Questions and Risks to Address with your MVP

When ideating a business concept, there are always assumptions made about customer desires and customer behaviours. It's important to address these assumptions at the MVP stage by creating questions to test them and highlighting the risks of these assumptions.

Answering Questions

It’s important to pair a representative MVP with answering crucial questions about your business, especially ones that affect key business drivers. These questions should relate to your value proposition and aspects of what your planned solution is. In fact, it’s best to start by determining the question you want to answer and then find the simplest, least expensive and fastest way to build an MVP to answer that question

Addressing Risks

Effective MVPs also address risks head-on. When thinking through aspects of your business, make sure to outline what the biggest risk and obstacles to overcome are. You will want to test these risks and possible ways to mitigate them as soon as possible. In the example of a cleaning business, risks might include:

• Customers not being comfortable with a different random stranger cleaning their house each time they need the service
• The government requiring cleaners to be employees instead of contractors
• The demanded frequency of cleanings being less than expected - lowering the lifetime value of a customer and affecting profitability.

Examples of Good Questions

“Are salespeople open to updating a CRM with their voice or through a chatbot?"

This question ties specifically to the technology aiCRM plans to use to solve customer problems. The MVP you create should include some kind of voice entry or chat function.

“Would families with kids allow a stranger to clean their house?”

This question addresses one of the risks with a cleaning startup mentioned earlier. The MVP should involve people they don’t know and haven’t vetted cleaning their house.

Example of Bad Questions

“Will the business work?”

This is much too generic and vague to be able to measure with a pass/fail test

“Do people want our products?”

This question is too broad and overlooks may other important questions that need to be answered first.

When you ask the wrong questions, then you build the wrong MVP. When you make the wrong MVP, the evaluation of it may give you a false sense of market validation that will lead to wasted time and money and ultimately a higher likelihood of failure.