Testing your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Let’s take a closer look at Testing & Measuring your MVPs.

Measuring Customer Experience

You should invite a limited number of people from your target customer-base to “experience” the MVP of your product. Keep in mind that a “limited” number could still be thousands of people. Then you observe their behaviour when using your product as well as their behaviour afterwards. You can measure using a framework like a Net Promoter Score or NPS where you ask your MVP users, on a scale from 1-10, how likely they are to recommend your product to someone else. A 9 or 10 is a +1 score, a 7 or 8 is 0 (neutral) score and a 6 down to 1 is a -1 score. Then you add up the score for 100 users (or multiple the number of users to get a score out of 100). If the score for every 100 users is 50+ you know you are on the right track. You can also measure velocity like amount usage or # of visits instead of # of signups - since the latter is a vanity metric. The more a customer uses your MVP the better.

Measure Purchases

The best way to validate you are on the right track with your product or service is that people are willing to pay you for it. Keep in mind that you don’t always have to get someone to pay you for it, they just need to THINK you are paying for it. For example, the business software startup inDinero offered a signup form on their landing page that required customers to input a credit card. InDinero didn’t even have credit card processing set up, but prospective customers still THOUGHT they were paying. Doing this also helps you determine if you are pricing your product right. Remember that a paying customer is the best validation for your product.

Observe, don’t Show

The worst thing to do is show your customer exactly how to use your product. This isn’t putting them in a real life situation. You can’t possibly be there every time a customer looks at your product for the first time. Letting them discover it themselves first can show you whether your design is intuitive and simple enough. So give them the MVP without guidance and observe what happens.

Measure Engagement

How often does a customer come back to your website or use your product? This helps with both validating the level of customer interest as well as with understanding your business model. Take Spotify or any streaming music service, for example, if they have a pay-per play cost model and users listen to too many songs then the amount they charge customers wouldn’t be enough to cover their cost. You can also look at how long a customer stays on your site or how much time they spend using your product, and who the frequent returnees are. These insights lead you to think about how you get the proper marketing messages to get in front of this target customer base.