Preparing To Sell Your Minimum Viable Product

Launching a successful Minimum Viable Product is only the beginning. Selling and scaling an MVP is harder and riskier.

If our product doesn’t emerge from MVP and quickly generate enough revenue to push our startup into the growth phase, our startup will stagnate. However, there are a couple challenges we’ll face right out of the MVP gate.

1. The company could crash under the weight of laborious processes that aren’t automated quickly enough to meet new demand, especially unexpected demand.
2. The product could fail under the load of unanticipated use cases from all these new customers.
3. The MVP launch likely produced a number of false positives. Just because we went from selling one unit to 100 units doesn’t mean we can take the same path from 100 units to 1,000,000 units.
4. Oh, and finally, margin will immediately evaporate once we start to scale.

Let’s tackle these one at a time.

While Accelerating Sales, Stabilize the Product

The conventional wisdom in startup is to come out of the MVP launch strong and immediately put all our efforts into accelerating sales. Everyone will want this, including (and maybe especially) our investors. It’s hard to argue against adding…