So… 1. We were correct, people don’t know what questions to ask and templates are a great way to get them started asking their customers questions. The customer feedback backs this up.

Hiten S. 2. Analyzing results is important, but it really is just a side-effect of #1 So if you provide good templates, analysis is a natural outcome. This can easily be achieved with a blog post or two, or what I would call “education”. Example: http://venturehacks.com/articles/measurefit

Hiten S. 3. The embed is actually the most significant leap that we made.
We first thought we wanted to “compete” with surveymonkey.com (at least take a slice of their customer based)
We actually wasted ton of time building that functionality (we have a version of survey.io that actually powers our KISSmetrics.com and sharefeed surveys) But we realized that we wanted to differentiate So than we did another MVP…

Hiten S. Any burning questions so far?

Richard R. How did you decide what features to kill?

Hiten S. It ended up being more of a pivot and more like what features should we focus on versus which ones should we kill
This was based on evaluating how people used the product

Richard J. so survey.io pivoted to KISSmetrics?

Hiten S. No, not at all. KISSmetrics has been going on all along, Survey.io is just another one of our products

Hiten S. We have some usability issues and we noticed some interested behavior based on that.

Richard R. Ahh, that makes sense. Did you build triggers to see what people did in the app?

Hiten S. So we actually used more qualitative feedback
Like people’s tweets about survey.io, feedback / bugs / support requests and very little metrics actually

ericzoo im interested in who were the early testers? were they MVP stage startups?

Hiten S. they were other startups, early, mid and late stage. In fact the folks at Automattic embedded the survey.io survey on wordpress.com within the first few days of us releasing it

ericzoo what did they felt using survey.io

Hiten S. they felt that it was easy to implement and provided good feedback

dru w. Hiten: When did you 1st start working on KISSmetrics?

Hiten S. it’s been about 20 months

ericzoo doesnt automattic own a survey company. funny that

Hiten S. they own polldaddy, more about polls than surveys. plus our template attracted them
so that related to other behavior we saw
many many people would take parts of our survey and add the questions to their own surveys in surveymonkey or other tools like google forms or wufoo
So, that helped us realize that we probably don’t want to compete with them
since the market is so saturated with survey tools

omarjead so can we hear a bit more about other products you used an MVP for at KISS?

Hiten S. omarjead: so here comes the next MVP

Richard J. makes sense – questions are not defensible right?

Hiten S. yup, exactly, question are not defensible

KevBurnsJr When you made the decision to pivot, did you have a clear idea of what direction to wanted to head with the product and was everyone in agreement?

Hiten S. yes we figured it out by our next MVP So, we had this idea of focusing on the embed idea
So we did a little MVP on our main KISSmetrics analytics product.

Richard J. I think we need to change how we’ve implemented survey.io as we have a low usage of it compared to apps made

KevBurnsJr So you created another MVP as an exploration of the direction you might want to pivot.

Hiten S. yup

Hiten S. we implemented our idea around embeds We came up with the idea of making it so people could ask simple, short questions within their web apps
so we built a quick MVP to test that theory on our KISSmetrics sign up flow

Jeremy L. and where is it?? I would love to use it (the way you have on your kiss splash page)

Hiten S. thats the thing, we’re not releasing that product

Vicky P. Hiten: Not allowing businesses to edit or add their questions is a bit non convincing. People would want to survey about a particular feature of their product and so on.

omarjead “So we did a little MVP on our main KISSmetrics analytics product.” – Just out of curiosity, how did you guys determine what metrics were important to measure the success of a company in the beginning? Did you use customer development to determine that?

Hiten S. yes, we do customer development
a lot

Richard J. I just like that there’s a name for it now – Customer Development – shortens explanation time when talking with investors

omarjead so u used custev to determine what metrics were important for startups?

Hiten S. simply put, we had a hypothesis with some assumptions and we continually try to validate them

Hiten S. we asked people a simple questions, “Are you going to install the code on your site right now?”
Here is an example of what our embeds looked like
our MVP for our embed related product idea of survey.io: http://… (no longer available)

KevBurnsJr So this MVP focused about embeds, did it pan out as a future direction for the product?

ericzoo in customer development. what type of people did u ask?
startup founders?

Hiten S. anyone that would listen! not necessarily startup founders, but people responsible for product development were our target
but we also had a solid base of survey.io customers from our previous MVP so we asked them

ericzoo in other words anyone in product development

Hiten S. yup, pretty much
but anyone that would sign up for survey.io too

Santosh your startup has achieved product and market fit?

Hiten S. not at liberty to say yet

Jeremy L. oh… I was talking about the expansion to the survey you have on your splash page, really like that. Not sure if we would use the embeds

Hiten S. there are many easy ways to do what we do on our splash page, like hacking google forms or using wufoo, so we didn’t feel like that was a worthy product for us to build

ericzoo do u remember the no. 1 feature request/feedback that came back from customer development?

Hiten S. it wasn’t that straight forward it was more about validating our own assumptions, as I mentioned earlier

KevBurnsJr Or is this MVP focused on embeds an additional product offering?

Hiten S. it’s actually embeds as THE product offering

Hiten S. so, basically we learned that templates are important and embeds might be a product opportunity

Richard J. I liked what Eric Ries tweeted today: Lean Startup and Minimum Viable Product don’t replace a vision, assumptions, a bold plan (paraphrasing)
sounds like you had bold assumptions and iterated around them

Hiten S. That was a great tweet
yes, you are correct, bold assumptions and iterated so, now we are very close to launching the new survey.io focused on embeddable “microsurveys”

dru w. 140 char or less?

Richard J. that would be REALLY useful… as a bit of proactive customer feedback

Hiten S. And some proof that we are heading in the right direction is this tweet: http://twitter.com/andrewwatson/status/9063886603

Richard J. our basic use of survey.io hasn’t been as useful as we’d hoped (though it tells us something) but i like the idea of micro-surveys

Hiten S. that was exactly the type of feedback we received

KevBurnsJr How much of the original survey.io were you able to repurpose for the new product? Or did you start from scratch?

Hiten S. The 5-day MVP is still live, but we didn’t use any of that code.

Vicky P. MVP seems interesting after these discussion!

ericzoo has survey.io become a probe product for KISSmetrics?

Hiten S. what do you mean by “probe”?

ericzoo a tiny product to test markets and assumptions for a bigger/main product.

Jeremy L. so hiten… how will you determine, once you release, if embeds are the right thing to focus on… can you take us what that validation may look like to you?

Hiten S. that is when product/market fit comes in and the “very disappointed” metric from survey.io

Nathan J. Hiten: Would these “micro-surveys” also include the ability for users to send very quick, simple, non-emailaddress- asking feedback?
Meaning: “Have some feedback, let us know: <textarea></textarea> <submit/>”

ericzoo im pretty sure theres a better term for that

Hiten S. @Nathan J.: Yes, possibly.

