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One, foreword
From the last article, you learned the true value of a Minimum Viable Product and how to determine its viability. Now, finding the best “pose” to launch an MVP is the key to realizing the value of an MVP for someone who wants to turn that entrepreneurial impulse into action.
Bringing an MVP to market is a gymnastic exercise involving a variety of difficult and complex techniques, and if you make the mistake, your MVP will sprain on the ground, or go from full of hope to empty handed. MVP’s launch method, timing, and scale means require entrepreneurs to repeatedly consider the matching relationship between MVP value and customer demand, so as to step on every step.
If you don’t know if your technology will scale, release MVP. But you can’t release an MVP if you don’t know if the technology will succeed.
How do you price your MVP
The choice of pricing model should always consider only what makes the most sense for the customer/business relationship. We can analyze all pricing models from this perspective.
A subscription model
In this model, customers get the same product at a known time interval. As markets go digital and delivery gets faster and faster, we’re seeing subscription models evolve, and these successful models are slightly different:
Replenishment: Some items we usually run out of and replace when we remember, so you can subscribe to anything from coffee bags to air filters.
“Buffet” model: The “buffet” model seems like a panacea, but all we’re doing is betting that it won’t cost customers more to use the product than the subscription price. Either the customer overuses the product and we lose money, or the customer underuses the product and we don’t provide enough value to those customers.
Membership model
In the digital age, membership allows users to cover everything they want to consume.
The biggest mistake startups make with membership models is ignoring the balance of usage. Membership only works if the product has an independent value and most members use it at a frequency that makes economic sense for both buyers and sellers, otherwise it will either be abandoned by members or hurt company profits.
Layered model
Layering allows us to consider different types of customers based on different usage rates, which can generally be divided into individual/infrequent users, group/moderate users, and organization/heavy users.
But there is a pitfall that makes customers hate bad layering patterns. The most typical example is mobile communications services, where users who break the layering are punished, either by paying a higher rate for additional use than the layering, or by being restricted to a lower service tier.
How do you get MVP to market quickly?
Most good MVPS are beaten by faster rivals because the product itself is overdesigned beyond the point of MVP. At this point, it’s necessary to go back to the essence of MVP and tweak the product.
Step 1: Go back to full manual and narrow down the scope
Every time we get closer to a product launch, I find myself tripping over another uncaptured detail that could ultimately ruin the product.
I did this for a few weeks, and then it hit me: I was trying to release too much stuff too fast. So the first thing I did was go back to full manual mode and completely de-scale the MVP.
I believe in crawling before you walk before you run. In order to be able to see the problems with the product, I had to go back to the full manual phase to resolve 90% of the release barriers. We chose “crawl” to prove that the product could eventually “run”.
Step 2: Shift your focus from product to customer results
** We want MVP to prove the concept works, not perfect. MVP needs to think about the results the customer should expect, not how the product achieves those results.
Take travel services, for example. It’s a very simple concept: press a button and you get a ride. Without the automation process, we could hire a whole bunch of people to go around looking for riders, looking for drivers, assigning drivers to riders, and then using physical credit cards to complete the transaction.
Neither automated procedures nor manual processes are important to the customer; As long as they have a button to press and a safe ride at a reasonable time.
Step 3: Avoid big mistakes and don’t worry about small ones
When we’re trying to bring a new product to market, it’s easy to get bogged down in all the details that could go wrong.
What we need to do is understand outliers. Worst-case scenario, and weigh the risks to the business and, most importantly, the risks to the customer. We need to ensure the security and privacy of our customers and avoid major inconvenience to them.
Step 4: Eliminate customer friction first
As we begin to put automation and innovation back into MVP, we need to eliminate customer friction first. For example, the first step in eliminating customer friction in mobility products is to locate customers through GPS.
Step 5: Limit the audience and launch the pilot
Never release an MVP without a pilot, even if you’ve overcome all the technical and logistical difficulties that arise with your product.
With a limited pilot, even if the MVP fails completely, you’ve narrowed the audience and minimized the damage without compromising the subsequent success of your product.
