(2009-03-24) Ries Minimum Viable Product

Eric Ries on figuring out what your Minimum Viable Product (v1 to launch with) is. (Customer Development)

What we should have done, and what we did for a lot of features thereafter, is started with a landing page that promised people that product. Then we should have taken out the AdWords we were planning to take out, drive traffic to that landing page, and offer people to buy the experience that we are talking about. Hmm, he's talking here really about an add-on feature for an existing working product. Which would work well for a Freemium model I suppose, but isn't comparable to true v1.

IMVU does have a VIP club today that is not anything related to this. But, in those days, the idea was, we were trying to test whether people wanted to have some kind of premium experience. What happened was few people actually clicked on that link to go find out about the VIP club, but in the experimental cohort for people who were shown that header, their average spending was higher. By constantly reminding them that there was such a think as a premium experience, we primed them to want to do more spending on IMVU. It was a very unexpected result. And it's a good example of why you always do full cohort-based split tests. Always test for the macro effect, don't look at the micro effect.

We would often ship things in a schematic form with horrible design to see if we'd gotten the information flow and information architecture right, and really good Interaction Design-ers, if they're being honest, will tell you that that's always the sequence.

The issue is that these practices do have a high ROI, and we got to them because we kept following the traditional model and failing and feeling like, God, we are burning money like there is no tomorrow. We keep building features that nobody wants. We literally don't have the time and we can't afford to keep doing the same old thing over and over again... We just didn't believe that (Hockey Stick plan) was going to happen. So we forced ourselves to actually test each feature to see if it was going to be successful.

(Interviewer) You charge from day one, so basically every Experiment (A-B Test) you ran was an experiment to make more money.

(Interviewer) You guys weren't doing any of this really in public because you had not launched the product, right? Nobody knew who you were. But people, at the same time were using the product, so how did you do that? see 2009-03-15-RiesWhenLaunch