Sep 21, 2021
Minimum Viable Product vs. Minimum Valuable Product?
All founders have been taught to build the MVP. There is debate about what MVP stands for, but lean startup methodology means you try to get the basic version off the ground so that you test the market before spending too much money. I thought we launched a solid minimum viable product, but our early traction told us we hadn’t quite figured it out.
Saving vendors hours and hours of time in step 2 wasn’t an MVP.
As a corporate lawyer, I have had to prepare a lot of due diligence on behalf of clients who were closing a transaction, like a financing or a merger. Generally, the due diligence was a list of questions that I sent to the client, but I always required we go through the questions together on a phone call first. Why? Because otherwise that questionnaire would sit in their inbox forever. It was like pulling teeth to get them to complete the task.
By scheduling the phone call, I could force them to get started. I would introduce every call the same way, “This is going to be painful, but this call will get most of it done and hopefully ease the pain of this process.”
It’s not a surprise, then, that I co-founded a company that automates due diligence. ClearOPS is a knowledge management platform for privacy and security operations data and it helps vendors respond to customer due diligence. When I first started talking to customers, they all told me the same thing, the same workflow, the same problems. The minimum viable product was coming together.
First, we decided that the minimum viable product had to incorporate a deep learning model that allowed our customers to pre-populate security questionnaires with their prior answers from a repository of answers. Second, we made sure that the workflow matched the workflow that all my investigations had revealed. And, finally, with 30% of spreadsheets being online portals, we also launched a browser extension so it was easy to access the answer repository.
But we experienced the cold start problem; they weren’t uploading files. How do you remove a cold start problem? How do we force them to get on the phone (figuratively speaking)?
User testing is critical and we talked to our customers and learned a lot. Specifically, over 60% of security questionnaires are spreadsheets. We realized that asking people to convert an excel file to .csv was too much friction.
Saving vendors hours and hours of time in step 2 wasn’t an MVP.
It turns out that any friction encountered on Day 1, Task 1 of using your product does not qualify your product as a MVP. It’s the phone call versus the document sitting in the inbox.
So, we fixed the import/export user flow making it easy to drag and drop an excel file into the platform and have it export in the original format.
When you are building a company and thinking about how to solve your customer’s problems, make sure to address the cold start problem first. It can be hard, because it may not be a task that you mind doing. But if the first step of working with your product is immediate friction, then you don’t have an MVP yet.
And I guess I am now a convert. I think building the minimum valuable product is the right mindset.
