Chapter 11. The MVP Interview
Before selling your minimum viable product (MVP) to strangers through your distribution channel (e.g., marketing website), sell it face to face to friendly early adopters. Learn from them. Then refine your design, positioning, and pricing for launch.
What You Need to Learn
With your MVP, marketing website, and conversion dashboard ready, you are all set to pay your prospects another visit. Your objective is to sign them up to use your service and, in the process, test out your messaging, pricing, and activation flow.
If you can’t convert a warm prospect in a 20-minute face-to-face interview, it will be much harder to convert a visitor in less than eight seconds on your landing page.
During the MVP interview, you are specifically looking to answer the following questions:
- Product risk: What is compelling about the product? (Unique Value Proposition or UVP)
Does your landing page get noticed?
Do customers make it all the way through your activation flow?
What are the usability hot spots?
Does your MVP demonstrate and deliver on your UVP?
- Customer risk: Do you have enough customers? (Channels)
Can you bring on more customers using your existing channels?
- Market risk: Is the price right? (Revenue Streams)
Do customers pay for your solution?
Formulate Testable Hypotheses
By now you should come to expect this step.
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