Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I might pass since I'm the CEO of confidence. And today. We're going to talk minimum viable product. Yes. Building a minimum viable product. Otherwise known as an MVP is such a good way to test your product idea. And what's neat about it is why build.

The entire product, whether it's digital analog, all that code or that infrastructure, why build it all. And then test when you can test really light versions, uh, light ideas, sketches models, prototypes, you name it, uh, really early in the process. So you can get a better idea of if your product really works for the user.

So today we're going to discover all the different [00:01:00] ways you can test and learn surveys, prototypes, or even feature driven for minimum viable product. So we're going to get into the good stuff. Now, the first thing I want to say here is some really hardcore lean startup folks would, um, Not always want to do surveys and interviews, but frankly I really liked them to kind of set the scene and to get you kind of comfortable with the market that you're going in, the segment that your customers and so forth.

You can do a lot of rapid prototyping and a lot of, uh, testing and learning after that. But I find it can give you some very, very good insights. So I'm stretching this concept of what can be the minimum viable product to include, uh, surveys and interviews. Um, but of course, we're going to talk about some prototyping and of course we'll get into some, uh, [00:02:00] MVPs.

So I'm going to break down each three. Types that I've just bucketed for you and we're going to get into them. And hopefully this gives you some inspiration about how to test your next product idea. Okay. Let's talk about surveys and interviews and how they can help you test your product idea. Now, uh, you might hear these formerly talked about in terms of quantitative and qualitative research.

Well, they really talking about is a survey, which is quant and qual. That's the interview. And you're looking at either doing surveys or user interviews. And I want to share with you just a couple of really cool tips and tricks that I've learned throughout the years and some best practices to help you get the most out of testing your idea.

Without a doubt. If you're going to do a survey, one of the most important things is your screener. And I love to use a screener as a way to create a [00:03:00] segmentation of my audience, of my customer, my user. So let's just take this idea that, um, we want to develop a new app for, for getting podcasts onto a smartphone.

I would have a screen that starts the survey. Asking them a couple of different ways to describe themselves. And this will help me understand not only some usage insights, but it will, might give me a little bit of a sense of which segment of all of the podcast, listeners and users might be a market for my product.

So I would have something like, uh, on the survey. First question is, you know, what, which best describes your podcast usage? I'm hooked. Um, I like podcasts. I've listened to a few shows or lastly pod. What? And obviously you can expand them on these and give them a context, but this could be really powerful because I might discover that people who like podcasts would listen more if they had [00:04:00] particular features or experiences.

In their podcasting habits and then I'd be off to the races. I've got something to build a hypothesis around. Um, some of the other questions I'd love to ask is, you know, what's the biggest pain that you experience, um, what trips you up, um, and, um, In a second round of, um, uh, surveys and interviews, you might start getting into asking people to evaluate an idea or a visual asset that is, uh, almost a poster.

If you will, for the, for the given product solution that you want to build. And do you ask them to write it out out of a scale of 10, 10 being amazing one being not so crash hot and you can propose something and ask them how interesting is the proposition? How likely would they be to share it or how likely they might be to try the product?

What's really interesting. These are all very good early indicators of whether you're [00:05:00] onto something with your product. So there you go. You don't have to build any code or you don't have to build any physical product or distribution. You can just get in front of users, either through a survey or interview.

You can ask some of these questions and you're actually already starting to test your product. Now, let's say that goes very well. And you're pretty excited, uh, from your interview and or your survey. And now you want to build a lightweight prototype and, uh, this is really gonna help you see if you've got a.

Problem solution fit. And you might, uh, have a product demo. This was famously done by the guys at Dropbox. They just made a video of their product. And so many people liked it. They then decided to build it, or you might get into bringing the experience to life through different what we call versions of a minimum viable product you could have, uh, you could crowdfund it.

So just think about Kickstarter. You can put it up there. The product's not [00:06:00] built. You might have a. Picture or profile prototype that you show, or you might get in front of real users. And frankly, this is some of the best stuff where you do what we call either a  VP or wizard of Oz. Um, the concierge, when I want to focus on, because that's actually what Zappos did when they launched, they actually needed to test whether people would even buy shoes online.

So what they did is they made a website and they only fulfilled orders. If someone actually purchased and they had no stock and then they would run down the road, buy the shoes and send it well, pretty soon they got so much response that they actually validated their hypothesis through their MVP and then three that they were ready to take it to the moon.

So, yeah, this is the second bucket. This is the rapid prototyping. We've got a whole master class on rapid prototyping. So if you're interested in that head over to bottom-up dot IO and you can sign up for the free master class that. Now the last bucket is [00:07:00] building a feature driven MVP and, um, The reason I say that's different to a concierge or wizard of Oz.

MVP is you're really moving into to test a new level of, uh, user experience. And it's generally much more work than the earlier two buckets. So we had bucket number one of testing of MVPs. Survey or interview that's number one, number two was prototyping. All right. Number three is building what we call feature driven MVP.

Now this is particularly good for software folks, people building digital products, and there's two things you really want to do here. You want to test either for. Task completion, which is a very, very, very strong indicator on your product. Can they get the job done? And if you want to take that to its highest order where you're actually really starting to get, uh, product market fit is when not only can you bring an early adopter to your feature driven [00:08:00] MVP?

Not only can they complete the task, but where they actually would recommend it. To a friend they're so satisfied that they would actually be prepared to not only purchase this given product or service, but actually they want to share it with a friend. And if you can get to that level with your MVP, you can have enormous confidence to go out into the world and actually build your product.

For real, you might want to raise money. You might even want to get people internally. If you're at a large enterprise to get behind your product. So let's just zoom back and look at what,...