What is an MVP
I’ll keep this brief since my audience probably already knows. MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product, with the idea being that before a company invests a bunch of time in building out a fully featured product, they should first build an MVP and get users to use it to validate that it delivers the expected value. It allows the company to engage with customers and get early feedback about what is important to them and what features would make the most sense to add.
The idea stems from The Lean Startup and may have been inspired by the concept of agile software development. Both approaches look to reduce risk through incremental steps and iteration. The MVP approach reduces the risk of building something nobody wants. Agile reduces the risk of writing a bunch of code that doesn’t work. They are two peas in a pod.
The Challenge With MVP
The MVP approach makes sense when developing in-house software, or if you have a close working relationship with your customers. They need to see that you are taking their feedback into account and evolving the product at a pace that promises to give them the complete product in a reasonable amount of time.
An MVP is also particularly effective if you solve a very acute pain point, presumably better than your competitors. If that is the case, your customers are likely more willing to overlook some warts in the overall experience.
The challenge I’m referring to comes from increasing competition and heightened expectations of how software should look and feel.
I’ve been developing software for a quarter century, and I can tell you that the tools and libraries available for creating software make development at the turn of the century look like the dark ages! Add to that a plethora of online documentation, forums, and sample projects, and the barrier to entry for creating a software product starts to melt away.
A global workforce and ease of software distribution just add to the competitive pressure. And now sprinkle in AI, and software developers are getting even more productive, able to crank out apps in days or weeks.
The chances of breaking into a market with a substandard product are dwindling.
SLC as Alternative To MVP
The answer is not to go back to the old way and try to build a maximally complete product (MCP?), but to stay focused on core features with an emphasis on an exceptional user experience, and getting to ‘wow’ as fast as possible. Enter a new acronym, SLC, which stands for Simple, Lovable, Complete. As far as I can tell, this phrase was coined by Jason Cohen in 2017 or earlier.
Let’s break it down
Simple
Rather than merely Minimal, which could be perceived as ‘janky’, aim for simplicity so that the solution is intuitive and easy to use and the value proposition is easy to grasp. The user experience should be polished, with as little friction as possible. The fewer clicks and choices the user needs to make to get to the value moment, the better.
Lovable
Instead of just Viable, and in addition to being Simple, the experience should ideally delight the user. Generating a positive emotional response will create an invisible bond between users and your product, and importantly, it will leave your user itching to share the experience with others.
Complete
If you want to compete and retain your customers, your product needs to be complete and provide enough value for the users to keep coming back. As mentioned, MVP is fine if working closely with your customers, who will wait patiently as you iterate and build out the full product. But if you are putting your product out there for people to use, not so much.
Approach For My Own Product
I certainly started with the idea of building an MVP, and I had a picture in my mind of what that would look like. But when I started talking to potential users about my idea, it became clear that it wouldn’t be enough. My idea is more B2C than B2B, and that tends to mean a larger audience and less direct engagement by the product team (myself for now) and users.
I was feeling guilty as I worked to flesh out my product further than a raw MVP, feeling a bit like I was going down the path of scope creep. But then a friend of mine mentioned this SLC concept, and I felt a bit vindicated.
Conclusion
As they say, you only have one chance to make a first impression. Both SLC and MVP encourage focusing on just the core features, but SLC means designing and building those features to be as slick as possible. If you are working closely with your initial customers, MVP makes sense. If you’re building a product to put out in the wild, using the SLC approach and delighting your customers seems much more likely to succeed.
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