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We all get bit carried away when building the MVP. Months and months of development gone into it. But is it really required? Or can we circumvent it? The ( ) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future development. minimum viable product MVP Though the term is almost 2 decades old now, it can owe its popularity to two people in particular: — Author, steve blank The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win — Author, Eric Ries The Lean Startup And all of a sudden, everybody in the startup and venture capital world was talking of MVPs. Investor pitch decks pimped up with details on MVP and the results that came with it. Having an MVP — it made obvious sense. Why spend months and months on developing a full-fledged product? You could now spend a few weeks to get a barebone architecture out there to test out your hypothesis. Having MVPs gave businesses the much needed insight on market validation. It helped them change their approaches way early in their product lifecycle. Long story cut short, it was all good. But, no good deed goes unpunished, and no pure thought remains incorrigible and incorruptible. The notion of MVP too, started to change — at least in the startup community. Primarily, I suspect, because of the fact that people did not really understand what MVP stood for. Let us look at a couple of problems and try to clear the air a bit. . : Read the follow-up to this story here …[cont] The MVP Saga . PROBLEM #1 — THE FREE MVP Today, someone asked me a question. A question I identify to be one of the many problems leading to the misguided view of MVP as we typically see it today. Should you ever do free trials for customers during MVP? Or should you always charge? How can your MVP be free if your product isn’t? And lets say you are offering your MVP for free when your product isn’t. Are you getting actionable and insightful intel or data from your early pilot, in that case? I always have trouble fixing up the perfect knot for my tie. The last wedding I attended, I ended up doing my tie 7 or 8 times before I was satisfied with the knot. Before I was happy with the length of the tie and everything. exact centimeter ( ) Yes. I want my tie to be correct to the precise cm. I am anal that way You can say it is a “pain-point” for me. Now, that’s what startups are all about. Solving a pain point. The important questions here would be: Does the pain-point exist? Yes it does. Any picture of me in a tie is a testimony to the endless effort that has gone behind getting it that way. Does the pain-point exist for a big enough consumer set to make it a viable business? I don’t know. I never thought of starting a business that sells a product that fixes the perfect tie for you. But if you want to get into this business, this is a critical question for you. One that will illustrate market size and potential to scale. Is the pain-point critical enough for the consumer to want to shell money for it? Alternately put, does he have the budget and intent to spend on a solution to fix this pain-point? Now, this. This my friends, is the $5,000 question. The primary question that you try finding the answer to by bringing out a MVP. Before I wrote that last point, the thought in my head was — But now? Now I am not so sure. I will never pay $99 for a device that just fixes my tie for me. After all, that would be insane. WHY NOT? I have paid bellhops a couple of dollars for fixing my tie — just before I enter the main venue. ( ) Yes. A couple of dollars may not seem as much, but where in an economy like India, it is actually a decent tip. So we have established I am already spending on getting my ties fixed. In that case, maybe I wouldn’t mind paying for a device that does that in the comfort of my home. Whenever I need, as frequently as I need. How much would I be willing to pay for that device is an altogether different question. A question that would be a part of your optimal pricing discussion and pricing strategy. So, let’s not get into that. If you look at that whole rant again, you would understand why you just offer your MVP for free. CAN’T I wasn’t initially willing to pay for device — which I inherently resigned as a silly thing to buy for. I submitted to the notion of probably making this purchase once I was confronted with a crucial fact. That I am already paying for this service, in a different form. THE Even then, I would — in all probability — be doing the cost benefit analysis. I would access value of a one time larger payment versus multiple smaller payments as and when I need, and what not. But once again, let us not get carried away with that, and stay on point. But had you offered me the device for free, I would have certainly taken it. Why not? I use neckties, this device fixes neckties, I can use this device, and the device is free. If I like it, great. If I don’t — in a landfill it goes. Offering a product for free, when it isn’t designed to be that way is counterproductive. It will never give you the market indicators you had set out in search for. PROBLEM #2 — THE MVP THAT’S NOT AN MVP, BUT