How To Plan Your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in 5 Simple Steps

it's easy as an early stage founder to get lost in the process of building a minimum viable product your MVP you can spend weeks if not months building something that no one wants so in this video I'm going to walk you through my five-step plan for creating your MVP by following these steps you can avoid wasting your time your money and your energy toiling away on a SAS idea that no one is willing to pay for and if you stick around till the end I'll show you how I'd roll the MVP out to your launch

list and yes you should have a launch list while ensuring that you don't learn through the people on that list in the process I've talked a lot about MVPs on this channel I have a video or two dedicated to MVPs so I'm not going to go into why you should consider building an MVP in this video I'm just going to dive into the five steps the first being to clearly Define your MVP's objective you don't want to go in guns blazing and just start building something before you do that you want to clearly Define what

hypothesis or hypotheses you are trying to prove or disprove by launching this MV and in this video we're going to look at two example apps that we're going to walk through all five steps with so one hypothesis might be I'm thinking about building a CRM but I'm going to make it cheaper and easier to use so a hypothesis might be will people who currently use a CRM switch to mine if it's cheaper if it's easier to use but maybe it only has a third of the functionality and throughout this video we'll call this idea bump

CRM at bump crm.com our second example is an email service provider or email marketing platform but I'm going to say ESP email service provider for this video that is focused on Realtors so the hypothesis might be do realtors care enough about email marketing that they would sign up for an ESP that is focused specifically on their vertical and we're going to call this one postcard at ostc guard.com so if we were to establish some success metrics for your MVP so you can help decide look it's not hard and fast it's not black and white it's

not if you hit this number you definitely are for sure validated and if not you're not but what about some guidelines some metrics so you have an idea if you should continue to build and launch this MVP so for bump CRM which is the horizontal CRM with limited feature set your true MVP at this point is probably having conversations and getting Buy in from somewhere between 10 and 40 people and I've talked about those numbers why 10 and 40 in a prior video so I'm not going to go into it here but for the sake

of this video Let's just say you already have 10 people who are champing at the bit to use a simpler perhaps less expensive CRM your next step would be to figure out which subset of features to build and then of course to start coding but the metric here would be how many of your 10 Early Access folks actually try it when given access and how many stick around and use it for even a few months I think even a 50% success rate of people who stick around for 6 months is pretty reasonable at this stage

your success rate is going to be low but of course it does depend on the space and your app and your price point and you there's a lot of things you can get right a lot of things you can get wrong at this point so that's where it can be hard to put hard and fast numbers on these things but you want to look for stuff that is directionally correct and then for postcard which is the ESP for realtors I'd be looking to have one-on-one conversations whether via email or phone or Zoom or whatever with

say 100 Realtors to pick a nice round number and to get at least 10% of those to be super interested in trying out the product step two is to outline your core features it's to determine the essential features needed for your MVP and then to prioritize these features based on your vision of the product how important you think they are and your user or Early Access feedback so so for bump CRM this is probably the hardest step of all really digging in with your 10 Early Access customers to figure out your feature set is exactly

what I'd be doing here so I'd spend a ton of time and honestly if you can't find a subset of functionality that most of your users need you either need to bail on the idea altogether or find more Early Access customers cuz you're trying to find a commonality if across all 10 users the vend diagram is you need 100% of the feature set of Salesforce then bump CRM doesn't work cuz you can't build 100% of the features of Salesforce it's just too big so in this case you're looking for that subset of Early Access folks

who need the same shared subset of features which look it's not going to be black and white it's going to be cloudy it's going to be muddy I get it there's a lot of signals but you just have to do your best being a Founder is making hard decisions with incomplete information and going out and finding as many Early Access customers as you can that only need that small subset whether it's a third or 20% or 40% you get the idea that's the key at this stage and for postcard I'm sure you're thinking well here

we go I get to figure out the sub set of features that I need to build to become an ESP and that's wrong I would not write a line of code here I would not build an ESP I would figure out exactly what I want to offer to Realtors whether it's custom pre-built email sequences some kind of done for you service a widget that installs on their website and is preconfigured to collect leads whatever you decide the packages for this product I'd be looking to then build that out with zero code on top of an

existing platform probably MailChimp if you want to know the truth when I say zero code I don't mean no code I mean you literally just build it in their platform you almost act as a consultant and you build out the things you promised on an existing ESP a minimum viable product is not just a simpler version or a version with less features of another product MVPs are about solving a problem and looking at hypotheses so in this step you're looking to avoid feature bloat and focus on delivering a clear solution and as I mentioned in

