Stage: MVP Validation Before You Launch

While analytics can give you the macro picture of how your customers are behaving. A better way to understand more about them is to actually just ask them by carrying out an interview like the ones we did before with problem interview and solution interview.

While you can conduct the interview any way you want, whether by person, by blog, by emailing, the main point is to collect the information that you will need to validate your problem. Also, the interview script is merely a suggestion. If you can get the answers with your own ways, do go ahead!

What we want to learn about in the MVP Interivew is:

1. Is the landing page attractive - do they want to keep going?

2. Do the customers make it through the activation flow (usage cycle)?

3. What features are the most popular?

4. Does your MVP deliver and demonstrate your UVP?

The MVP Interview script is taken from Ash Maurya's Running Lean

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Sample Script:

1. Welcome - set the stage - 2 minutes

Hey, thanks for meeting with us again to help us with our startup. 

We are almost done with our product and we'd love to get your feedback on the product. In return we'll give you early access to the product. Cool?

We'll run a short interview to ask you about the usability of our product. I'll start showing you the website and ask you a couple of questions. It'll be really good if you could think out loud as we go along. That'll help us identify any problems we need to address.

2. Show Landing Page (Test UVP Message) - 2 minutes

(Run a 5-second test to test the site navigation/call to action)

Look at the home page, and let me know what you think of it. Don't click anything yet.

- Is it clear what what our product is?

- What would you do next?

3. Show Pricing Page (Test Pricing - If you have one that is) - 3 minutes

(Instruct the visitor to check out the pricing page, and let him navigate it)

- This is the our pricing plan

- What do you think of it?

4. Signup and Activation (Test Solution) - 15 minutes

(This is the heart of the interview. Ask the interviewee to sign up and watch him use the key features)

- Are you still interested in trying out this service?

- Click on the sign up link to proceed

(Tell the interviewee that we will be seeing him/her go through the signup process)

5. Wrapping up - 2 minutes

- That's it, you're signed up and ready to start rocking

- Would you like to be a customer at a big early adopter discount, 50% (or anything) off for the first 6 months? (If the customer is unwilling to, then this may be a sign of invalidation)

- What did you think of the process?

- Is there anything we could improve on?

- Do you know what to do next?

Thank you very much for our time today. If you have any questions or run into issues, please let me know. Would it be okay for me to check in with you next week?

Great. Thanks again.

6. Document Results - 5 minutes

(Document everything, and write down the top 3 problems you've observed)

Tips: 

1. Don’t ask questions that might get a polite response back. Asking a yes or no question or whether or not they will use your service will often yield a polite answer.

2. Always ask questions that will make them tell you what they already do right now as an alternative to solve their problems.

3. Probe their behavior instead of asking them questions that leads them to answer that they want to use your solution.

4. The point of the interview is to learn about them, not to sell to them.

5. The trick to get people to talk more is by asking them open-ended questions like "What do you usually do to solve this problem." and not "Is this how you solve ths problem nowadays?"

Please check out Ash Maurya’s MVP Interview Script Deconstructed from "Running Lean" for instructions on a more comprehensive interview strategy.

Hopefully you have gotten a lot of great feedback on whether or not your MVP delivered your UVP. The war is not over yet, since your feedback should tell you many things about what are the next steps you should take to optimize your solution.

Congratulations! You've gotten feedback from customers about the cornerstones of your service and have come up with action items to improve your product. However, at this point, we need to understand whether or not we should move forward or tweak our MVP so that we are sure that we do successfully deliver the UVP to our customers. 

Before you go ahead and launch to get users, we'd suggest to keep tweaking or pivoting until you have proven that your MVP does indeed work. The reason again is because before you validate your MVP, you shouldn't think about getting more users. If your MVP does not work as advertised, then the users that you get to your website will drop off after the first visit because they realized that you didn't deliver your UVP.

Therefore, there are 2 options now:

1. Your MVP doesn't have to be perfect, but it needs to work (take user through a full user cycle and they get a taste of the UVP delivered). If it at least "works" then you can soft launch it and get more feedback to grow it.

2. If your MVP doesn't deliver the UVP, then continue to tweak your MVP.

If you indeed have a great MVP and a solution that works, then you have successfully validated your solution qualitatively (on a micro scale). It's time to launch and get more early adopters so that we can validate our service quantitately (test it at a macro scale - with the mass public), to see if it's a good fit for the market that we have envisioned.

In the next section, we will give you tips and tools to get your first batch of early adopters who will not only help you improve your service more, but also help you evangelize your company.

Soft Launch Checklist:

1. If 80% of your early adopters are able to get through your whole usage cycle, then you are ready to launch.

2. Were you able to deliver your UVP.

3. Review your usability results frequently - so that you can keep tweaking and keep improving. Understand what part of the usage cycle are customers leaving the site. Make sure this is optimized.

4. Do the smallest thing possible - Don't go and just redesign your whole landing page. The point here is to make sure something "works well". It doesn't need to be perfect. Therefore, lets just tweak things for now.