How to attract customers for MVP
Our goal is not how many customers we acquire at once, but how much we learn from each customer we acquire.
Know they have a problem and are willing to solve it
We’re looking for complainers — people who are fed up with a certain kind of problem. When a mobile car startup surveyed its customers, it found that the main reason customers used the service was that they didn’t like the inconvenience and time it took to get their car washed.
They know they have a problem, but they’re not willing to solve it
They are very valuable because this audience is an important part of continued growth in the future. Some people can live with dirty cars, but if we make it easy and cost-effective, this audience will realize they don’t have to live with dirty cars anymore.
A free version of the solution is already in use
The free version presents us with a challenge. We must increase the audience’s desire to fix the problem while offering a solution that is worth the time and money spent. It’s important to learn from this audience to understand where and how valuable the MVP is.
Paid for a plan but not satisfied
In the short term, this is a good audience to pursue. These are our competitors’ customers, and they can be swayed by anything from price to innovation. You know, if it’s the former, it’s hard to keep them; If it’s the latter, then we can’t just rely on the MVP, we have to keep innovating.
Have paid for a solution and are happy with it
Access to this group of customers is the difference between a competitor and a market leader. If we can demonstrate value to this audience, it means we are reshaping the industry, changing the rules of the game, and even building the next generation of business.
5. Prepare to sell your MVP on a large scale
There are still some challenges we have to overcome before MVP can be announced.
- If you don’t automate fast enough, you can collapse under the weight of heavy processes.
- New customers have unexpected use cases, and the product can fail under this load.
- The RELEASE of the MVP may have produced some incorrect test results. Our success in going from 1 to 100 doesn’t guarantee that the same thing will get us from 100 to 1,000,000.
- Once we start scaling, profits will disappear.
Stabilize the product while accelerating sales
Startups often think they need to go all out to speed up sales right after the MVP phase.
But as we accelerate sales, we also need to automate almost every unautomated process. A dedicated team should be assigned to this task with only one task: to make the process around the core functionality more stable.
Once the product is stable, we can easily serve a thousand customers as well as one, or even go after a million.
Try to avoid failure in extreme situations
In some extreme customer requirement use cases, the product is doomed to fail.
For use cases where the product went wrong, we needed extra work to determine where the failure occurred and to limit the use in these extreme cases. Such as removing the feature or part of the feature.
Be rational about early adopter feedback
We won’t learn much from the first wave of customers, but we can learn a lot from the second. Because the first wave of data is too new, the sample size is too small. So instead of taking the first wave of customers’ behavior as Gospel and planning around it, we need to give them time to get used to the product if we want an honest assessment of its true value.
Focus on falling profit margins
The rise and fall of profit margin is a natural phenomenon of product development. In the process of product process automation, attention should be paid to ensure that the decline of profit margin does not affect the sustainability of the product. What we ultimately want is to stabilize the product and stabilize the margin.
6. When should AN MVP not be released
The technology is not ready
In some cases, much of the MVP can be done manually, but there is no way to limit the number of customers to a low enough number to avoid operational risk. If this happens, it will either overstress employees or leave customers unsatisfied. You can’t take the former lightly, and you can’t let the latter happen.
The product is fundamentally flawed
Startups want to chase the trend toward automation, self-service, and higher-margin products. So a lot of people end up with the most unwise “go fast and break things” strategy — “We’re going to do MVPS and solve technical problems while we’re attracting customers.”
It’s almost impossible to succeed because you make promises that the technology can’t deliver. If you don’t know if your technology will scale, release MVP. But you can’t release an MVP if you don’t know if the technology will succeed.
The tests are not done yet
The digital marketplace allows us to experiment. We can finely slice the audience for a product launch and then test it question by question, testing every aspect of the customer experience, from how they touch the product to how quickly they come back. Until then, don’t make a move.
Numbers not up to standard
We can’t launch a product if we don’t believe we’re going to be a huge success in the market. As entrepreneurs, nature dictates that we don’t take on a project unless we believe in it wholeheartedly from the start. But if we don’t see any bright spots in the numbers, we need to stop our losses.
Seven, the original
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