How to Craft the Message for Your Minimum Viable Product

What exactly does your product do?

This is the most challenging and brain-bending question a startup faces, because if a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is going to succeed, its description has to be deceptively simple. And by “deceptively,” I mean it has to convey a ridiculously complex idea in about 15 words.

To add to the confusion, when our product is just an MVP, we’re only maybe 50% sure of what it should do in the first place.

So when I ask early-stagers the what-does-it-do question, they usually launch into their standard pitch, spitting out studies, statistics, and even financials. Don’t do that. Stats always sound like proof but most people don’t even listen to them, let alone get swayed by them. What they do get swayed by is a story — a very short, deceptively simple story.

I’ve launched dozens of MVPs over a 20-year startup career. Along the way I’ve learned that you can execute every aspect of your MVP launch perfectly, but if you mess up the messaging, you’ll kill the product before it even gets into your customers’ hands.

That MVP messaging should be as individual and groundbreaking as the product it’s describing. Therefore, the message needs to be crafted by the team building the product. So rather than tell you what your message…