All right, today I'd like to talk to you about how to
build an MVP or a minimum viable
product. So if you haven't seen this before, this is a
meme that we love to talk about when trying to
help founders with their mvp. It's called the midwit meme. The person who
is the Jedi, the super intelligent,
the founder who's doing all the best things and knows all the best things,
and the idiot, the first time founder, the founder who
has no idea what's going on. Many times these two
founders will actually come to the right decision before the founder who
is really smart and is trying to work really hard and do everything right.
And so in this situation with the mvp,
the best advice is to actually launch something
quickly and iterate. Get a product into the hands of your
customers and then learn whether it helps them or
doesn't, and then iterate it, improve it over time. The wrong answer
is to do 100 surveys and 600 user
interviews and contact every single one of the competitors
and spend a year fundraising and hire
100 people. And you know, all these other things
that you can distract yourself with that. It might appear like other
smart things, but in reality they really don't
highlight the most important point about an mvp, which is you'd only
really start learning about your user when you put a product in front of them.
That doesn't mean that the thing you build in your MVP is going to work,
right? It's probably not going to work. It's just the best way to start
the conversation with the user and how you can solve their problems. So to summarize
that point, the goal that you should have as an early stage founder
is you should be getting a product out into the world quickly,
minimum viable product. Second, you should be
talking to some initial customers and trying to figure out
what you can do to make that product useful for them.
You should care about how to help them accomplish their
goals. And you should try to figure out how can I change and iterate
my product so that it actually helps them accomplish those goals and
then rinse and repeat. Talk to more users,
iterate your product, talk to more users, iterate your product.
More often than not, after 3, 4, 5, 6 iterations,
your MVP is going to be very different. You have learned so
much, but by having that conversation with users and by
letting them see your product evolve, you can actually make them more excited,
more likely to use your product, more likely to pay for your product. And you
can learn 10 times more than just talking to your co founders
or thinking about in your head. So the challenge today
is that a lot of people are knocking MVPs.
A lot of people are talking about minimum lovable products or minimum
useful products. And honestly, a lot of founders actually
just want to build, you know, God level products, you know, the Steve
Jobs level, make the iPhone and change the world.
There's this misconception that starting with something small
that might not work very well is a bad idea. There are a lot
of people who worry that if you start with something small
and you give it to a customer and the customer doesn't like the product,
you'll never be able to talk to them again. What I will tell you is
this. In most cases, the people who are interested in talking to
a startup are early adopters. They're used
to using products that don't work very well.
And the reason why they're talking to you is not because they think your products
going to work great. It's because they have a real problem and they're
open to using new software. So you
don't have to worry about losing these people. These are the kinds of people
who try new products all the time. These are the kinds of people, if you
tell them, hey, look, I can't promise it's going to work perfectly
from day one, but if you keep working with me, we'll make it better and
make it better and I'll make sure it works for you over time. These are
the kinds of people who respond to that pitch. It turns out the people who
will run away after seeing your product break and never use you again. They're never
going to try your product in the first place. They're not early adopters, they don't
use new software. So you don't have to worry about losing those
people because you never had them, you're not going to get them to
get started. Now. One of the things we have to work on at YC
a lot is fear. And this is the biggest fear that
founders have. It's a non specific fear of,
oh my God, if I give people my product and they don't like it,
boom, my company dies. And it's always like hilarious because
when we think about this, it's like, well, your company doesn't actually
die, right? Like it doesn't die tomorrow. It's not like game over,
you haven't run out of money, all your co founders aren't going to quit.
Whenever we encounter these fear scenarios, we like to dig
in and kind of ask like, well, what would actually happen? Like imagine the worst
case scenario. You do talk to a customer. You do demo your product. It doesn't
work. They don't want to use it. You wake up the next day.
But is anything that different? Can't you reach out to someone else?
Can't you reach back out to that customer who you demo to a week later?
When you've made the product better, is your startup actually dead?
More often than not, when you have this fear,
what you should be doing is kind of leaning into it and asking yourself,
is this fear real? Is my company actually going to die if
this scary thing happens? And it's not bad to feel the fear,
but it is bad to act on it. It is bad to spend one year
building your MVP because you're afraid the first customer might not like it.