JUST A SMALLER, SIMPLER PRODUCT Yes. I know the P in MVP stands for , but I don’t think the intent ever was to create a simpler product. The intent was to create a product/solution that is quick to introduce to the market. So that you’re in a better position to gather actionable and live customer data. Things that you can’t figure out for sure, sitting in a board room. Product When you are taking a couple of months and a team of 4–5 people to build your MVP, then you are not really building an MVP, are you? You are actually building an entry level product. One that you will add bells and whistles to at a later stage, if things start going your way. Not to mention, if you get the much coveted VC funding — as many entrepreneurs would agree. Your MVP is supposed to just validate your core hypothesis. And access the willingness of the market to accept and embrace that solution — at a cost. Let us take the example of a food app — one with a new concept. Or newish. I am not sure if it already exists. WHAT SHOULD WE HAVE FOR LUNCH? That is the typical question we ask ourselves when we are planning a lunch with friends. That is the question mothers ask their kids when they are planning to start cooking. So how did the answer to this question change from “ ” to “ ”. #FoodForThought — Let’s have Pepperoni Pizza Let’s go to Big Chill all puns intended. It is interesting, isn’t it? All these food-tech startups around you, attempting to bring restaurants home to you. Yet nobody is actually trying to bring you the food worth killing for. So what if that is exactly what you did? A simple solution — does one thing. Tells you what are on the menu of any restaurant, in any particular locality. THE MOST AMAZING DISHES Quite a simple concept really. Let us consider this to be an app. Here will be the steps: User fires up the app App detects user’s location Shows restaurants in the area. Maybe even give some sort of indication as to which are the popular ones and which aren’t Asks for preferences from users — Vegan, Glutten free and what not Suggests the exact dishes that a user may love — Restaurant + Dish Top 10 most popular dishes in that particular area — from various restaurants The user can make an informed choice now. I want to have Peking Duck, cool — I know where to head out to. SO. WHAT WILL THE MVP LOOK LIKE? Well, it will be an app which will….. Errrr. Do you really need an app for the MVP? Let’s look at it this way. Our primary assumption asserts the usefulness of this system for foodies out there. Let’s do a quick and dirty test. Take any locality — I choose Connaught Place, New Delhi, India. I print a mini brochure — say a 3 page fold one. It has a list of restaurants, and popular dishes in each restaurants — just from that locality. On one page, it has top 10 most popular dishes for different categories. May be just two categories, one for the vegetarians and one for those who live and swear by meat. Next, I print 5 restaurants on the front of the brochure. The brochure is sealed. People can look at the front for free, of course. And if they like the offering, they can have it for — say 30 cents. The price isn’t that important at this stage. The willingness to shell out any money is. I would look at the conversion ratio. Out of 100 people I talked to, how many even wanted to look at the front page. And off of those who did, how many wanted to pay me the 30 cents. What kind of people were most interested for each of those two buckets of the funnel. Were they college kids, couples, working professionals, tourists? I can list out some more interesting data points you can accumulate here, but you get the idea. And more importantly, you did manage to do a full fledged pilot, without writing a single line of code. And you did it with a MVP that is nowhere close to what your actual product would look like. Sure, you should be having a website as well. And there are other things that we can talk about in terms of the design of the brochure and its contents. How you leverage the leads that you generate via this experiment, but let us keep all that aside for the time being. Ola* started out their operations by taking cab bookings on a central number. Did you know that? They started phasing out that process and ultimately ditched it completely. They didn’t do so because it wasn’t working, but because they knew it couldn’t be scaled up. But even that central 1800-number* served its purpose and was a good way to move ahead. That is what the real essence of MVP is. Having a product that validates your hypothesis and gives you actionable market intelligence. It doesn’t matter whether the MVP is anywhere close to your real product or not. *Ola is a competitor to Uber, operating in India *We are just calling it by the generic name 1800-number, it wasn’t actually an 1800-number. . : Read the follow-up to this story here …[cont] The MVP Saga . Getting in touch is easy. I am available on , . I write on Medium, but I guess that you already knew. I also have a account. :-) Twitter Facebook, Quora, LinkedIn mail Have fun! Let’s chat. Humans, bots — really doesn’t make much difference to me.