Nathan J. Ok cool. That’ll be something I’ll use. I saw the idea of just having a very quick feedback form in the footer of every page. It was just the word “Feedback:” and an input box (which morphed into a textarea once clicked) and a send button. No other details needed. Having this would increase feedback incredibly.

Jeremy L. Hiten: and do you start that right away? wait a little?
Will we be able to change the questions, for example: What are you looking for here: A. to change your email B. to see your transaction history C. to add your twitter/facebook etc

Hiten S. I don’t think it hurts to do it right away, but more contextual would be better

Jeremy L. or D. Something else: [free text]

Hiten S. Yes, on the paid plans

Jeremy L. dont make them to expensive!!
but do get them out quick!!

Hiten S. There will be a free plan
I am only comfortable chatting about it today because it is almost ready
Alpha is going live on Monday with early customers, and we’re already using it ourselves, as of this past Monday

nitin b. would like to know how you adapt “customer development” model when you are a startup based on a successful open source project – people are already using and loving it – now we need to figure out where revenue streams lie

Hiten S. example is that @flowtown sends to new users 2 weeks after sign up: http://twitter.com/adamstac/status/9298921475

Hiten S. nitin b: We’re talking about MVPs right now, but I am happy to discuss that later or via email with you (I think you have my email, so ping me

Jeremy L. yep, i’ve seen it… We better be in that alpha

Hiten S. you can sign up here if you haven’t already http://beta.survey.io (anyone else can too, of course)

cwe what goes into the follow-up survey? Was that already discussed?
or are you focusing on the tech to make the survey, people can use them however they want?

Hiten S. what do you mean “follow-up” survey? the @flowtown one?

cwe yeah
probably off topic, if it’s a specific use case

Vicky P. the good thing about survey.io is that its pretty simple to navigate,simple interface (no flashy nonsense)

Hiten S. cwe: they are sending out the survey.io survey I believe
we’re starting with templates and than allowing customization on paid plans

Vicky P. ok so the customization will bring the revenue!..cool.

Hiten S. Ok, I took up the conversation, I am happy to, but don’t want to be a hog…anyone want to chat about other MVP stuff?

Team

Jeremy L. Hiten: a little off topic: how big is your team at Kiss? can you talk a little about the structure of it?

Hiten S. 8 people right, all distributed all over the US and 1 guy out of the country. 3 non-technical people and 5 techy

Jeremy L. ? would not expect to hear distributed… all people you know personally (before)

Hiten S. I knew half of them before

Sharefeed

Nathan J. So is Sharefeed an MVP right now?

Hiten S. Yes it is an MVP, but I call it a webtoy, I really really wanted it and it was used as a way to get one of our developers feet wet with OOP (he is a designer by trade but dabbles in programming).

Hiten S. I would say that even the survey we have on sharefeed.com right now is a MVP itself

Hiten S. brb

Jeremy L. big fan of sharefeed… how about making a sidebar (like bit.ly sidebar) with it?

AppWhirl

Richard J. well, we put out an MVP, it was buggy really really limited in functionality
we went from a small lifestyle business idea, to VC-scale momentum… so i have to say i’m a big believer in the approach been using it for years without having a name
when i’ve failed we haven’t used the MVP approach when i’ve succeded we did

NonSatisReevis Did you guys already discuss MVP versus Minimum Desirable Product? Also would like to hear thought (ala Richard’s comment) as to how buggy a MVP can be.

Mikko K. “don’t worry, be crappy” – Guy Kawasaki but with elegance
something that looks amazing will be forgiven a lot

NonSatisReevis I like that quote

Mikko K. unfortunately that is how our world works

Nathan J. Mikko: Thanks: http://twitter.com/HelloLogic/status/9375229764

cwe Richard J. can you share what you learned along the way?
anything that might help some of us currently closer to the lifestyle side?

NonSatisReevis I ask because we’re trying to stay as minimal as possible, but man, bugs and base level functionality sure can end up requiring a ton of work and polish that doesn’t feel very minimal

Richard J. we had this idea to automate the production of mobile apps we want a mass-market non-IDE product for regular people

Richard J. so we tried to find the minimum feature set to still call it an app that would allow our users to stake their claim on screen real estate
and we also wanted to test a business model – would people pay for the app (not the service – app building is always going to be free for us)

Richard J. the minimum viable product for us was a form

cwe it seems to me that a lot of potential business opportunities these days are taking services and turning them into applications

Richard J. linked to an eye-candy css based simulator doing one thing
rss feeds –> apps
then we got some podcasters to make apps and sure enough we hit a seam of virality people started using it

Richard J. and we found ways to optimize and tweak

Richard R. Great Idea Richard J. Glad to hear the back story!

ericzoo @richard j. who submits the app to the itunes store?

Richard J. Eric, we automate that

Richard J. we’re adding more platforms, oodles more services and features, for DEMO 2010, but we’re embargoed from going into details prior to DEMO

Steven L. Hmm, I guess I misunderstood. MVP being low in features and Features be built through feedback.

Richard R. I have the same definition of MVP as you.

Keeping startups secret / stealth

Ashley how does a team develop MVP-style landing/marketing test page without essentially giving away the idea to potential competition?

Richard J. i first came to Silicon Valley in 1999 and was almost immediately in a dinner with legendary VC Don Valentine, and he said the following
entrepreneurs spend their first two years keeping everything a secret, then the rest of their lives shouting from the rooftops in a hope that someone will listen to them

Richard J. someone already has your idea and is already working on it – you just have to out-execute them

cwe people stealing your idea means you’re on the right track

ericzoo worry about your users not your competition.
everyone feel free to quote me on that.

Richard J. a bunch of people had the same idea as us – now they’re dropping like flies, or going off in the wrong direction… have a firm vision, iterate fast and beat them!

Hiten S. ericzoo: Agreed with that quote 100% – That’s where customer development and lean startup principles really come into play.

cwe don’t try to compete by adding features

Ashley @Richard J: hmm, good advice. i’ve found bits and pieces of my vision in other companies, but never snapped together… do you think MVP-style tester business combinations work? or only very simplified offerings?

Richard J. ashley: with some thought most things can be tested and iterated on in some sort of MVP way

Hiten S. Good one!

Ashley @Richard J: i understand, and it seems like a great strategy for drilling many niche holes to find the veins of gold, without cratering.

Richard J. Ashley: well we started with a very basic idea as part of a very large potential vision

Ashley aha, that sounds very relevant to what i want to build
or should i say, *how* i want to build

Richard J. we started by throwing out there the first thing that worked (barely) and asked a couple of potential users to use it and then did everything we could to make them happy – follow up, talked to them
made their stuff work and then watched them get the apps out and listened to the responses and a funny thing happened

Richard J. they started telling others to come to our site and build so we tweaked and got more and so on
by showing our commitment to those early customers we got GREAT user feedback and ONLY added features requested we didn’t ry to guess what people would want we were REALLY disciplined about that

Richard R. Very smart Richard J. You should be a case study for this!

