A minimum viable product is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development. It is a term originally coined by Frank Robinson and popularized by Steve Blank and Eric Ries in their book The Lean Startup.
It is important to get early feedback on the product that you are developing, but it can be difficult to find people who are willing to take a chance on an unproven concept. A minimum viable product can provide an attractive way of presenting your idea for people to buy into based on what they know about the core idea, whilst still being able to evolve over time.
This is different from the "minimum viable product":
The term was originally coined in 1991, by two of the designers of the Y-COMPUTE, a supercomputing system that required a lot of RAM. To not overwhelm their customers on memory restrictions, they wrote a program called "Y-COMPUTE", which could be run on a tiny 64KB ram machine. This was meant to show that their machine could solve arbitrary computations, without having to commit the system to a large memory requirement.
For example, at one time the original Macintosh could only run one program at a time. This limited its usefulness until Apple introduced the "graphics mode", which allowed more than one program to be on screen at a time. The Macintosh also required memory to be manually paged in and out of RAM, thereby boxing users into "older" software configurations that took up more of their limited RAM supply.
Why is an MVP important for startups?
An MVP for startups is a way to attain product perfection and reduce chances of failure—one iteration at a time. MVP prototyping is a way to test your product ideas in the smallest possible fashion, and get it up and running as soon as possible. This can be done by obtaining real feedback from early users of the product, who will provide pointers for how the product should be improved.
With the help of MVPs, startups have a chance to use their minimum resources to find out whether their concept can stand on its own without having to spend too much time and effort on building it up.
How MVP is Helpful for Startup Products:
The minimum viable product is used as part of the initial development process to define the highest-quality version of any new start-up product.
The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a process where a new product or service is tested with a limited set of users. It serves as an early prototype that is later revisited and adjusted or replaced by the actual implementation of the final solution.
With MVP development teams can start fresh with a clean slate, which eliminates the need to build up big and expensive infrastructure in the early stages of a startup project. In order to test their idea, MVP projects require users to provide feedback, which is then used by later-stage developers for improving the product.
MVPs are used for many new products as well as products that are still under development. They are an effective way of quickly rolling out a fully functional prototype that can be refined and improved with additional user feedback.
How does an MVP work?
MVPs are a pragmatic approach to the software development process and do not require any upfront costs to be incurred – they can be deployed immediately as long as users provide feedback. They require virtually no planning or big budget; instead, MVPs are meant for rapid prototyping and constant iterations.
An MVP is a stripped-down version of the final product, which doesn’t contain all the features or capabilities that will eventually be included in the final product. MVPs can be a completely different product from the final product in many ways and are often focused solely on specific features that are essential for wide-scale usage. Some of these improvements made to the MVP may eventually be introduced in later versions of the software or other products.
MVPs should contain enough functionality to allow test users to provide feedback in order to move the project forward. Feedback can then be taken into account when developing the final version of the software or product.