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Photo Credit: http://tancast.com/2010/10/13/rejected-by-cracked-movies-from-websites/ WebVan was conceived by Louis Borders in 1996. The idea occurred to him when some spices were delivered to him through fedex. He thought there has to be a better way to delivery grocery online and his goal was last mile leader of Internet commerce. It’s a simple idea about improving grocery shopping experience of the user by selling grocery through online platform at a price comparable if not cheaper than traditional grocery story and deliver them to the user within 30mins. Louis went about hiring the best management team from the likes of FedEx, Oracle, Goldman, Anderson Consulting etc with a track record of delivering innovative products. The team was referred as the “Dream team”. The team had managed 800million USD in initial rounds of investments from VC and IPO. Louis idea was also backed by research firm IDC projections – online grocery market 2000 will be worth 3.5 Billion USD and growing to 6.5 billion USD in 2003 with atleast 5% of US Household buying grocery online. Louis believed in “first to scale” and not “first to market” philosophy. From 1996 to 1999 he focused on designing and implemented a very sophisticated warehouse(27 DCs each the size of 18 large stores with investment of 30million) and order management system, which was very capital and technology intensive. Webvan subsequently spent three years and hired 80 software programmers to create the proprietary systems linking and automating many aspects of its business processes. Needless to say, Webvan was betting on IT to be their strong-point and major cost saver.

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- Tool to test your hypothesis (problem/opportunity and proposed solution) - Smallest version which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning - First step on the way to a product The purpose of the minimum viable product is to validate some assumptions you are making about the value hypothesis of your product, the market demand for your product, or the growth hypothesis of your product.

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Everyone here has experienced auto rickshaw travels? I’m sure all of you have your own story to talk about autos here. Lets say if we want to build a platform so that you can book auto in advance. If thts your project then what’s your MVP?

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Potential set of MVP Examples -  Sign-Up Page (Buffer) followed by capturing email -  Survey -  Sign-Up Page, followed by pricing, followed by email -  Paper Prototype -  Wordpress blogs (Groupon) -  Social Media (Fb, twitter) -  Explainer video -  GoogleAdWords -  PoC -  HTML prototype -  Concierge MVP (Food on the table) -  Wizard of Oz (Zappos) -  Sell before you build(MS Dos)

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Same paradigm can be applied to MVP for existing products new features: -  Prioritization of feature (Build what your customer wants) -  Flows within the feature Some of the technique discussed earlier could be used to determine the prioritization of features and flows within the feature

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Paper prototype Observing the users In one of our projects we were rebuilding the call centre application with simplified UX. We’re really excited about the new UX but when we went to show the UX to the Call Centre employees then they said it would increase their average call time as the new UX doesn’t provide the short cuts which they were used to.

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MVP is a cyclical process, starts with an hypothesis, to test the hypothesis you do small experiments and you measure the results of the experiments. The results gives you yes/no answer to whether your product/service has a market or not. It provides you an opportunity to improvise your idea and build using Agile methodology because you need to keep your users engaged

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Minimum viable products are experiments which you undertake to determine the value, market demand and growth hypothesis of your product or services, for validating whether the consuming class will a) consume your product or service and b) would pay for consuming your service whereas minimum releasable product is the first version of your product which you put in your users hand. It’s the core of your product, something which helps user achieve some goal

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One of the bigger difference between MVP And MRP is in it’s purpose. The purpose of MVP is to Learn whereas purpose of MRP is to Serve. You can have something quick and dirty to test your hypothesis but for serving your customer you need something more concrete. Understand the problem vs address the problem

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Instantaneous v/s 2-3 months feedback loop

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Low Risk v/s Calculated Risk

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Cost of building MVP is lot lower compared to cost of building an MRP.

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- Faster feedback - Validate assumptions on problem area and solutions (Validated learning) - List of interested early adopters - Reduce Risk of failure - Fail fast philosophy (build something which none wants)

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- Pressure on delivery the actual solution ASAP because of fear of competition replicating the product - Total cost of building and piloting is higher compared to traditional model - Cut the fat, not the essence

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Dropbox by Drew Houston in 2006. Idea originated while trying to work on the way to boston but forgot the pen drive. Wanted to build a cross platform file sharing application but the challenges involved breaking the proprietary file systems of OS and sharing files across them without loosing any data sanity. Wanted to capture VC attention so put screencast and ycombinator app on hackernews…In his own words he got really great feedback from dozens of smart people which otherwise would have got only after releasing the product. He captured VC interest and was successful in securing funding. With the success he wanted to see if his idea will have consumers especially at that time there were already 60+ cloud storage providers so he went about putting a explainer video on diggs, followed by sign-up page on dropbox site for private beta. There were discussing if they get 5000 users they will call it success, they ended up getting 75000 users in just one day. 75000 users without too much investment…Start-ups grapple with a critical mass problem and they were able to get over the critical mass problem without much marketing expense. A trivia fact…when dropbox launched their service, they decided to follow the big release approach, had a big marketing budget, hired the best marketers relevant google adwords. They realized that for acquiring a customer who would pay 99 $ their cost was anywhere between 253 – 333 $. The economics just don’t work out Zappos -  Nick Swinmurn had this idea of selling shoes online. He heard that shoe industry in US is worth 40 Billion USD a year of which 5% of mailing orders. He saw an opportunity but wasn’t sure if people would buy considering people buy shoe not just based on how it looks but also based on how comfortable it is to wear etc etc. So he walked on to the local store store, asked if he can click pictures of the shoe. He put all the pictures on a website just to check if people are looking at and buying shoes from there. There was no supply chain, no investory…on receiving an order he use to personally buy the shoe from the store and mail it to the buyer. He lost some money in the process but realized that consumers will buy shoes online

GoPro - Nick Woodman on a surfing trip to australia noticed that most of the surfers wanted to take their picture surfing and in order to do so they were strapping the camera to their arms. The straps were awkward, painful and easily broken. He thought there otta to be better straps and his idea was to build strap was the surf leashes. On talking to various adventure sports junkies he realized the strap is just part of the problem. The bigger problem was that the camera technology has not evolved for action sports photography so his MVP was a 35mm film camera with a strap and now they have tons of product in this category.

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