Get your users to help put up your tent

Reading Nivi’s interview with Eric Reis on Minimum Viable Products was a revelation*. In it, Eric outlined a way to accelerate the already rapid pace of development for startups. Rather than waiting until you have an actual product ready, Eric outlined some paths to skip directly to getting user feedback.

The idea of the minimum viable product is useful because you can basically say, look, our vision is to build a product that solves this core problem for our customers, with these kind of general feature areas…and the early adopters will fill in their minds the features that aren’t quite there if we give them the core, tent-pole features that point the direction of where we’re trying to go.

We’re possibly skipping ahead on Eric’s already shortened path by asking users on our splash page what type of core problems they want solved. We’re working on a product that will be able to answer a lot of questions, but we want to make sure we frame the benefits in a way that our users care about most…so, what are you suffering from?

* = as a bonus, there are lots of other insights beyond MVPs in Eric’s interview…would highly recommend all #prevee’s check it out.