chapter fourteen

14 Getting to Minimum Viable Product—with lighthouse customers

 
  • Can you leverage your LinkedIn connections to identify lighthouse customers?
  • Does your product solve their problems and what is the MVP that does that?
  • What are the product gaps to address from the customer interviews before you enter the market?

You are working hard to get into the market and start getting revenue. But you need to get a few things nailed down before you do that so that you have confidence you have something that solves the big problem you wanted to solve as the premise for starting your new company. The first big step to getting the right product into the right market the right way is to make sure the product is something people in your chosen market will pay for. But you don’t want to build too much product because that takes more time, and you might not be building “necessary” features and that is a complete waste of time not to mention delaying you getting into the market. This anecdote is about how you zero in on what is called a minimum viable product (MVP) that real customers will pay real money for.

14.1 Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

14.1.1 MVP vs. prototype

14.1.2 Different MVP definitions

14.2 The critical importance of lighthouse customers

14.3 Talking to the market

14.4 The moral of this anecdote