Famous Examples of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs)Tom Green, Co-Founder @ VerticodeDecember 2, 2022, 3 min read
Although their offerings are now packed with functionality and pushing the boundaries in their industries, most successful startups, scaleups and unicorns started with a simple MVP. Here we look at 3 great examples of the MVP process; Airbnb, 99Designs and Rent the Runway.
Airbnb
Airbnb wanted to determine whether people would pay to stay at a local’s residence when traveling instead of at a hotel. They made a simple website and used Craigslist posts to link to the listings on their site. Since Craigslist already had thousands of people in the area visiting the website each day, they plugged into a captive audience and channel to lead people to Airbnb’s site.
Moreover, to test, the founders targeted a sold out tech conference in a certain area and used their own apartment to host conference attendees, offering free breakfast and wifi. One of the lessons here is that Concierge MVPs, or MVPs that aren’t scalable, will help you learn more about your customer and understand the process of delivering your product or service. The founders only had one apartment, so they couldn’t scale their MVP—but it didn’t matter. They learned a lot from the early guests they hosted at their apartment.
99Designs
The online design platform 99Designs offers another great MVP example. As discussed during an interview conducted by Patrick Vlaskovits and Brant Cooper for the book The Lean Entrepreneur, 99Designs explained that their initial idea for the business came while browsing the web community SitePost, where they saw posts between people asking for help on logo design and other members helping them. The people who got help even offered to pay the designers, offering to pay them via Paypal.
Instead of creating their own platform, the 99Design founders just launched a SitePost Contest, and made people pay to post the graphic design jobs they needed done, weeding out people who weren’t serious. Once they saw enough traction on SitePost, they built their own site.
Rent the Runway
Finally, there is Rent the Runway, which is an online e-commerce website that allows women to rent designer apparel and accessories. They broke down how their target market typically chose clothing by going to a store, trying a garment on in the dressing room and going to the register after they saw they looked good wearing it.
To transition to an online purchase, there were a few steps the company needed to go through. The first question they posed was “Will women rent dresses vs. buying them?” Their MVP was to have a pop-up with a fitting area so attendees could try-on the dresses. Once they got positive feedback on this experience and proved the rental-over-purchase model, the next question they posed was “Would they rent the dresses without being able to try them on?” So they created an MVP that was a pop-up without a fitting area, so no one could put the clothes on first. After this proved successful, they asked “Would our customers rent a dress online without seeing it or trying it on, all by themselves?” The last part being important because often people at their first 2 MVPs came in groups and at home they wouldn’t be in a group. Their MVP was a PDF of the dress with pictures and written details. This proved to be successful as well and they decided they had enough validation to create a website for the concept.
The lesson from Rent The Runway is that getting from the current model to your vision for the product may take time and require multiple steps along the way. If the Rent the Runway team attempted to test all those elements at once it would have been difficult to single out which aspect didn’t work.
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