Richard J. well anyone who wants to talk about any of this stuff any time is welcome to email me r…@appwhirl.com or drop by the hacker dojo when we’re there… we eat live and breathe this stuff so are happy to talk and more eager to listen and learn

Richard R. THank you Ricard J. Great info you shared here!

Ashley @Richard J: i totally appreciate what you’re saying, but I have lingering questions around how MVP-style iterations and buildingfor- the-market can come into conflict with the team’s vision for revolutionizing an existing entrenched market. do you think these are reconcilable, or are we talking about two completely different strategies?

Richard J. so ashley – we are TOTALLY re-writing rules of a huge market we’re going up against major brains and telling them everything you know is wrong

Richard J. we did it to google today you don’t not have a vision – you MUST have one – you iterate to learn the path

Ashley wow, sounds exciting and even more relevant to my dream business model!

Richard J. we may be wrong, and it may not work out, but at least we took a position

Insipration and Blogs

Matt W. Ashley–one thing I’ve read in Four Steps (Steve Blank) that helped was realizing that you aren’t looking to customers for your vision.

suman Its about starting with your vision however unconventional or conventional it mightbe

Andrew S. Ashley: Customer Development can only start after you have a vision. You are just going to test the vision as early and as often as possible.

Richard J. Ashley: are you reading:
Lessons learned blog
Steve Blank’s blog
Sean Ellis’ blog
Dave McClure
and I’d add Bokardo blog
and Andrew Chen blog

Ashley no! apparently i need to get on all of these like a fat kid on watermelon

ericzoo mark suster blog is v good

Richard J. if you want a list of the best VC blogs like mark suster here’s a link to my google reader: http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user/0… (incomplete link)

Ashley Richard J: subscribed to your Reader collection and your Twitter.

Andrew S. Chris Dixon, Chris Sacca

Richard J. Eric Ries, Sean Ellis, Dave McClure, Steve Blank, Andrew Chen and the Bokardo blog are all good for lean startup MVP stuff

ericzoo the stanford video and podcast are run run by Steve Blank so i would highly suggest those

dru w. Not MVP blog, but worthwhile: http://pmarcaarchive.posterous.com/

Richard J. yeah – the PMARCA archive is MUST READ stuff

Richard R. PMARCA rocks!

Richard J. oh and anyone thinking of doing a startup – check out the untitled startup guys

Steven L. what is untitled startup guys?

Richard J. two guys starting a company http://www.untitledstartup.com
they’re doing the antistealth mode startup where EVERYTHING is in the open
it’s smart, original… plus i like their thinking, they’re scrappy…

Ashley what are they offering besides the fact that they’re offering?

Richard J. they have a product they link to
it’s an interesting idea

Social Game MVP

Steven L. How does MVP apply to social gaming apps? Or does it?

cwe cut costs by building a prototype off another social network

Steven L. Has the market been so saturated that you can’t build a game using MVP?

ericzoo MVP is when its fun but not goodlooking and nicesounding

cwe the app store shows that it’s possible

Richard J. you can build an MVP game
test out the game dynamics
and flesh out the eye candy later i’d think

Hiten S. Social Game MVP – How about just advertising several ideas via Facebook Ads as an MVP and just seeing which one people are willing to click on the ad for and also possibly sign up to be notified when it launches?

Steven L. Interesting. Didn’t think of pursuing that channel before the product gets built.
Sounds like somethign worth trying. Especially with cost being low.

dru w. Hiten: That brings up my issue with the FB ads testing + landing page suggestion. At what point does one know that it’s the idea that is good, and not just the marketing copy of the specific ad?

cwe customer feedback

Hiten S. dru w.: Good question. I’d say that is very important to test different messaging and different ideas at the same time dru wynings: and find the “winners”

Hiten S. this is a great video of Mark Pincus: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterial… (incomplete link)

Enterprise

Richard R. Hiten, I would like to know if there are special cases for MVPs of enterprise apps regarding usage metrics and fine tuning feature sets? My users are gov agencies and Fortune 1000 companies. Talked to Dave McClure about it when he was in Tokyo, but he only knows consumer stuff.
and we’re getting a lot of traction with it

suman The enterprise feedback loop is a long one
The easiest loop you can have is the sales and marketing loop

Richard R. yes, I was looking for shortcuts

suman Finetuning is at two levels here the buyer’s level (those that make the decision to buy your software for the organization) and the user level, those who actually use your software

Hiten S. I would follow Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany pretty much word for word if my customers were Enterprise customers

Andrew S. The Four Steps book has a pretty strong enterprise bias in my opinion, if you can follow Blank’s customer development strategy you should maximize your results

Richard J. yeah – i find Four Steps a bit enterprise for us, but if you don’t take it literally but take the spirit of it you can adapt to other models

Andrew S. totally

suman The central idea behind fours steps and MVP is recongizing that your assumptions are not reality and doing a reality check using as scientific a process as possible

ericzoo for enterprise. just hone in on a job role > pain > then do customer development on companies that has that job role.

MVP in traditional sales

cwe Do you guys think traditional sales models are going to give out for this? Do any of you work with any sales people regularly? I come from a sales background but am conflicted learning about MVP – seems like a better model

Andrew S. traditional sales will never go away, particularly in enterprise, what customer development prevents is putting too much into sales until you have product market fit.

Next steps and how much it costs

dru w. Hiten: So as far as MVP goes, we’ve talked about what you, personally, know you know. What about what you know you don’t know?

Hiten S. I am trying to learn how to best hire smarter people than me
I am not a programmer, but I “fake” it pretty well, so I’d love to actually learn one day soon

Richard J. well whoever it was that said hacker dojo intimidated them the last coding i did was in the 1990s
i am not a hacker – that’s for the smart folks – i am just the founder & ceo – it’s up to me to keep them in caffeine and gummy bears

dru w. Any untested hypotheses as to the future of MVP?

Nathan J. Anyone here still in the “idea” stage and just haven’t made the leap yet?

Hiten S. I am always in the “idea” stage ;0

Ashley i do consulting to bootstrapfund some small-fry opportunities, but i’m kicking around a business plan for a web app, but most of my dreams and desires centre around revolutionizing the music and media

Hiten S. we had a random idea to take the google analytics API and send daily updates to people

Ashley did you test that with a landing/marketing page and views, or with the survey?

Hiten S. and we just put out a landing page and survey similar to sharefeed and we discovered it wasn’t an idea that people would pay “enough” for, so we stopped going after it – both

cwe hiten, how much does that kind of landing page testing really cost?

Hiten S. what parts specifically?

cwe well I’m quickly approaching broke, but have an idea I want to start testing with landing pages and MVP.

