How To Support Your Minimum Viable Product With No Tech

Don’t doom your MVP with a bad first impression

A lot of MVP failures have nothing to do with the viability of the core product itself. In fact, in over 20 years of building, delivering, and studying both successful and failed products, these are the most common mistakes that I’ve seen ultimately doom an MVP:

• The company can’t onboard customers properly or quickly.
• The user experience isn’t defined.
• The customer experience isn’t executed according to plan.
• One or more outliers grow unchecked until the product falls over.
• The front line of support doesn’t know how to solve or escalate problems.

None of those mistakes are rooted in the core product itself. In fact, in all those cases, the core product never got a chance to live or die on its own, because the first impression of that core product got botched right out of the gate.

The Problem: MVP delivery, execution, an support are usually afterthoughts

Customers will actually accept a new product that doesn’t work 100% as expected the first time and every time. What they won’t accept is having to jump through a bunch of broken hoops to purchase, receive, use, and manage the product. Delivery, execution, and support are concepts that have all been set in stone for a while now, and no one wants those things reinvented.

But there are a bunch of reasons why those concepts get overlooked:

Misunderstanding: Some entrepreneurs mistakenly believe an MVP is an excuse to require extra effort from the customer.

Excitement: We’ve built this awesome, game-changing MVP and the world needs it right now.

Pressure: Money or time is crunched, and it’s now or never.

Cost and complexity: It’s expensive and time consuming to build out proper delivery, execution, and support for an MVP.

The Solution: A simple playbook

An MVP playbook is a living document that defines and dictates how the product is delivered, executed, and…