MVP and Eric Ries

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: Now let's talk about the Minimum Viable Product by Eric Ries. I'm going to introduce you to Eric Ries in a second but I want to introduce you to the idea first okay and this is essentially industry standard for how to create technical products so do not do anything before you totally understand this so you start with an idea maybe an idea you currently have let's say it's an app or some software or something else and then you build a little product minimum you see minimum is like one of the keywords and then you launch it okay you launch it and then you get feedback you get analytics feedback you get to talk to people and place it into their hands and the feedback you get from people who have used your product is far more insightful than people who just heard your business pitch when you only have your business pitch it's fantastic but the next level up to get feedback is to give them some little product to use and you'll learn from that data and you update your product improve it a tiny little bit and the theme here is small incremental improvements and the initial launch is also small why small because it's faster and cheaper and you're not using your assumptions it's minimally using your assumptions.

You're using more hard data hard feedback from real customers so you're minimizing mistakes and you're eliminating waste okay that's the whole point and this optimizes your development and product improvement cycle until you are able to create a good product there is of course one common mistake that happens all the time I've done it myself and it's creating a minimal product and forgetting the word viable has to be you know there has to be few enough bugs the usability has to be good enough or at least reasonable enough for people to use it otherwise the feedback isn't useful okay so here's another visual that helps to represent this concept you see it has to be minimum and viable that overlap you see that okay don't give people you see on the bottom left crappy products nobody wants to use don't give people that you'll get the wrong feedback and you don't want to overdo it on the other hand either because you're gonna make the same mistake the mistake the very mistake that this whole methodology is meant to prevent you is that you don't want to over build because as engineers if you sit in your office or your garage for a year you're gonna talk to so many people and like we program so many features and you're gonna get so many ideas on top of your ideas like oh and this will be cool and this will be cool and this will be cool but that's only an assumption about which you're excited about first of all you already know the follow see of being excited and secondly even if you're not excited it's only your opinion unproven by the market the way to prove it by the market is essentially to put it into people's hands that's the whole value of this no you know she put make it a minimum but viable as you can put that into customers hands get the feedback improve then put that improved product into customers hands get the feedback improve improve and so many such cycles is the way to make very winning products ok this is MVP by Eric Ries who's Eric Ries let's introduce you to him a little bit.

Eric Ries is a writer and a very successful entrepreneur he's got a this concept the Lean Startup is essentially built around this model of the MVP and he's got a very popular book the Lean Startup and he's also you know she is the speaker he's very well known in the technology and entrepreneurship industry and here you know this is his website we were essentially going from and he advises in companies and he mentors company he's just like he's one of the Giants not these days he's essentially one of the Giants the technology and industry so he's a good guy to follow his book is the Lean Startup I'm gonna show you that on Amazon and again when I show you books on Amazon I don't get paid for selling this book but this is essentially his books you see has very good reviews but essentially you already know the main idea which is the MVP Minimum Viable Product it's the core idea of this book obviously this book has an ideas on top of it but this is the core and so what I'd like you to do is actually strip down your idea if you have an eight business idea strip it down a little bit to the core so that it's way faster for you to make way simpler and you can launch it way sooner.