our how to create an MVP video which you should watch next if you haven't already you probably don't need to design and build polished account deletion billing all kinds of things you can leave out of your MVP and we'll link to that video of course in the description step three I've already kind of jumped to this but it's to choose the right MVP approach I recommend using one of three MVP approaches the first is human automation this is where you write no code and you have humans doing the work behind the scenes in the case

of postcard that's pretty much what I'm talking about you're doing the automation or you're hiring a virtual assistant or a consultant to do the work you're not trying to make money at this point you're just trying to prove Pro or disprove the hypothesis then there's the no code approach and this is where you take bubble or air table or softer or some other no code tool and you slap it together with bailing wire and chewing gum and you kind of build a Franken product potentially it doesn't have to be amazing or scalable but again you're

trying to prove a disprove a hypothesis and finally full code this is where you get in as a developer or if you have to hire a developer and you build out that minimum viable product in this step you have to decide which approach aligns best with the problem you're trying to solve and how you can best prove or disprove that hypothesis so you probably want to match it up with your own technical skills so if you're not a developer you probably want to pick a problem in the first place that can be solved with human

automation or no code lean into your strengths or your assets if you really need a full code MVP and you're not a developer it's a very risky and very expensive proposition step four is one that most people skip but it's to create a development timeline and I don't mean it has to be software development I mean just the schedule for building out the MVP most people don't do this and I think it's critical you want a realistic timeline for building this and you want to stick to it as close as possible even if you're not

fully correct you know if you're on course or if you're way off with no estimate you just spend the next 6 months tooling around because that's what we do as makers personally I like to set a deadline for each phase and Milestone and I track my progress in a Google or an Excel sheet so that keeps you accountable and it lets you know when you might be dragging your feet when I used to work nights and weekends on my products I had a running task list and one thing I did separate from the building was

the planning so I sat down and said what is everything that needs to be built in order to get this product shipped ready and to get it shipped and I would make a huge list of that just a project plan again I would use an Excel spreadsheet or a Google sheet but what that did was it separated the planning from the building because then when I sat down to build I didn't have to think oh what comes next there was just a list that I knew to dive into and I always knew whether I was

on schedule or behind schedule and once you have all that you get to work in a minute I'm going to tell you how I'd release my MVP into the world but first I want you to know that applications for microcom masterminds are closing soon I've talked a lot on this channel about how important masterminds have been to my entrepreneurial success but finding the right Founders to join up with can be really hard so over the past few years my team at microcom has successfully handm matched over 1,000 Founders into Mastermind groups by looking at your

Revenue your team size your strengths your goals and several other data points to make sure your peer group is the right fit collectively all the Mastermind folks we've matched have more than $150 million in ARR so once you're matched you'll also have access to our mentorship series a three-month program where you can connect with some great minds in sales Business Development marketing and more if you're looking for accountability honest feedback about your business and the opportunity to make new friends that care about your success you should head to microcomp mastermind.com and apply by June 12th

that's microcom mastermind.com all right let's get back to launching your MVP so step five is to launch and when I launched my last SAS app and this is how I would do it today is I used a phased launch so this is down the line when you have a launch list it's not your 10 Early Access people but let's say you have 500 or 5,000 people on an email list what I did cuz I think I had about 3,400 if I recall first I would show it to the people in Early Access you get in

conversations with them you get feedback you iterate you're improving the product You're Building features and of course you're squashing what few bugs that you have and I call this early access I charge for it it is not a beta I don't do annual or lifetime comps at this point I want people who are really interested in paying for the product and what I used to tell them is you can use it for free for now until you start getting value and then I'm going to start charging you $ x a month in my case it

was $49 a month so you start charging people as soon as they are willing to pay so this phased launch took five months when we rolled drip out was my email service provider I built 5 months to roll out to 3,400 people a few hundred at a time every two weeks I remember I started with 1 to 200 just to try to get a feel for can we build fast enough to keep up with these people and then I started launching to five or 600 people every 2 weeks towards the end we were building frantically

between the the groups of folks we were letting in and realistically it led us to find product Market fit over the next several months once you have your MVP you're going to need to find a marketing channel that works in my book The SAS Playbook I list the 20 marketing channels I've seen companies use and in an upcoming video I'll be chatting with a microf connect member who broke down 10 of the strategies he tried while helping ass SAS grow from less than a million to over 10 million in ARR make sure you're subscribed to

this channel so you don't miss that chat