Minimum Viable Business Product (MVBP)

You must actually get someone to pay something for it. And importantly, it starts the real-world feedback loop to test your value proposition and GTM strategy which is critical to allow you to iterate to make your product, value proposition, GTM execution, and business better.

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To create an MVBP, your goal is to do the least amount of work possible to achieve three key objectives:

1. The customer gets value out of your product—that is, you validate your work from Step 8, Quantify the Value Proposition.
2. The economic buyer pays for the product—you’re probably not maximizing short-term profit yet, but you’re showing a willingness of the economic buyer to pay something greater than zero.
3. You start a meaningful feedback loop with your customer so you understand what about your product works, and what is missing or needs to be refined—as well as what priority to give the work you still need to do.

While the MVBP is minimal, the customer should see it as a product at this point (hence why “business product” is in the name) and not as simply a prototype for feedback. The prototypes could come into play in Steps 20 and 21, Identify and Test Key Assumptions, but unless the customer is paying for the prototypes, they do not meet the criteria to be a product. At the same time, you’re not trying to deliver a full-fledged version of your product; the MVBP is the smallest set of functionality and investment needed to get you started. Once you are successfully moving forward with regard to the three criteria above, you can then incrementally add more and more functionality.

The level of detail needed for an MVBP will vary depending on your industry. To get started on defining your MVBP, first review the work you did in Step 7, High-Level Product Specification. Visually describe your MVBP on Worksheet 22.1. Then, on Worksheet 22.2, define how your MVBP meets the three key objectives for an MVBP. Finally, consider any opportunities to concierge elements of your MVBP so that you can minimize development time and focus on testing what your customers think of your product (Worksheet 22.3).

Content will be published as it becomes available.

Content will be published as it becomes available.