What is an MVP

An MVP (minimum viable product) is the simplest and lightest solution required to de-risk an idea.

This concept can be used for any project whether it’s in product, marketing, creatives, etc. At Finch, we aim to start with an MVP that reflects the absolute bare minimum hypothesis for every problem we’re trying to solve for. It’s important to break down initiatives into a crawl, walk, run.

How to land on an MVP

MVPs may seem like a simple concept, but it’s hard to pull off well in practice. Whenever you’re breaking down a problem, we encourage you to:

• Identify the goal. Concisely define the problem to solve for and what success looks like.
• Commit to a concrete hypothesis. Identify the most promising hypothesis and commit to a direction to explore. It should be clear why this could solve the problem.
• Explore concepts to narrow down on. Flesh concrete ideas out and consider the tradeoffs between the options. It’s easier to narrow down if you have side-by-side comparisons of concrete concepts.
• Aggressively trim the concept down. Choose a solution to commit to and further refine it. Internalize the goal and use that to trim out “nice to have’s” that aren’t required for the success of your MVP. Trim, trim, trim.

Why are MVPs important at Finch

Ultimately it comes down to time as our biggest enemy and speed is often a startup’s only advantage.

In order for us to have an honest chance to succeed at our extremely ambitious mission, we need to:

• Continuously disrupt our own product. We’ll have to try many ideas, learn from many failures, and essentially fail our way up to success.
• Understand that companies that can’t innovate will die off. This is true for every company, and extra true for startups like us. Success is continuously earned.
• Respect our users. Many users put their trust in us, and how we use our time— our most valuable resource— is important for taking their trust seriously.

While our team is financially profitable which can create the illusion of time, it’s important to not become complacent.

Lessons from early Product Market Fit

Product Market Fit is notoriously difficult with many good lessons to learn for today’s MVPs. Every new idea we try can still be broken down to gaining Product Market Fit.

✏️ Lesson 1: Concisely define the goal in writing. It’s often difficult to even know what problem to solve for and what direction to commit to. If we can’t concisely define the problem and success criteria, we don’t understand what we’re solving for. In the early days, we sometimes had a hand-wavy understanding of our own ideas that could slow us down and writing is a great tool to evaluate our own understanding.