Airbnb once flew a customer named Roberto to SF to give him a magical weekend experience. It was over the top, wildly unprofitable, but well worth the money.
Airbnb handcrafted an experience curated by humans that made Roberto cry tears of joy. The essence of the experience later became Airbnb Experiences.
It’s the opposite of a *minimum* viable product.
Manuel Rosso calls it a *maximum* viable product.
You offer a human-powered service that delivers an end-to-end experience that completely solves someone’s problem. You only automate/productize it after you understand the problem and have a solution that actually works.
That’s our playbook at DoWhatWorks. We used it to launch and have used it to radically improve our offering.
We swear by it.
Here’s an example of how we use it and 4 lessons…
We saw that our customers love getting access to data about experiments from their industry. But they sometimes had trouble figuring out what to do with it and lacked the time to dig in.
So we experimented with a service that analyzed our test data and gave customers specific recommendations for their UX based on evidence.
The service forced us to solve the entire problem for customers. In the process we learned a great deal. It turns out our customers don't want data. They want impact (and they want it now).
All of our R&D focused on how to get them more impact, faster, with less work.
We worked with a professor at Johns Hopkins University to create a methodology to predict what variables drove impact by page, sector, etc based on experimentation data.
When clients tested the methodology, they got multi-million dollar wins from our recommendations. Once we saw it work, we built systems, tools and product for our team and rolled the service out to more clients.
Now that the service has proven it works, we are scaling it up. I can’t wait to unveil what’s in the works. If you’d like to get in early to this next generation product let me know.
4 Lessons
1️⃣ It’s a slog. Prepare to work exceptionally hard during the upfront manual phase. It’s brutal.
2️⃣ It’s worth it. Your pace of learning is extreme. It is also a lot easier to adapt the service while it is manual.
3️⃣ Don’t automate too soon. Since Maximum Viable Products are a slog it will be tempting to ask engineers to remove the pain for you. Don’t automate until you have done the end-to-end solution a few times. See what creates value. See what you can eliminate. Then automate and productize.
4️⃣ Keep disciplined. Have a strong POV on what the product solution might look like and be willing to say no to cool opportunities that are too tangential to the vision.
Have you launched with a Maximum Viable Product? What’s your story? What are your lessons?
Credits: Eric Ries (inventing MVP), Patrick Campbell (inspiring us to launch services), Brian Chesky (Airbnb example)
#mvp #leanstartup #product #pm #marketing #GTM
