MVP stands for minimal viable product. It’s the lowest common denominator for your product, while being the strongest denominator. What is the one feature you can build to sustain your product enough to get it into the hands of your customers?

How does it help?

For first-time entrepreneurs, especially non-technical ones, MVP is king. Distilling your core product down to a single entity or feature does a lot for the future of your product.

It’s the products first viability indicator, and the first cost analysis you can perform for your product. It’ll help you build the core functionality of your app at a fraction of the cost and become your first point of customer return.

MVP isn’t pretty

We have a motto here, make it work, then make it right. MVP is making it work. Get it functional, get it live, and then work to build an audience around it, don’t worry about scalability until it’s an actual problem. We often look too far down the road, worry too much about the overall look and feel of an idea, rather than the nitty-gritty functionality of it. Make it work on a small enough scale that you don’t need to worry about glaring oversights, or have to juggle too many outstanding issues. Let your MVP start small and grow naturally over time.

Take inspiration from Amazon’s original launch page. Or from the fact Groupon originally launched using Wordpress.

Getting started

I guarantee there are things you can do now to get your product or service into the hands of customers. It doesn’t need to be sexy, it just needs to work.

Outsource. I don’t mean having someone else build your product. I mean find services that already exist that you can piggy-back off of to launch your service. Wordpress for hosting, Shopify for payment. Use Delicous Stacks as your quasi-database and aggregate content from the web to start sharing. Use a Google Doc. You’d be surprised how many tools can be leveraged for business use today.

Beyond technology there’s a lot you can do to help build an audience around your product. Start by reaching out to core customers, actually offer the solution you intend to build as a personal, live service. Starting a recipe webapp? Start by finding all your favorite recipes and sharing them people. Starting a Yelp competitor? Start by finding your favorite restaurants nearby and sharing them.

MVP’s goal is to move quick, stay agile, and build from day one. Trouble figuring out what your MVP is? Ping us @codeacademy.