The curious case of MVP — The Why and How

Learning by doing Hello there! In this post, we're gonna go over the basics of creating your own blogging system using C# specifically .NET Core 3.0. The aim of this series of blog posts is to teach you guys how easy it can be to write your own basic blogging system and hopefully get you inspired to create your own or use this as a base for something much better and or bigger. The first few paragraphs are a bit of a backstory as to why I personally wanted my first tutorial series to be on this exact subject. If you are not at all interested in reading through the backstory simply scrolling down. Warning: The Story Back at a very young age, I could never quite figure out the sense or purpose behind keeping a diary. I obviously knew schoolmates male and female that wrote a daily diary and obviously, in our very young teenage years, all the boys wanted a peek inside one of those to see who our girl schoolmates wrote about and what they thought about us. But even in those days the practice of writing about the events that happened to you and the thoughts that you had only to keep it locked away to yourself seemed... well odd.I thought surely if you write about an experience or a great idea you had you'd want to share it with as many people as possible and get their take on it. I even got a pretty nice leather notebook that was supposed to be a diary gifted to me, but I never got around to it. It just stayed there in a drawer completely empty until it was either thrown out or lost to time. But then only a few short years after we finally upgraded from dial-up internet to broadband. This increased my 1h of internet time to always online. The change was drastic and I was immediately taken in. At first, I did what any 13 years old would do on the internet... I visited flash game websites, watched funny videos, chatted with my friends on MSN Messenger and joined public forums where I could discuss my favorite cartoons, sports teams, movies, and hobbies. Then I Discovered Blogging One day as I was reading through a forum I frequented I noticed somebody posted a link and asked people for their opinion on the blog they've just written. Now I've never heard of blogging before this was completely new territory to me. I noticed the long wall of text thought, pff who has time for this immediately closed it and went on with my business. But then something odd happened, the next day when I went back and logged onto my favorite forum I noticed this the post from this guy asking for people's opinion about his blog post was the top post and not only that, it appeared to have gathered more than 300 comments, in a single night. I was confused and at the same time amazed. Obviously, I had to see what the comments were saying, surely they had to be as unimpressed with the great big wall of text this person linked as me. No, it was a mixed bag, some disagreed with the author on the points he was trying to make, some praised him and defended his position, others were there to antagonize him. This was still not enough to convince me so I ignored it and went about my business avoiding the forum post in question. A couple of days passed and the post was still at the top of the forum. That was when finally I decided "fuck it" let's see what all the commotion is about. I started reading, thinking I'll get bored in no time and will skim through it as I did with everything else that I considered too long and boring back then. But then I just kept reading and reading, for the life of me I can't remember after all these years what exactly the post was about or why it drew me in so much but I clearly remember reaching the end of it and feeling disappointed that there was not more. Just like that, I understood it. That was also the first year I learned coding. Now back then we didn't have Youtube and video tutorials that would teach you how to do cool shit online. But we did have manuals, glorious dry boring manuals. The first language I learned was C++ and right after that PHP because I really really wanted to build websites, forums, portals, and whatnot. One of the very first things I've built was a blog of my very own, of course being 13 and not having any disposable income I had no way to host it. But I did know how to open up the ports on our router and host it myself, this of course meant that the blog was only available at certain hours. Not that it would have seen much success regardless, the content was...well it read like it was written by a 13-year-old, because well, it was. I've kept making blogging systems over the years and gotten pretty good at it and now finally after his long and boring story, I want to give some of my knowledge over to you. Now Let's Get Down To Business So the very first things you're gonna need are: DotNet Core 3.0 A Code editor (visual studio code should do just fine) Your favorite database (I'm gonna be using feel free to switch over to a SQL database if you wish. LiteDB Keep in mind this tutorial is meant for intermediate developers, if you've never worked with C# or dotnet that's fine I'll explain as we go along but some prior development knowledge is required, especially stuff like understanding how databases and how to write basic SQL CRUD statements. Okay! now that that's outta our way and you got your tools ready. The very first part we're gonna do is run dotnet --version the output you're looking for is: D: ayvi orkspace utorials log series art one>dotnet --version
3.0.100 \D \W \T \B \P If that is not your output or there's a newer version of Dotnet available then some of the parts of this tutorial might differ from your system. Right then create your workspace folder open a command prompt in it and run dotnet web new If everything went well you should see: :\Dayvi\Workspace\Tutorials\Blog series\Part one&gt;dotnet new mvc
The template was created successfully.
