Looking for MVPs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17573276

by Brett_S • 8 years ago

1 5 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I was just asked to show a MVP to help explain the compromises necessary to make an MVP (c.f. a finished product such as Dropbox).

While I can think of many examples of MVPs that have gone on to do great things I could not think of a single product that was still at the point of being the minimum viable solutions. I am sure lots of people on HN make and use MVPs.

Please list any MVPs you can think of below (ideally ones that charge something for their product):

MaciejLukianski• 8 years ago

I am not sure you will find what you are looking for. An MVP that is on the market will usually not show 'obvious compromises'.

If people are paying for it, then it has to do the thing it does quite well. Minimalism may be visible on the sidelines, and then it will not be evident whether this is due to it being an MVP or an actual strategic decision not to implement something. If the product is clearly missing something then it will probably try to hide it not to deter users.

An example

I work at https://www.droptica.com, where we recently created an MVP application https://www.trainingrealm.com.

Is this an MVP? Yes. It is the minimum required for the subscription to the app to be sellable - "schedule training & guide you through the training".

But there are no 'nice to haves' like:

1. No multilanguage support, though clients are from all over.

2. No notifications and reminders, which seem like an obvious thing to have.

3. Initially "Cancel account" was a link to a contact form.

4. To be fair, not all trainings created by TrainingRealm team are at this time available in the app. e.g.

www.run40minutes.com is not, because it is a whole lot of additional functionality that would have to be added for it to make any sense to users. 5. No native apps, just a PWA, though users as for these all the time.

6. UX is not yet quite polished, especially for mobile.

7. A million other things that would be great to have and would increase user engagement and would make the app a greater success.

The above will be added of course, but without these, the app already seems complete. If anything, it may look like poor design or poor implementation here and there, but so do many established products.

If something looks 'really incomplete', then it will not be on the market yet I think.

This is my take at least ;)

Brett_S2• 8 years ago

Awesome. Thanks Macie

brudgers• 8 years ago

One of my favorite essays on MVP's, https://blog.ycombinator.com/minimum-viable-product-process/

Brett_S2• 8 years ago

Yeah, it is gold.

matt_the_bass• 8 years ago

Inkscape

Looking for MVPs

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