Richard R. I have been embarrassed by my launches before, I can still see them at archive.org when I feel brave

cwe so how much should a few rounds of testing cost?

Hiten S. You can use stumbleupon, adwords, facebook ads, twitter and / or other fairly inexpensive traffic sources
it really depends on the cost of keywords, advertising, etc…
and the audience you are trying to reach. can you get away with low-cost ads or is do you need to use expensive keywords?

Richard R. Tim Ferris went into some detail on this in a chapter of Four Hour Work Week

Ashley speaking of testing costs, has anyone built a MVP-geared wholesale hosting & startup testing platform yet?

Andrew S. Free is a distraction from the truth. You want to know what people will pay for. Free makes sense as a way to get feedback or as part of an overall Freemium strategy, but the heart of the matter is ‘what will someone pay for’

Ashley gotcha. i guess i’ve always looked at Free/mium in the context of broken big business, like the music industry

Andrew S. Sometimes free is the most disruptive thing you can do and sometimes it’s the path to hell, it really just depends IMHO

Hiten S. Ashley: I have thought about that a lot, would love to see it built, closest thing I have seen is: http://prefinery.com

Ashley i see what you mean; their offering looks very close to MVP

Andrew S. I spent the last 2 years ‘selling’ free open source software. I’ve given it some thought. If you are trying to monetize a service, the faster you can get something people will pay you for the better and if you make too much free it can be hard to go backwards and potentially kill your opportunity.

KevBurnsJr [IRC] Just crash #startups next time http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=startups

Links

Links that were mentioned in the chat

http://onstartups.com/ – Software startups

http://www.appwhirl.com/ – Create iPhone apps fast

http://recman.net/ – Records Management and Compliance for Google Apps (appwhirl shell site)

http://starstreetsports.com – Sports stock market

http://Twidl.it

http://getglue.com

http://sharefeed.com

http://Dubzer.com

http://intridea.com

http://presentlyapp.com

http://crowdsound.com

http://colawars.tv/

http://www.heyzap.com/

http://survey.io

http://startupmarketing.com

http://venturehacks.com/articles/measurefit

http://pmarcaarchive.posterous.com/

http://www.untitledstartup.com

http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=startups – “Startup” discussion channel on FreeNode IRC

http://prefinery.com – Private beta testing invitation and management

http://venturehacks.com/articles/debt-benefits – What are the benefits of debt in a seed round?

Twitter

Recommended Twitter hash tag: #StartupChat

“Don’t worry, be crappy” – Guy Kawasaki HelloLogic

“someone already has your idea and is already working on it – you just have to out-execute them” HelloLogic

“entrepreneurs spend their 1st 2 yrs keeping everything a secret & the rest of their lives shouting from rooftops hoping someone’ll listen” HelloLogic

“people stealing your idea means you’re on the right track” #chatlog HelloLogic

The #startup chat was fun, we went for about 3 hours! Thanks to everyone who participated. hnshah

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Jeremy L.	I’m the founder of starstreetsports.com – we have our MVP up – It is a sports stock market. Located in Boston. A sports stock market – it is a virtual assets market place where you (soon with real money) can buy and sell share of the players and teams of your choice. If anyone wants in to poke around shoot me your email, or just enter it at http://starstreetsports.com and I’ll let you in
Ericzoo	Generalist of http://Twidl.it Twitter: @ericzoo
Richard J.	Richard Jordan, Founder & CEO of AppWhirl, Inc. – we automate the production of mobile apps (though we have quite a bold idea of exactly what a mobile app is) and we’ve bootstrapped through our minimum viable product
Nathan J.	I’m Nathan Brauer – founder of HelloLogic, a UX consultant and web developer. I’m both a writer and an editor for AEXT.NET. Twitter: @hellologic
Vicky P.	I am Vicky Parmar, Student of Computer application, based in mumbai, india
Nathan	Nathan – Undergrad Business Student at the University of British Columbia
waterfallrain	Shontae cs student/consultant
George R	George Revutsky, ROI.works Search Marketing (seervices co.) transforming into MyNextCustomer
Richard J.	I’m Richard Roberts, I live in Yokohama, Japan. I am making a records management compliance app for Google Docs. Was a finalist at Startup Weekend Tokyo in December.
Gangadhar S.	I have started hLog – an app for documenting health data
omarjead	So I am Omar, and I am working on a few different projects using the lean startup and customer development methodology. Currently, I am working with a company that is trying to build an ecommerce site to compliment their bricks and mortar store. I would like to learn more about how the MVP practice applies to ecommerce
Nic	Hi, Nic from NYC… work with adaptiveblue as senior web dev, but I really like startups, oh and it’s 2am here… http://getglue.com
Santosh	Santosh Dawara, Founder, Engineer at http://Dubzer.com, we are pre-launch, in India, presented at DEMOFall’09 (Alphapitch). Our Appn helps you collaborate and share blogs, content in the right (human) language
Pradeep E.	Pradeep – R&D at Intridea, Inc (http://intridea.com) – we have a bunch of products – http://presentlyapp.com, http://crowdsound.com and a few more stealth
Syed	Everyone Syed here working on a site which is 1-1 meetups, i am looking for a cofounder.
dru w.	Hey guys- I’m Dru. Took a leave of absence from UC Berkeley last year during what I call my quarter life crisis =D …. now I do business development for http://www.heyzap.com/ (We monetize and distribute flash games) Twitter: @druwynings
Steven L.	Twitter: @StevenLoi
Ashley	Twitter: @beforeyouknowit
cwe	Twitter: @chadwetsell
Andrew S.	Twitter: @littleidea

Gangadhar S.	So Hiten – what topics did you want to touch today?
Hiten S.	Hiring actually it’s hard to find really really good developers, and the bar at our company is really high
Dharmesh S.	I’ve found hiring has gotten even harder with the improved economy.
Hiten S.	Dharmesh: agreed
Gangadhar S.	how does one find good techies who will match your value system and expectations?
Jeremy L.	I’ve got the same challenge… seems like a lot do… Best advice I have is you just gotta try… really really hard
Jal	but it’s always a dilemma. You need professionals to create the first product when you don’t have enough to pay them
Jeremy L.	yep… I’ve been able to put together a great team (at least the start of it) and make some progress without any money, but could certainly be moving faster with it
Santosh	Jeremy : did hear web startups up and running in a $1,000?
Jeremy L.	Santosh: nope didn’t hear it… saw some tweets about it though
Mikko K	Gangadhar S: I’ve had great success using the sports type scouting. Pick them early, make sure basic values match and then cultivate just like in sports, everyone wants the top talent, and there is really not so many
Jal	Jeremy: Yep. It’s all about cherry picking the first employees
Gangadhar S.	Mikko – sure. The issue is that I am in a place where not many are interested in startups….they look for stability of fortune 500/1000 companies

