Before You Launch Your Minimum Viable Product, Do This
Your MVP is your first impression, both for your startup and for you as an entrepreneur.
I wrote a piece two weeks ago about the increasing number of trash MVPs coming to market and what the “minimum” part of MVP should actually mean. I got a lot of responses back asking: When do we know we can launch our MVP without courting disaster?
We’re always going to be a little nervous at launch. We should be. But we can’t wait forever, so here’s a high-level checklist I use to give my MVP its best chance, with some real-world examples thrown in.
- Make sure everyone is aware of our MVP’s goals.
We’re doing an MVP to test the basic hypothesis of our product. To put it bluntly, our MVP is trying to determine whether or not our product deserves to exist.
We should launch with core features only, those that are going to prove our hypothesis. Core features should run exactly as they will in the actual product, but any supporting features should be manual, faked, or just plain turned off.
We do this for two reasons. 1) To get to market as quickly as possible and 2) To reduce the noise those additional features will add to our test results.
