What is an MVP?

Lesson Details:

This course is brought to you by Appy Pie as part of our academy series in this video I'm going to explain what an MVP is so MVP stands for minimum viable product and it's used to test our assumption about the problem that we are solving more specifically an MVP is used to find out if you can provide a solution that people are willing to pay for using the least amount of time and monetary investment possible so what does that really mean well if we look back to our customer interviews hopefully we found at least one strong pain point that multiple people were sharing so our business is going to be built around that pain point and we do that by building a solution we're providing a solution to either eliminate or reduce that pain that our customers or potential customers are experiencing so the purpose of an MVP is before we build out this huge business and complicated solution we don't want to invest time and money if we can't create a solution that people are willing to pay for so instead we create an MVP so what does the MVP answer well it answers a few really important questions the first is can we solve the problem effectively so we may realize that our customers all share this problem but we might not have the ability to solve that problem and if we don't then there's no point trying to build a full complicated business if we can't build a solution that customers find valuable the next question is are people willing to pay to solve this problem so there's a lot of cases where a customer may talk about a problem they have and they may say that it's a big problem but when it comes time to pay for a solution they don't think it's a big enough problem that's worth paying for and that's a problem because if we develop a full business around that pain point and we find out our customers aren't willing to pay for a solution then we don't really have a business and we've just wasted time and money and the last question the MVP can help answer is what solution so this problem the customers prefer so the MVP is an excellent way to get feedback about what kind of solution you can build for your customer so let's take an example let's say after doing a lot of customer interviews I realized that people have a pain point around going grocery shopping they don't want to spend all that time out of their day going to the store and buying those products they need so let's say I've created this assumption that people don't have time to do their own grocery shopping and they're willing to pay someone else to do it well now instead of building a full-fledged business and hiring drivers it's time to build an MVP and the MVP can be very simple in this case let's say the MVP is to put up a flyer with my own phone number advertising a grocery shopping service and if someone calls for an order then they just will pay me cash and if they pay cash that's validated my assumption so that's much simpler than going out to hire other people we're seen right away if I do this work manually are people willing to pay for the solution and if I do this multiple times I'm gonna get a lot of feedback about what customers liked about the solution and what they don't like.