Sell the vision with a minimum viable product

Your a minimum viable product – a secret weapon used by the most successful startups

Do you ever wonder how companies come up with super star products that appear to hit the mark every time?

I used to believe it was brilliance or luck. But it’s no such thing.

Startups and established businesses use minimum viable products (MVPs) to test out their new service and product ideas before they launch a finished version of their product.

A minimum viable product is a prototype, sample or model that is used to test the viability, appeal and attractiveness of a product or service before it’s created in its entirety.

An MVP is used to test out an idea at all phases of development which eliminates the unknowns and the risk of a big flop.

Top benefits of a minimum viable product

It takes a lot of pressure off from thinking you need to come up with the perfect item, online course, package tour or a speciality service all at the right price from the get go!

It’s almost impossible to have that kind of insight and foresight into what people want.

And the truth is, most entrepreneurs don’t. They launch different versions of minimum viable products to tryout various features, the right target audience, appropriate pricing and marketing copy, etc.

Testing out your concept before you make the mistake of spending loads of time and energy making something can prevent the big letdown after launching it if it doesn’t meet your customers needs.

There a number of other benefits from using this approach including:

• Advance advertising for your offer & getting people excited about what coming.
• Building your pipeline full of early adopters, the ones who look for the latest innovation from you.
• Testing out messaging to see if it resonates.
• Choosing not to nurture this idea and creating a better one!

Lessons from skipping the minimum viable product

I made this mistake years ago.

I painstakingly created and recorded an online course. It took months of my time. It was to be dripped out evergreen style – meaning that the course would start whenever someone signed up and they would automatically receive the course from the start.

Brilliant right?

Well it was until I decided to launch it and then learned three critical things:

1. I didn’t have customers who were hungry for this kind of product.
2. didn’t have a good launch strategy planned out in advance.
3. I wasn’t as stoked on it as I predicted because I had a lot of new learnings that couldn’t easily be incorporated into the format after the fact.

That was my big belly flop!

Had I tested the idea out I would have realized that it wasn’t going to be my next big thing.

Super simple MVPs for launching success

I could have done a number of things that would have saved me a lot of time and effort building something I would eventually take down from my website and put into my “learning experience” archives.

• A sales page describing the program that included an option to get on a wait list.
• Live workshop or casual gathering with a group of warm contacts to test the value to them.
• A mini series of videos for my best customers with a feedback loop to gauge their interest in the topics.
• Put out a free informational email series and to see how many people opted in.

Any of these would have evaluated the interest of the product without having to build it out in full. It would have provided feedback, tweaking and given me more confidence to properly launch it!

Unfortunately I was so focused on creating my product, I missed out on a lot of other ways to generate revenue.  Now I always test out my idea in advance!

Now it’s your turn. How can you turn an idea into a test run that’ll build up momentum for it? Let’s do it!