Jal	How do you initially fund yourself for an Internet Business?
?	Jal: via consulting
Gangadhar S.	ok..how do startups afford health insurance? That has kept me from going full time on my venture?
Richard J.	Gangadhar: that’s part of the entrepreneurial thing – the risk it’s a risk for all of us, and it’s not something everyone can take
George R.	health insurance – depending on where you are, Kaiser has pretty inexpensive plans
Gangadhar S.	Richard – you are saying that just wing it…and hope that you do not fall sick?
Richard J.	fortunately for me my wife was able to get insurance for kiddoes and us, but there was a lot of time without it… it’s tough, but part of the startup thing

Hiten S.	Alright MVPs, who has attempted one recently, either full web app or MVP feature? me: http://sharefeed.com is probably our latest
George R.	Ok, Minimum Viable Product – every time get ready to launch publicly (we have 55 paying Closed Beta Customers), I get this urge to FIX SOMETHING…
ericzoo	Our MVP is over at http://twidl.it. It combines images or photos and status updates.
Richard J.	We have attempted an MVP see http://www.appwhirl.com
Mikko K	Just for fun: http://colawars.tv/ (after the design was completed took 20 minutes to do)
Hiten S.	So, how do you guys assess whether your MVP has been “successful” or not?
Nic	also curious what tools you use to determine “success”
Richard J.	you don’t know it really needs fixing till your customers tell you
Mikko K	we use MVPs internally, so the best metric is how much easier it makes our life
Jeremy L.	I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of what I expected… means we’re sticking on the path and continuing development, building out a set of features right now
Pradeep E.	Hiten: we use our own products, so if we enjoy using it, then it’s usually worth pursuing and post beta-launch, it’s all about analytics and retention
Richard J.	Hiten: we found that we got higher penetration rates than expected, got word of mouth virality and saw the monetization model work (people paid) but we tracked it very primitively
George R.	that’s the thing – we don’t have good then best analytics installed in our product (its a SAAS) to REALLY know how it’s being used.. I mean we can infer…