This template contains technologies parties other than Microsoft, see ://aka.ms/aspnetcore/ -third-party-notices details.

Processing post-creation actions...
Running on :\Dayvi\Workspace\Tutorials\Blog series\Part one\Part one.csproj...
Restore completed , ms :\Dayvi\Workspace\Tutorials\Blog series\Part one\Part one.csproj.

Restore succeeded. D "ASP.NET Core Web App (Model-View-Controller)" from https 3.0 for 'dotnet restore' D in 60 91 for D Now let's open up our Visual Studio code by simply running . code directly in the command prompt, the period in that command tells it to open up the current folder in visual studio code. Hit F5 for debugging and wait for a prompt to pop up in Visual Studio code asking you which config you wanna use. Simply select .NET Core and hit Enter. Just like that your project should be up and running in debug mode.You can also run it by opening a command prompt in the folder where your project is and running > dotnet build > dotnet run Or dotnet watch run for more info read dotnet watch Personally I like the best when I'm developing because it recompiles and relaunches your application automatically every time you make and save a change. dotnet watch run Aaaaanyhow after you've successfully launched your dotnet MVC application in your preferred method you should see a message like this: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[ ]
      Now listening Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[ ]
      Now listening info: 0 on: https: //localhost:5001 info: 0 on: http: //localhost:5000 Open up either of these addresses in your favorite browser(visual studio and visual studio code should it automatically for you n a successful launch). You should not be greeted with a welcome screen. Now let's create our folder structure when finished it should look a little something like this: ├───App
├───bin
│   └─── │       └───netcoreapp3 │           └─── ├───Controllers
├───Models
├───obj
│   └─── │       └───netcoreapp3 │           └───staticwebassets
├─── ├───Views
└───wwwroot Debug .0 Properties Debug .0 Properties Nothing too fancy, nothing too crazy. Some of you might be wondering why I didn't simply work with: dotnet mvc new well my reason is quite simple, I believe it comes with waaay too many files that I have to delete before I have a clean install. Now let's head back to visual studio code right click on our Models folder (if you're using visual studio make sure to include the newly created folders in your project) and select create new C# Class, if you do not have that option install the recommended extensions for visual studio code or update visual studio code. Name your class and edit it to look like this: Model.cs System;
namespaceBlog.Models { { ID{ ; ;} DateTime Created { ; ;} = DateTime.Now; DateTime Updated { ; ;} = DateTime.Now; Deleted { ; ;} = ;
    }
} using public class Model // Everything needs and ID, not explanation required public string get set // Will hold the original creation date of the field, // the default value is set to DateTime.Now public get set // will hold the last updated date of the field will initially be set to DateTime.Now, but should be updated on every...update /// public get set public bool get set false This will be our base model class that every other model will inherit from, next let's create our post model well use a super inspired and original name and call it, you read? ! Post.cs { : { Title { ; ;} Views { ; ;} = ; Content { ; ;} Excerpt { ; ;} CoverImagePath { ; ;} Public { ; ;}

    }
} namespace Blog.Models public class Post Model public string get set public int get set 0 public string get set public string get set public string get set public bool get set As you can see we're extending the Model class which means the Post class has all the members that Model has, neato! Remember in my story when I said I felt the first blog I've ever read ended too early? Well..Hope you enjoyed part one of my tutorial series if you have any questions or remarks feel free to contact me at @arctekdev I know this wasn't much information but the next one will have a lot more meat and a lot less story! I just felt it was important to try and draw you in, I hope it worked and if not hey lesson learned am I right?

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