The High Bar for an MVP

One of the areas that I mentor entrepreneurs repeatedly on is the construction of the minimum viable experience that will allow one to test out their current hypothesis. This mitigates the risk of building something no one wants by establishing a cycle of learning, hypothesizing, and building just enough to learn.

It’s also something I keep learning too. My gut instinct as someone who “loves to build” has to be kept in check by a growing muscle to ensure we’re only building what’s needed while maintaining enough quality for an MVP. My best lesson here was with Contactually, where we built too much, too fast, believing we needed it all. Many of our more advanced features saw low adoption, while the core functionality suffered from not getting enough TLC.

Having made the mistake of overbuilding, the inverse problems become under-building. How does one not keep lowering the floor past the point where you have a viable test?

We face this with Talk Social, where we are building a facilitated conversation platform. To maintain human conversation so much has to go right – latency, audio/video stability, echo management. To have a facilitated experience, one has to get the timing right, allow the right user controls, and produce quality templates that deliver on a particular user objective. This has yielded a high barrier to overcome for even minimum viability. If latency is even slightly off and people are talking over each other, nothing else matters. If the timing of the templates is off, and people keep getting interrupted, then nothing else matters. And if the UI is not smooth enough that people don’t understand or trust what they’re doing, then they can’t engage.

So I’ve had to shelve my desires for a “what could we build in two weeks” test, and pursue building a more comprehensive platform, and iterating continuously to refine as much as possible. Low latency. Smooth UI. Full features. And the templates themselves have taken an extreme amount of time.

Could we have taken a completely different route? Potentially – and this is what I keep reflecting on. Could we have hired facilitators to work with us over Zoom? Could we have reduced a lot of what we’re doing? 20/20 hindsight, sure.

More to come.