MVP? 7 day startup? A startup every month?
MVP is the catch of the era. Almost every new startup is aware of the concept and is practising it thematically (or lets just say intends to practise it). You can find this term used in books such as The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and 7 Day startup by Dan Norris. Now Eric Ries defined MVP as an integral element of Build — Measure — Vision loop to get at each stage quickly and capitalization maximum return on time invested which is these days actually the money in other words. MVP is basically an abbreviated form of Minimum Viable Product and as the name indicates is apropos to the concept of providing a product with minimalistic features and of true value to a customer . (do wikipedia this term !).
Infact second day of “7 Day Startup” by Dan is completely focussed on this idea of creating and defining your MVP once you have a product idea in mind. He advocates beautifully by saying that “A common MVP mistake is over-emphasizing the “minimum” and under emphasizing the “viable”. Ask yourself this question, how long do you take to define the features of product / service you intend to create / startup ? The more you drift away , less are you clear about what you intend to create and fewer are the chances it might work — for you wont ever come to know an immediate reaction to the problem you are trying to resolve as you will be virtualy lost in iterations one after another before you are in market with something in your hand.
But the most interesting point was made by Pieter Levels in the podcast “Hack the Entrepreneur” (http://hacktheentrepreneur.com/levels-launching-12-startups-12-months/) where he takes the challenge of launching 12 startups in 12 months. According to Pieter, most of the people know what an MVP is but never design according to the real concept of MVP and take months to re-iterate and come up with something. Again he says that emotional connect with your idea is good but you also need to learn how to detach yourself from your idea / product if you are thinking of scale and profitability in long run. Lastly you can never ever be perfect in creating your product. There would be one or few elements left behind which you want to add upon at a later stage. So, why waste so much time in the un-fertile stuff — Just get a glass of water, take an hour break (or read Chapter 2 of “ The 7 Day Startup”), open your word editor/ scrabble notes and just be done with your MVP- and that would well be a day well spent fellas !
