How to Build a Scalable Minimum Viable Product

Minimum viable meets maximum flexible

If I gave you unlimited funds, time, and talent, could you build a wildly successful product?

Wait. Stop. It’s a trick question. None of those things actually matter.

As recently as a few years ago, a startup could get away with hiring a crack development team to build a product from the ground up, based solely on a good idea. They would then test the market with a beta, tweak a few things, and go on to enjoy a successful release. That didn’t happen all the time. In fact, it was rare. But it happened.

The same strategy is just not possible today. Today, while not every product has to be software to be successful, almost every product must use software and data to measure and determine its scalability.

I’ve been building software products — as well as using software to build products — for over 20 years. I’ve built them the right way and I’ve built them the wrong way. Along that path, the conventional wisdom was always: “If we code this, we make money.” Turns out that’s almost never true. The truth is actually: “If we code this, we save money.”

Technology doesn’t sell a product, it only serves to make the product cheaper to scale. With today’s MVP approach, oftentimes the rush to market results in technology without flexibility. Then that technology fails at scale. So if you want to give your product its best chance at success, you need to build in maximum flexibility at the MVP stage. That used to be my competitive edge. Today, it’s a requirement.

The beautiful side effect of this now-mandatory flexible MVP approach is that it no longer takes a huge capital investment to build and prove a product, especially in software. Anyone can follow this approach. You can do this. And you don’t need unlimited funds, a time investment of years, or ninja-level hacker developers.

But you do need maximum flexibility. Here’s how to build that in from the get-go.

The Human Factor

As I write this, I’m bolting two new features onto an existing product, and if I do it right, we’ll have the beginnings of a direct-to-consumer marketplace for two new product lines…