MDP: Minimum Delightful Product

We've discussed this before here, often.

A product can be unbelievably crappy as long as it solves a real pain point. If your product makes or saves people money, if it saves them an arduous chore, if it gets them laid, then your product can be actively hostile to the user and still succeed. There's nothing "delightful" about the vast majority of consumer products or services.

It's when your benefits are less clear that interface becomes important. Invantory falls firmly into this latter category - their own homepage blurb essentially describes them as "a nicer Craigslist". Offering a nicer version of a commodity is potentially very lucrative, as Apple and Starbucks shareholders will testify, but it's inherently more difficult to bootstrap. The incumbent players have enough resources to crush you like a bug, so you're gambling that they're too dumb or too slow. That's a big gamble, certainly a bigger one than I'd be prepared to take on a product that's hugely dependent on network effects.

I think this post is confusing two stages of development. I would argue that MDP is a step beyond and MVP.

MVP is not about marketing, word of mouth, promotion (although it's always welcome). MVP is about building the absolute minimum you can test against your target market to validate your assumptions.

I just finished a Lean Startup Machine weekend. You know what our team's MVP was? Us walking the streets of London, approaching our target market, explaining our offering and completing the service we were promoting (it wasn't a virtual goods or saas obviously!).

That's right, we didn't write one line of code! But we went through the exact motions that we would have done if a website existed i.e. attracting interest, taking details, fulfilling the service and receiving payment.

An oft overlooked point of MVP / lean methodology is that companies should try to minimize time through the build -> measure -> learn loop. Spending too much time on the build phase (to get impecable design) can delay critical learning.

The central point is that "viable" doesn't really apply to a huge class of products and things. There are times when a user wants a problem solved, but in other instances they are looking to add a little something inessential but pleasant/fun/nice/funny/beautiful/lovely to their life, even just a moment to connect thoughts or with other people, not because of a job offer or order pizza, but to add variety to life. In the morning do you just cover up, dress appropriately or love fashion? There are businesses placed at many points in Maslow's hierarchy. Software is going to be completely omnipresent and there will be fewer exciting startups tackling problems at the bottom of the pyramid. Look at the facebook valuation. For that business, they will have needed an MDP. Talking about minimum viability of social networking software is a muddled discussion. That is why I like the idea of MDP. Nice observation.