Hiten S.	Would it be beneficial if I went over my own experience with a MVP we created at KISSmetrics?
(many)	Yes
Hiten S.	Alright, so I’ll start with the story about http://survey.io Basically our business mission is to help people understand their customers better
Nathan J.	…did you start survery.io? Didn’t realize that…
Vicky P.	survey.io looks interesting
Hiten S.	So, there is a quantitative and qualitative aspect to understanding customers With the main KISSmetrics product, we knew it was going to take time and a ton of effort to get it right and we also started doing some qualitative stuff, like surveying of early customers
George R.	Minimum Viable to me – is when they pay you, use it, it does what it says it does, even if it is a basic feature set, and they don’t ask for the money back
Vicky P.	hiten: OK so does that mean that survey.io is a platform for businesses to connect with consumers and understand their perspective?
Hiten S.	and we really didn’t know what questions to ask (I am being a little dramatic about that point) but hear me out so, we had a few assumptions about surveying
George R.	got a survey.io from another entrepreneur – I think it could be useful for early customer feedback for sure
Hiten S.	1. People don’t know what questions to ask their customers 2. They don’t know how to analyze the questions 3. The way that surveys are sent to customers is not as effective as it could be
Hiten S.	so we set out to build an MVP to address those 3 assumptions and prove them right or wrong we addressed them in the following way: 1. Create a single template of questions that is easily applicable to all companies on the web – that’s where Sean Ellis’s (http://startupmarketing.com) expertise came into play. He helped us spec the questions based on his years of experience as a marketer.
Hiten S.	2. By using the expertise that Sean had with his “first survey” template, we could easily tell people how to analyze the results (especially since it is a template) 3. We figured we’d make it an embed and also allow for people to use a publicly available link.
Vicky P.	Hiten: Just a doubt from my side, how is survey.io different than the normal Google doc surveys that one can create? I mean what’s the USP of it.
Richard R.	It is very easy to use Vicky P. Just did one today. Slick.
Vicky P.	ok
Richard J.	Vicky – check it out it’s SOOOO easy – just go to survey.io while Hiten is telling us – it’s so quick you’ll be back without missing much
Vicky P.	Richard J.: Doing just that sir
Hiten S.	So, survey.io was built by one of our engineers in about 5 days based on those assumptions and features So here are the things we learned about these assumptions
omarjead	survey.io is deff cool, but it does not address my market…I am anticipating the release of KISSmetrics survey for ecommerce
Richard R.	Wow, impressive dev time!
Richard R.	It took 5 weeks with 3 devs for mine. B2B and more complex problem domain for mine I think.
Hiten S.	It was a MVP, so speed was everything, we wanted something we could build with 1 engineer in less than 7 days we were just trying to validate our assumptions that’s why you can’t edit the questions yet
Richard J.	i like the yet
ericzoo	what was the feedback from the MVP early users?
Hiten S.	So… 1. We were correct, people don’t know what questions to ask and templates are a great way to get them started asking their customers questions. The customer feedback backs this up.
Hiten S.	2. Analyzing results is important, but it really is just a side-effect of #1 So if you provide good templates, analysis is a natural outcome. This can easily be achieved with a blog post or two, or what I would call “education”. Example: http://venturehacks.com/articles/measurefit
Hiten S.	3. The embed is actually the most significant leap that we made. We first thought we wanted to “compete” with surveymonkey.com (at least take a slice of their customer based) We actually wasted ton of time building that functionality (we have a version of survey.io that actually powers our KISSmetrics.com and sharefeed surveys) But we realized that we wanted to differentiate So than we did another MVP…
Hiten S.	Any burning questions so far?
Richard R.	How did you decide what features to kill?
Hiten S.	It ended up being more of a pivot and more like what features should we focus on versus which ones should we kill This was based on evaluating how people used the product
Richard J.	so survey.io pivoted to KISSmetrics?
Hiten S.	No, not at all. KISSmetrics has been going on all along, Survey.io is just another one of our products
Hiten S.	We have some usability issues and we noticed some interested behavior based on that.
Richard R.	Ahh, that makes sense. Did you build triggers to see what people did in the app?
Hiten S.	So we actually used more qualitative feedback Like people’s tweets about survey.io, feedback / bugs / support requests and very little metrics actually
ericzoo	im interested in who were the early testers? were they MVP stage startups?
Hiten S.	they were other startups, early, mid and late stage. In fact the folks at Automattic embedded the survey.io survey on wordpress.com within the first few days of us releasing it
ericzoo	what did they felt using survey.io
Hiten S.	they felt that it was easy to implement and provided good feedback
dru w.	Hiten: When did you 1st start working on KISSmetrics?
Hiten S.	it’s been about 20 months
ericzoo	doesnt automattic own a survey company. funny that
Hiten S.	they own polldaddy, more about polls than surveys. plus our template attracted them so that related to other behavior we saw many many people would take parts of our survey and add the questions to their own surveys in surveymonkey or other tools like google forms or wufoo So, that helped us realize that we probably don’t want to compete with them since the market is so saturated with survey tools
omarjead	so can we hear a bit more about other products you used an MVP for at KISS?
Hiten S.	omarjead: so here comes the next MVP
Richard J.	makes sense – questions are not defensible right?
Hiten S.	yup, exactly, question are not defensible
KevBurnsJr	When you made the decision to pivot, did you have a clear idea of what direction to wanted to head with the product and was everyone in agreement?
Hiten S.	yes we figured it out by our next MVP So, we had this idea of focusing on the embed idea So we did a little MVP on our main KISSmetrics analytics product.
Richard J.	I think we need to change how we’ve implemented survey.io as we have a low usage of it compared to apps made
KevBurnsJr	So you created another MVP as an exploration of the direction you might want to pivot.
Hiten S.	yup
Hiten S.	we implemented our idea around embeds We came up with the idea of making it so people could ask simple, short questions within their web apps so we built a quick MVP to test that theory on our KISSmetrics sign up flow
Jeremy L.	and where is it?? I would love to use it (the way you have on your kiss splash page)
Hiten S.	thats the thing, we’re not releasing that product
Vicky P.	Hiten: Not allowing businesses to edit or add their questions is a bit non convincing. People would want to survey about a particular feature of their product and so on.
omarjead	“So we did a little MVP on our main KISSmetrics analytics product.” – Just out of curiosity, how did you guys determine what metrics were important to measure the success of a company in the beginning? Did you use customer development to determine that?
Hiten S.	yes, we do customer development a lot
Richard J.	I just like that there’s a name for it now – Customer Development – shortens explanation time when talking with investors
omarjead	so u used custev to determine what metrics were important for startups?
Hiten S.	simply put, we had a hypothesis with some assumptions and we continually try to validate them
Hiten S.	we asked people a simple questions, “Are you going to install the code on your site right now?” Here is an example of what our embeds looked like our MVP for our embed related product idea of survey.io: http://… (no longer available)
KevBurnsJr	So this MVP focused about embeds, did it pan out as a future direction for the product?
ericzoo	in customer development. what type of people did u ask? startup founders?
Hiten S.	anyone that would listen! not necessarily startup founders, but people responsible for product development were our target but we also had a solid base of survey.io customers from our previous MVP so we asked them
ericzoo	in other words anyone in product development
Hiten S.	yup, pretty much but anyone that would sign up for survey.io too
Santosh	your startup has achieved product and market fit?
Hiten S.	not at liberty to say yet
Jeremy L.	oh… I was talking about the expansion to the survey you have on your splash page, really like that. Not sure if we would use the embeds
Hiten S.	there are many easy ways to do what we do on our splash page, like hacking google forms or using wufoo, so we didn’t feel like that was a worthy product for us to build
ericzoo	do u remember the no. 1 feature request/feedback that came back from customer development?
Hiten S.	it wasn’t that straight forward it was more about validating our own assumptions, as I mentioned earlier
KevBurnsJr	Or is this MVP focused on embeds an additional product offering?
Hiten S.	it’s actually embeds as THE product offering
Hiten S.	so, basically we learned that templates are important and embeds might be a product opportunity
Richard J.	I liked what Eric Ries tweeted today: Lean Startup and Minimum Viable Product don’t replace a vision, assumptions, a bold plan (paraphrasing) sounds like you had bold assumptions and iterated around them
Hiten S.	That was a great tweet yes, you are correct, bold assumptions and iterated so, now we are very close to launching the new survey.io focused on embeddable “microsurveys”
dru w.	140 char or less?
Richard J.	that would be REALLY useful… as a bit of proactive customer feedback
Hiten S.	And some proof that we are heading in the right direction is this tweet: http://twitter.com/andrewwatson/status/9063886603
Richard J.	our basic use of survey.io hasn’t been as useful as we’d hoped (though it tells us something) but i like the idea of micro-surveys
Hiten S.	that was exactly the type of feedback we received
KevBurnsJr	How much of the original survey.io were you able to repurpose for the new product? Or did you start from scratch?
Hiten S.	The 5-day MVP is still live, but we didn’t use any of that code.
Vicky P.	MVP seems interesting after these discussion!
ericzoo	has survey.io become a probe product for KISSmetrics?
Hiten S.	what do you mean by “probe”?
ericzoo	a tiny product to test markets and assumptions for a bigger/main product.
Jeremy L.	so hiten… how will you determine, once you release, if embeds are the right thing to focus on… can you take us what that validation may look like to you?
Hiten S.	that is when product/market fit comes in and the “very disappointed” metric from survey.io
Nathan J.	Hiten: Would these “micro-surveys” also include the ability for users to send very quick, simple, non-emailaddress- asking feedback? Meaning: “Have some feedback, let us know: `<textarea></textarea> <submit/>`”
ericzoo	im pretty sure theres a better term for that
Hiten S.	@Nathan J.: Yes, possibly.
Nathan J.	Ok cool. That’ll be something I’ll use. I saw the idea of just having a very quick feedback form in the footer of every page. It was just the word “Feedback:” and an input box (which morphed into a textarea once clicked) and a send button. No other details needed. Having this would increase feedback incredibly.
Jeremy L.	Hiten: and do you start that right away? wait a little? Will we be able to change the questions, for example: What are you looking for here: A. to change your email B. to see your transaction history C. to add your twitter/facebook etc
Hiten S.	I don’t think it hurts to do it right away, but more contextual would be better
Jeremy L.	or D. Something else: [free text]
Hiten S.	Yes, on the paid plans
Jeremy L.	dont make them to expensive!! but do get them out quick!!
Hiten S.	There will be a free plan I am only comfortable chatting about it today because it is almost ready Alpha is going live on Monday with early customers, and we’re already using it ourselves, as of this past Monday
nitin b.	would like to know how you adapt “customer development” model when you are a startup based on a successful open source project – people are already using and loving it – now we need to figure out where revenue streams lie
Hiten S.	example is that @flowtown sends to new users 2 weeks after sign up: http://twitter.com/adamstac/status/9298921475
Hiten S.	nitin b: We’re talking about MVPs right now, but I am happy to discuss that later or via email with you (I think you have my email, so ping me
Jeremy L.	yep, i’ve seen it… We better be in that alpha
Hiten S.	you can sign up here if you haven’t already http://beta.survey.io (anyone else can too, of course)
cwe	what goes into the follow-up survey? Was that already discussed? or are you focusing on the tech to make the survey, people can use them however they want?
Hiten S.	what do you mean “follow-up” survey? the @flowtown one?
cwe	yeah probably off topic, if it’s a specific use case
Vicky P.	the good thing about survey.io is that its pretty simple to navigate,simple interface (no flashy nonsense)
Hiten S.	cwe: they are sending out the survey.io survey I believe we’re starting with templates and than allowing customization on paid plans
Vicky P.	ok so the customization will bring the revenue!..cool.
Hiten S.	Ok, I took up the conversation, I am happy to, but don’t want to be a hog…anyone want to chat about other MVP stuff?

