What I did was a "fake door" MVP, as the article states. It is not necessarily intended for directly measuring sales but whether its worth my time to build it in the first place. Having over a thousand sign-ups now, it validates that I should indeed spend my time on it.
Then, I would make a high fidelity one, a "one feature" MVP as the article calls it, which would cut the product down to its essence and see if it can still solve a specific problem, and whether people would still pay for only one feature. I am doing this now with a mobile app instead of web/desktop app as the reduced screen space forces me to think about the problem of time block productivity from its essence.
Perhaps your definitions of MVP are different than others, which is perfectly fine. There are others I've seen over the years like simple, lovable, complete (products), and so on (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955085).
That he's denying this proves your point.
/shrug
> You're twisting the meaning of the words in the acronym. I really don't care, but it renders the words meaningless to use them that way.
Again, I'm not sure how to explain that MVP does not literally mean an actual product. It's a tool for hypothesis testing, you don't spend time and energy building out your entire product before you show something to customers, that would be a waste of time and energy. That's why I, and others, define MVP as anything that let's you understand something new about your market and eventually you use that knowledge to make a product.
It feels wrong to me, but I think it puts me on the same side as those that reply "but there's a server still" on serverless discussions. As much as I may dislike the naming, that's what it means.
Here’s the definition of an MVP: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product
> , the term MVP is commonly used, either deliberately or unwittingly, to refer to a much broader notion ranging from a rather prototype-like product to a fully-fledged and marketable product.[9]
The summary section of that article and the elaboration is correct and the portion you pulled out is just an explanation of a non-normative minority practice. The same goes for the other end that reserves the term for an essentially mature product, although for different reasons, since the minimum to actually put features in the hands of paying users can be debated whereas users cannot use a lack of features.
No, that their initial landing page and video is regularly talked about as an MVP. Here's a 2011 article on it: https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-pro...
And here's Eric Ries http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-...
> First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
> Some caveats right off the bat. MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products
The theologian in me says this person writes about/to god frequently and thus treats words like "you" as a capitalized proper noun so frequently that it's autocorrected.
The rationalist in me says English is not their first language and spends most of their time writing in their native language which may include different noun forms and so is habitual. And given some spacing and punctuation oddities, possibly an older person.
My money is on the rational explanation.
1. What problem are you trying to solve?
2. Who has those problems?
3. Where exactly are they located, both physically or in cyberspace?
Based on your conversation rate, you are probably doing a shotgun approach or not talking to the people you need to be.
Second, based on these answers, do things that don't scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html). Actually talk to your customers and figure out what problems they have, and what solutions you can give them. In many user interviews, customers will try to give you solutions but that's not their job, their job is to identify their problems, yours is the job to fix them.
I'm creating an open source todo list + calendar webapp (https://getartemis.app, source at https://github.com/satvikpendem/artemis) made by just me, and I can tell you how I approached the problem. The video you see on the front page does not exist in code, it is simply a prototype designed with Figma (https://figma.com) and animated with Principle (https://principleformac.com). I created the landing page and video, added a Mailchimp form, and I posted on Twitter, Reddit, and here on Hacker News, the communities in which it made sense. For me, it's a productivity / task management tool, so I would post on reddit.com/r/getdisciplined or reddit.com/r/productivity.
It's all about creating a minimum viable product, as you might well be aware, but what you may not know is that an MVP need not have code. Indeed, it could be a video as I did, and I think for software, a video works best as people can actually see what it looks and feels like, without you necessarily creating the product architecture (full frontend and backend plus devops etc). Now I have over 150 subscribers (edit: now 1100 as of July 2020) in only a month due to rapid creation of this type of MVP, and based on this feedback, I changed my designs, and only now I am beginning to really create the heart of the product.
Using non-code MVPs is the best way in my opinion to sell quickly before building.