I feel like sometimes people confuse Minimum Viable Product with Minimum Sellable Product. That is, MVP is not about building the smallest thing that someone will pay you money for. It's about cutting out all the pieces that might fall onto the 20 side of the Pareto principle. It's about resolving any 50-50 decisions by picking one way and going with it, instead of quibbling over which way is the best ("Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" sort of thing). It's about making every really difficult design decision answer the question "do we really need this feature? right now?".
If I can take you back, you might remember that the first iPhone didn't have a customizable home screen or a unified inbox. It went with "The Web is Your API" instead of native apps. It didn't even have copy-paste!
That said, if someone handed you an original iPhone, it is still very recognizable as an iPhone. It still took YEARS to iterate internally and reach that first model iPhone. From friends who've worked on the iPhone, I've heard there were something like 5 unreleased precursors to the iPad. That's right, the iPhone was actually the MVP of the iPad.
So, MVP doesn't mean you don't have to work at it. It doesn't mean that it won't take a lot of time to develop internally. At CodeConf, Wil Shipley said to think about it as Minimum Viable Awesome. MVP is about recognizing which decisions are best made by the engineers and product managers, and which are best made by the customers. Your MVP shouldn't be the first thing you can charge money for, it should be the first thing you can charge money for and feel proud about.
The idea behind MVP is simple enough: market response is more important and more accurate than anything you can ever do yourself - so the most important thing you can do is get it. The best way to get it is be out there fast, however - in order to get something that's worth something you need to give something meaningful (value) - and the result is the MVP.
MVP doesn't mean you don't have to work at it - it means you have to THINK about it a lot.. and be very connected to your market.
I've built the minimum in order to get it live in 2 weeks. I've got a HUGE list of features to add in future, including customisation, multiple highlights, automate the subscription process, API, etc.
What tools, frameworks, languages did you use?
It's a great story, you should check out the interview.
Also, you should be able to run bug muncher on that page, what browser are you using?
For the record, I used the exact same theme when I launched my product, but quickly ditched it.
Having said that, I've had a lot of compliments on the theme, and for $20, I've got no complaints :)
"Groupon 1.0 started on a WordPress blog"
http://www.tomloverro.com/2010/08/19/groupon-1-0-started-on-...
It was a "sunday night" project, and the first thing I've ever done where I thought I did just the right amount of work and no more. It hasn't, like, gone viral or anything but has a few likes and a few people using it - who knows maybe some more will use it.
But it was a great feeling - to really get something useful made, throw it out there and see what happens without investing a whole lot in it.
Another I made earlier this year was http://pickdropapp.com/ which was even less successful than cueyoutube :)
I find that whipping up things like this and just releasing them is a great way of "staying in shape". Releasing software is like a habit and the more you do it, the easier it becomes.
To deviate from my shameless self promotion, I would also like to add that I love the story of TKs http://toutapp.com/ - he's actually turned that into a real product now with thousands of users, but he got a lot of validation from his initial MVP release so that's a real success story. He's written about it quite a bit on his blog.
I actually copied and pasted most of it from other sources (which I've listed on the page).
The playlists are "saved" by sharing them - each playlist exists only as a URL containing a comma separated list of video IDs.
I've been sharing on Twitter using the #cueyoutube hashtag.
Unfortunately, however, my primary webserver is down due to a drive failure - I'm waiting for the VPS image to copy to a new host now. Bummer :( Should be back up in about an hour with any luck.
There are some suggestions from people over at http://cueyoutube.uservoice.com/
I really want to only work on the site in response to user demand, you know? Like I want to keep it as an MVP always. If people like it, then they will use it and make suggestions and I'll react to that.
I'm really enjoying the "throwaway" nature of the playlists themselves (ie. you don't login, you don't give them a name, you don't "save" them, you just create, share and move on with your life), but also the "throwaway" nature of the project - it's good to have something that's useful but that I'm not so heavily invested in (unlike Decal, which I'm like, totally invested in to the point of insanity).
"""My favorite video on bootstrapping/minimum viable product:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv17lF60OHY
It's well worth watching the whole thing."""
Some sort of airforce RickRoll?
This is a great example of designing something with an extreme focus on achieving its purpose while ensuring any necessary, but non-core functions are only minimally included.
We made Lifehacker (after only adding a couple more things) not too long after that.
Wormwall likewise is about as basic a web authoring system as you can get. A WYSIWYG editor and a publish button. Nothing fancy.
We have well over a thousand users now.
As a consultant I see a lot of people put way too much effort into developing bespoke software to automate or "improve" workflows that don't even really exist in their business yet, only to find out that the real bottlenecks exist in places they never even knew (and that they've wasted a bunch of money building something they'll never really use).
It's like a "real life" analogue of the adage "premature optimisation is the devil".
If you want massively successful MVPs, twitter is probably the king.
For this first release, I didn't do anything outside of those 4 features. Soon I'll be adding the ability to open and close the poll by SMS, get results by SMS, and many more things, but for now it is "done".
(Unless you want a revenue-generating MVP).
We are big fans of using Dave McClure's Pirate Metrics model... building activation first, then retention, and then going for acquisition, etc.
The first version of CoderBuddy was very minimally-viable compared to where we're at today. It was enough to get something done and to use in workshops. Since then we've analyzed where the biggest bottlenecks are improving activation etc., along the lines of the Pirate Metrics model.
Hope this helps.
http://captured.codeography.com
While building this I did try hard to focus on what I could do to ship right away, and nothing more. Even for v2 I had to concentrate on limiting the features, which was quite the challenge. At this point, I cant even remember half the things that I needed to implement.
(edit: although colour would have been ahead of its time, the other features could easily have been scope-creeped into the final product)
[1] - http://www.sramanamitra.com/2008/02/24/the-iphone-as-a-minim...
Why? 68% of all registered users visited Subjot last week. Our total number of users are still small (private beta) but our engagement is very high.
It's in private beta but you can use this code to check it out if you are interested - http://sjot.it/nXM96E
HackerNews is a great example.
