When it comes to validating your hypothesis or product idea, MVP is the best technique to adopt.
Eric Ries, the author of Lean Startup, describes the minimum viable product (MVP) as a version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Here are 9 possible MVP Techniques to validate your idea:
- Email Campaign MVP
This involves sending an email to inform the existing email list of your product idea, including its features and benefits, while you draw insight from the engagement.
- Shadow MVP
Instead of building a new feature, you show a call-to-action button that supposedly links people to that specific feature. The link could take visitors to another page saying the feature is coming soon, or it might just look broken.
- Fake Landing page MVP
Publishing a landing page that describes what your product is doing, as if you have it already, with the goal of either capturing the visitors’ interest or asking them to join a waitlist.
- Explainer Video MVP
An explainer video MVP technique is used to take complex product ideas and simplify them in a well-thought-out 90-second video to receive feedback from the target audience.
- 404 / Coming Soon Page MPV
With this technique, you act as if you’re adding a new feature but when the user navigates to the page, it either displays a 404 error message or a page that says the product is coming soon while you ask them to sign up.
- Marketing Campaign
The use of a free or paid promotional marketing campaign to attract interest to your idea, and check if customers are willing to use it.
- Concierge MVP
With Concierge MVP, you manually help your users accomplish their goals as a means of validating whether or not they have a need for what you’re doing.
- Piecemeal MVP
Instead of building the product, you adopt one or more software, piece it together, automate, and get the functionality you need to test basic functionality users needs to perform.
- Wizard of OZ MVP
With this MVP, from the outside, the MVP looks functional, but instead of a computer system doing the operations and logic, it is done by a human behind the scene.
Which of these MVPs have you adopted before?