Sometimes you just need to know if something works. Rather than draw up elaborate business or design plans, consult with specialists and slave away for hours, if you create a functioning prototype including some major features, this is known as a Minimum Viable Product or MVP. You then use this MVP to show potential customers and learn what works for them and what doesn’t from it to enable continued development.
For example…
Take Buffer, the social media post scheduling app. Its founders created a Minimum Viable Product of it initially to gauge interest. This MVP involved providing users the ability to just schedule tweets without the ability to execute it. The question the founders had to answer were: ‘would enough users be interested in it to pay for such a service?’ The answer was a resounding yes and thereafter, Buffer, as we know it, was born.
