1/ Recently we launched @usefyi to help you search and organize all your documents in one place. Today we're releasing a minimum viable product (MVP) of our next feature, a desktop app. Here’s how we’ve been successfully using MVPs for building @usefyi producthunt.com/posts/fyi-desk…
2/ Nearly 10 years ago, @EricRies defined the concept of MVP as a product with "just those features (and no more) that allows you to ship a product that resonates with early adopters; some of whom will pay you money or give you feedback."
3/ MVP is still one of the hardest product development concepts to get right. Why? An MVP isn’t just less code, or fewer features. And it’s not an excuse to leave out the details of a product to make product development easier.
4/ MVPs help create a mindset that’s most critical for startups. The MVP mindset represents a desire to find the core problem your future customers have and solve it in the best way possible.
5/ MVPs work best when you have limited resources but are convicted to iterate towards product/market fit. Large companies don’t always have that conviction. MVPs are best in situations where you can rapidly release, learn and iterate.
6/ MVPs are not perfect. Our first MVP of @usefyi was built in 5 days and it was slow, worked with a limited number of apps, plus it wasn’t scalable. The MVP was a simple search box that enabled customers to type in keywords to find documents across the apps they used.
7/ An MVP is all about the learning! Our 5-day MVP gave us the insights to build the first version of @usefyi and launch it publicly. We learned that people needed so much more than a search box connected to a handful of apps to solve their problem of finding documents.
8/ MVPs help you discover customer needs. Our 5-day MVP led us to learn what people needed really quickly and helped us iterate @usefyi into a launchable product. We ended up with over 1,100 votes on @ProductHunt and were the #2 product of the day. producthunt.com/posts/fyi
9/ MVPs force you to find the problem your product *has* to solve, no matter what. After launch, the most common request we got for @usefyi was a desktop app. Once we dug deeper by interviewing people, we found the core problem: people wanted to find their desktop files in FYI.
10/ MVPs are purposefully designed not to be full-featured products. An MVP helps you focus in on solving the core problem you discover from user research and interviews. MVPs are meant to be the gateways to building great products, not the final, perfect version of a product.
11/ The hardest part of building an MVP is resisting the urge to overbuild. We had a list of features we wanted in the desktop app based on our interviews. We had to resist in order to get the desktop MVP out fast to learn from actual customers using it.
12/ Getting the team onboard with the MVP feature set becomes the easier when you’ve done the research upfront. Our engineering team thought we had to build more for the app to be complete. We used the research for our desktop MVP to align on the most important problem to solve.
13/ MVPs can be uncomfortable. Today, we’re expecting a lot of feedback about what’s lacking with the FYI Desktop MVP. Getting comfortable with critical feedback is part of the process. Check out our MVP and bring on the feedback: producthunt.com/posts/fyi-desk…