Now there's another group of folks who thinks, I know
what the perfect product is and I know it's going to take a year
to build. Why would I build shitty versions of it?
I like to call these folks fake Steve Jobs. And it's really
a massive misconception of what great product people do.
A lot of people thought of Steve Jobs as the kind of person
who could just imagine great products in his mind and then bring them
out into the world. But what's funny is that most of
the time, when people think about the products that Steve Jobs is most
known for, let's say the ipod and let's say the iPhone,
people don't take enough time to look at all of the
different iterations of those products over time. Often when someone tells me,
like, oh, well, you know, Steve Jobs released an amazing phone first
time, I say, well, do you remember that the iPhone started without an app store?
Do you remember you couldn't take video with the first iPhone? Do you remember that
the first iPhone only had 2G and not
3G? So really, really, really bad Internet.
Like, most people don't remember that. Most people, the iPhone that they actually think
of as an iPhone was like the third or fourth iteration of the iPhone.
The first version of the ipod had like an actual physical scrolling device where like,
sand would get stuck into it and it would break all the time. Even the
great Steve Jobs iterated his products over time.
So if you find yourself being a fake Steve Jobs,
thinking, I know exactly what the customer needs, I just needs to
raise $10 million and spend a year building it and then launch it.
Think again, right? Like, if Steve Jobs needed multiple
tries to get his products right, maybe you need to
as well. Next, let's look at some examples. And in all of these
examples, you're going to see three pretty simple points.
First, all of these products were fast
to build. They could get out of the market quickly. Second,
they all had very limited functionality. The third,
and interestingly enough, all these products appealed to a small set
of users. These founders realized that just making something that
a small group of peoples loved was far more important than making something
that could address all the needs of all potential customers from day one.
So here's what the first version of Airbnb looked like.
And if you were a user when Airbnb first launched, here are
some of the fun things that you didn't get to experience.
There were no payments. If you found a place on Airbnb,
you couldn't pay for it there. You had to arrange for payment some
other way. There was no map view,
so there was no way for you to actually see where the places were in
the city. That's a pretty basic one.
Three, even more funny, you had to stay on an airbed.
Like, you couldn't rent out your whole house. You couldn't rent out a room in
your house then. Fourth, the first version of Airbnb only worked
for conferences. They would literally spin it up in a city when there was
a conference, and when the conference was over, they'd spin it down.
That was Airbnb to start. That was the mvp. Here's a
second example. This one's my company, Twitch. Twitch started as a
site named Justin tv, where my co founder Justin had a camera
on his head to broadcast 24 7. In the first version
of Twitch, there was only one page. The page that you're
seeing here, there was only one streamer.
His name was Justin. There's no video games except for, like,
we randomly would play video games sometimes like Guitar Hero
or something like that. And streaming was
ridiculously expensive. We were paying a cdn. We hadn't built our
video system yet, but this was the first version of our product. Now when
you go to Twitch, it's completely different, but this is where it started.
Finally, we have Stripe. This was the first version of Stripe.
Back then, it didn't even have the name Stripe. It was called Slash Debt Payments.
Back then, they had no fancy bank deal. They were working with a tiny bank.
There was literally no direct APIs with that
bank for setting up accounts. So they'd have to call the bank and
every night file manual paperwork for you to get your account set up.
And there are almost no features in their API.
The first version of Stripe was so basic that even us
back in the day at Twitch couldn't use it because it didn't have enough features.
But the folks who could use it were early stage YC
startups who all they wanted to do was accept simple credit card payments
from their customers. That's all Stripe did in the beginning and that was
more than enough to get started. So you might ask yourself, who are these people
who actually want to use crappy MVPs?
You're telling us that they're going to be built fast, they're going to probably not
work that well, and we're going to have to iterate the hell out of them
in order to actually make them good. Who are these early adopters
who'd want to go through that experience? There's this fun analogy that I
was told as an early stage founder. It was, you want to build your first
version for customers who have their hair on fire. And I never
quite understood what that meant. I mean, it makes sense, I guess,
but I always found it more useful when I attached a story to it.
So imagine that you are a person and
your hair is on fire right now as you're watching this.
Now imagine if I was sitting in the room next to you. What is the
thing that you wish I could sell you to solve this problem?