Jeremy L.	Hiten: a little off topic: how big is your team at Kiss? can you talk a little about the structure of it?
Hiten S.	8 people right, all distributed all over the US and 1 guy out of the country. 3 non-technical people and 5 techy
Jeremy L.	? would not expect to hear distributed… all people you know personally (before)
Hiten S.	I knew half of them before

Nathan J.	So is Sharefeed an MVP right now?
Hiten S.	Yes it is an MVP, but I call it a webtoy, I really really wanted it and it was used as a way to get one of our developers feet wet with OOP (he is a designer by trade but dabbles in programming).
Hiten S.	I would say that even the survey we have on sharefeed.com right now is a MVP itself
Hiten S.	brb
Jeremy L.	big fan of sharefeed… how about making a sidebar (like bit.ly sidebar) with it?

Richard J.	well, we put out an MVP, it was buggy really really limited in functionality we went from a small lifestyle business idea, to VC-scale momentum… so i have to say i’m a big believer in the approach been using it for years without having a name when i’ve failed we haven’t used the MVP approach when i’ve succeded we did
NonSatisReevis	Did you guys already discuss MVP versus Minimum Desirable Product? Also would like to hear thought (ala Richard’s comment) as to how buggy a MVP can be.
Mikko K.	“don’t worry, be crappy” – Guy Kawasaki but with elegance something that looks amazing will be forgiven a lot
NonSatisReevis	I like that quote
Mikko K.	unfortunately that is how our world works
Nathan J.	Mikko: Thanks: http://twitter.com/HelloLogic/status/9375229764
cwe	Richard J. can you share what you learned along the way? anything that might help some of us currently closer to the lifestyle side?
NonSatisReevis	I ask because we’re trying to stay as minimal as possible, but man, bugs and base level functionality sure can end up requiring a ton of work and polish that doesn’t feel very minimal
Richard J.	we had this idea to automate the production of mobile apps we want a mass-market non-IDE product for regular people
Richard J.	so we tried to find the minimum feature set to still call it an app that would allow our users to stake their claim on screen real estate and we also wanted to test a business model – would people pay for the app (not the service – app building is always going to be free for us)
Richard J.	the minimum viable product for us was a form
cwe	it seems to me that a lot of potential business opportunities these days are taking services and turning them into applications
Richard J.	linked to an eye-candy css based simulator doing one thing rss feeds –> apps then we got some podcasters to make apps and sure enough we hit a seam of virality people started using it
Richard J.	and we found ways to optimize and tweak
Richard R.	Great Idea Richard J. Glad to hear the back story!
ericzoo	@richard j. who submits the app to the itunes store?
Richard J.	Eric, we automate that
Richard J.	we’re adding more platforms, oodles more services and features, for DEMO 2010, but we’re embargoed from going into details prior to DEMO
Steven L.	Hmm, I guess I misunderstood. MVP being low in features and Features be built through feedback.
Richard R.	I have the same definition of MVP as you.

Ashley	how does a team develop MVP-style landing/marketing test page without essentially giving away the idea to potential competition?
Richard J.	i first came to Silicon Valley in 1999 and was almost immediately in a dinner with legendary VC Don Valentine, and he said the following entrepreneurs spend their first two years keeping everything a secret, then the rest of their lives shouting from the rooftops in a hope that someone will listen to them
Richard J.	someone already has your idea and is already working on it – you just have to out-execute them
cwe	people stealing your idea means you’re on the right track
ericzoo	worry about your users not your competition. everyone feel free to quote me on that.
Richard J.	a bunch of people had the same idea as us – now they’re dropping like flies, or going off in the wrong direction… have a firm vision, iterate fast and beat them!
Hiten S.	ericzoo: Agreed with that quote 100% – That’s where customer development and lean startup principles really come into play.
cwe	don’t try to compete by adding features
Ashley	@Richard J: hmm, good advice. i’ve found bits and pieces of my vision in other companies, but never snapped together… do you think MVP-style tester business combinations work? or only very simplified offerings?
Richard J.	ashley: with some thought most things can be tested and iterated on in some sort of MVP way
Hiten S.	Good one!
Ashley	@Richard J: i understand, and it seems like a great strategy for drilling many niche holes to find the veins of gold, without cratering.
Richard J.	Ashley: well we started with a very basic idea as part of a very large potential vision
Ashley	aha, that sounds very relevant to what i want to build or should i say, how i want to build
Richard J.	we started by throwing out there the first thing that worked (barely) and asked a couple of potential users to use it and then did everything we could to make them happy – follow up, talked to them made their stuff work and then watched them get the apps out and listened to the responses and a funny thing happened
Richard J.	they started telling others to come to our site and build so we tweaked and got more and so on by showing our commitment to those early customers we got GREAT user feedback and ONLY added features requested we didn’t ry to guess what people would want we were REALLY disciplined about that
Richard R.	Very smart Richard J. You should be a case study for this!
Richard J.	well anyone who wants to talk about any of this stuff any time is welcome to email me r…@appwhirl.com or drop by the hacker dojo when we’re there… we eat live and breathe this stuff so are happy to talk and more eager to listen and learn
Richard R.	THank you Ricard J. Great info you shared here!
Ashley	@Richard J: i totally appreciate what you’re saying, but I have lingering questions around how MVP-style iterations and buildingfor- the-market can come into conflict with the team’s vision for revolutionizing an existing entrenched market. do you think these are reconcilable, or are we talking about two completely different strategies?
Richard J.	so ashley – we are TOTALLY re-writing rules of a huge market we’re going up against major brains and telling them everything you know is wrong
Richard J.	we did it to google today you don’t not have a vision – you MUST have one – you iterate to learn the path
Ashley	wow, sounds exciting and even more relevant to my dream business model!
Richard J.	we may be wrong, and it may not work out, but at least we took a position

Matt W.	Ashley–one thing I’ve read in Four Steps (Steve Blank) that helped was realizing that you aren’t looking to customers for your vision.
suman	Its about starting with your vision however unconventional or conventional it mightbe
Andrew S.	Ashley: Customer Development can only start after you have a vision. You are just going to test the vision as early and as often as possible.
Richard J.	Ashley: are you reading: Lessons learned blog Steve Blank’s blog Sean Ellis’ blog Dave McClure and I’d add Bokardo blog and Andrew Chen blog
Ashley	no! apparently i need to get on all of these like a fat kid on watermelon
ericzoo	mark suster blog is v good
Richard J.	if you want a list of the best VC blogs like mark suster here’s a link to my google reader: http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user/0… (incomplete link)
Ashley	Richard J: subscribed to your Reader collection and your Twitter.
Andrew S.	Chris Dixon, Chris Sacca
Richard J.	Eric Ries, Sean Ellis, Dave McClure, Steve Blank, Andrew Chen and the Bokardo blog are all good for lean startup MVP stuff
ericzoo	the stanford video and podcast are run run by Steve Blank so i would highly suggest those
dru w.	Not MVP blog, but worthwhile: http://pmarcaarchive.posterous.com/
Richard J.	yeah – the PMARCA archive is MUST READ stuff
Richard R.	PMARCA rocks!
Richard J.	oh and anyone thinking of doing a startup – check out the untitled startup guys
Steven L.	what is untitled startup guys?
Richard J.	two guys starting a company http://www.untitledstartup.com they’re doing the antistealth mode startup where EVERYTHING is in the open it’s smart, original… plus i like their thinking, they’re scrappy…
Ashley	what are they offering besides the fact that they’re offering?
Richard J.	they have a product they link to it’s an interesting idea

Steven L.	How does MVP apply to social gaming apps? Or does it?
cwe	cut costs by building a prototype off another social network
Steven L.	Has the market been so saturated that you can’t build a game using MVP?
ericzoo	MVP is when its fun but not goodlooking and nicesounding
cwe	the app store shows that it’s possible
Richard J.	you can build an MVP game test out the game dynamics and flesh out the eye candy later i’d think
Hiten S.	Social Game MVP – How about just advertising several ideas via Facebook Ads as an MVP and just seeing which one people are willing to click on the ad for and also possibly sign up to be notified when it launches?
Steven L.	Interesting. Didn’t think of pursuing that channel before the product gets built. Sounds like somethign worth trying. Especially with cost being low.
dru w.	Hiten: That brings up my issue with the FB ads testing + landing page suggestion. At what point does one know that it’s the idea that is good, and not just the marketing copy of the specific ad?
cwe	customer feedback
Hiten S.	dru w.: Good question. I’d say that is very important to test different messaging and different ideas at the same time dru wynings: and find the “winners”
Hiten S.	this is a great video of Mark Pincus: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterial… (incomplete link)

Richard R.	Hiten, I would like to know if there are special cases for MVPs of enterprise apps regarding usage metrics and fine tuning feature sets? My users are gov agencies and Fortune 1000 companies. Talked to Dave McClure about it when he was in Tokyo, but he only knows consumer stuff. and we’re getting a lot of traction with it
suman	The enterprise feedback loop is a long one The easiest loop you can have is the sales and marketing loop
Richard R.	yes, I was looking for shortcuts
suman	Finetuning is at two levels here the buyer’s level (those that make the decision to buy your software for the organization) and the user level, those who actually use your software
Hiten S.	I would follow Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany pretty much word for word if my customers were Enterprise customers
Andrew S.	The Four Steps book has a pretty strong enterprise bias in my opinion, if you can follow Blank’s customer development strategy you should maximize your results
Richard J.	yeah – i find Four Steps a bit enterprise for us, but if you don’t take it literally but take the spirit of it you can adapt to other models
Andrew S.	totally
suman	The central idea behind fours steps and MVP is recongizing that your assumptions are not reality and doing a reality check using as scientific a process as possible
ericzoo	for enterprise. just hone in on a job role > pain > then do customer development on companies that has that job role.

cwe	Do you guys think traditional sales models are going to give out for this? Do any of you work with any sales people regularly? I come from a sales background but am conflicted learning about MVP – seems like a better model
Andrew S.	traditional sales will never go away, particularly in enterprise, what customer development prevents is putting too much into sales until you have product market fit.

dru w.	Hiten: So as far as MVP goes, we’ve talked about what you, personally, know you know. What about what you know you don’t know?
Hiten S.	I am trying to learn how to best hire smarter people than me I am not a programmer, but I “fake” it pretty well, so I’d love to actually learn one day soon
Richard J.	well whoever it was that said hacker dojo intimidated them the last coding i did was in the 1990s i am not a hacker – that’s for the smart folks – i am just the founder & ceo – it’s up to me to keep them in caffeine and gummy bears
dru w.	Any untested hypotheses as to the future of MVP?
Nathan J.	Anyone here still in the “idea” stage and just haven’t made the leap yet?
Hiten S.	I am always in the “idea” stage ;0
Ashley	i do consulting to bootstrapfund some small-fry opportunities, but i’m kicking around a business plan for a web app, but most of my dreams and desires centre around revolutionizing the music and media
Hiten S.	we had a random idea to take the google analytics API and send daily updates to people
Ashley	did you test that with a landing/marketing page and views, or with the survey?
Hiten S.	and we just put out a landing page and survey similar to sharefeed and we discovered it wasn’t an idea that people would pay “enough” for, so we stopped going after it – both
cwe	hiten, how much does that kind of landing page testing really cost?
Hiten S.	what parts specifically?
cwe	well I’m quickly approaching broke, but have an idea I want to start testing with landing pages and MVP.
Richard R.	I have been embarrassed by my launches before, I can still see them at archive.org when I feel brave
cwe	so how much should a few rounds of testing cost?
Hiten S.	You can use stumbleupon, adwords, facebook ads, twitter and / or other fairly inexpensive traffic sources it really depends on the cost of keywords, advertising, etc… and the audience you are trying to reach. can you get away with low-cost ads or is do you need to use expensive keywords?
Richard R.	Tim Ferris went into some detail on this in a chapter of Four Hour Work Week
Ashley	speaking of testing costs, has anyone built a MVP-geared wholesale hosting & startup testing platform yet?
Andrew S.	Free is a distraction from the truth. You want to know what people will pay for. Free makes sense as a way to get feedback or as part of an overall Freemium strategy, but the heart of the matter is ‘what will someone pay for’
Ashley	gotcha. i guess i’ve always looked at Free/mium in the context of broken big business, like the music industry
Andrew S.	Sometimes free is the most disruptive thing you can do and sometimes it’s the path to hell, it really just depends IMHO
Hiten S.	Ashley: I have thought about that a lot, would love to see it built, closest thing I have seen is: http://prefinery.com
Ashley	i see what you mean; their offering looks very close to MVP
Andrew S.	I spent the last 2 years ‘selling’ free open source software. I’ve given it some thought. If you are trying to monetize a service, the faster you can get something people will pay you for the better and if you make too much free it can be hard to go backwards and potentially kill your opportunity.
KevBurnsJr	[IRC] Just crash #startups next time http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=startups

The Startup Chat – Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The Startup Chat on Feb 19, 2010Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Topics

Introductions

Hiring

Bootstrap

Minimum Viable Product

survey.io

Team

Sharefeed

AppWhirl

Keeping startups secret / stealth

Insipration and Blogs

Social Game MVP

Enterprise

MVP in traditional sales

Next steps and how much it costs

Links

Twitter

The Startup Chat on Feb 19, 2010
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)