Your hair is currently on fire. Probably most of
you will think some version of a bucket of water, a hose,
some kind of water thing. Now that is a great product.
That's like the iPhone today. That would solve your product immediately.
I don't have that. I'm a founder. I've got an mvp.
What I'm selling is a brick. Now what would you do
if I was selling you a brick? Now some of you are like, well,
I would, you know, I would leave the room like, I couldn't use a brick,
blah, blah, blah, bullshit. Your hair's on fire. You would buy
that brick and you would hit yourself on the head
with the brick to smother the fire. That's an mvp.
It's not the perfect solution, but you are in
so much pain as a customer, you will use a non perfect
solution to solve your problem. That's the customer you should be going
after. For customers who are not desperate, you can
wait. You don't have to go after them now. Just go after the
desperate ones first. It'll make your life a lot easier.
Now, I know some of you, especially those who've gone to business
school, I know a lot of you have said, I can skip this step
instead of building an mvp.
Iterating. Iterating. Why don't I just survey my
Users. Why don't I just talk to 100 users and they'll tell me
what to build? I wish this is the case. I wish
that users could just tell you what to build and
then if you built those things, you'd win. In fact, I think every business
wished that was the case. Here's the problem. Your customers
are experts in their problem, but they actually
don't have all of the answers on how to solve their problem.
That's your job. That's the job of the person who's building a
new product. Surveys might help you understand
the pain that your customer is going through, but they will never help you
figure out how to solve that pain. The only time that you
start having that conversation with the customer is when you can put
a product in front of them, preferably a crappy mvp,
and start saying, does this solve your problem?
I haven't really seen a shortcut to this step. I haven't
seen a shortcut of building something pretty fast
that's pretty crappy to get started. And even for
larger companies, even for enterprise software companies,
if you go back in time, the first versions of their product, they were not
perfect. They were far from it. They were the minimum that those
customers were willing to use. So across the entire
board, you got to start with the minimum viable product.
I think one of the most important points that I want to leave you with
is that you don't start your startup with all the answers.
Building a startup, especially the first phase of building a startup pre product
market fit, is all about learning.
It's all about taking some of the insights that you start with,
bringing them to the market, and learning most
of the solutions. Most of the best parts of products we use
today were discovered after those products were launched,
when those founders were learning from their users.
And building and launching MVP is the fastest way to
start the process of learning. And the faster you
learn, the more likely you are to build something that people love
before anyone else. So let's say I've convinced you that
now you actually want to build an mvp. How do you make sure you
do it quickly? Here are some tricks. 1.
Give yourself a very specific deadline.
It's a lot easier to make sure that you're building something that's
the minimum viable product if you give yourself two weeks
or a month, or a month and a half to complete it,
versus if you don't give yourself a deadline. Second,
write down your spec. If you think that
there are five or ten features required in
order to launch an mvp, write them all down.
Don't put yourself in the position where you're constantly
trying to figure out, should we have that feature? Should we not have that feature?
I don't remember the feature we talked about the other day. How should it look?
How should it work? If you write it down, then you can just focus on
building instead of continuously debating what should be built.
Number three, cut that spec. After you write all that stuff down,
go through each one of those items and ask yourself, does a truly desperate customer
need that feature to start? You'd probably be surprised at
how many features you can leave off for the second, third or fourth version
of your product and just get the basic stuff out first.
And then number four, and most important,
don't fall in love with your mvp. It's going to change.
You're going to iterate it. It's going to get very, very, very different
over time. You want to do it fast, and you don't want to fall in
love with it. You want to fall in love with your customer, with your user,
not in love with the crappy initial product that you're building to
start learning from that user. All right, so hopefully you
don't need any more convincing. You understand that the simplest
and easiest path and the smartest and
most jedi path is to build and launch your product and then
iterate it. And so I wish you all a lot of good luck.
And while you're building, remember one thing. It's far
better to have 100 people love your product than
100,000 who kind of like it. So when you're
releasing that mvp, it's totally okay to do things that don't
scale and recruit those initial customers one at
a time. If you care about those customers, I promise you
they will talk to you, that you can work with them and you
can help them figure out how to solve their problems, and as a result,
help figure out how to build a great product for them. Thank you very much
and good luck.