What are the most successful minimum viable products and how can you create them?

As innovation facilitator of 100+ projects, I advise you to EXPERIMENT BY PRETOTYPING, like TESLA… FAKE IT BEFORE YOU MAKE IT 🤗✅. Pretotyping is a technique for testing - and validating ideas quickly and cheap, founded by Savoia. It involves creating a simplified version of a product or service to collect user feedback and understand market demand. It’s a non-working prototype. Pretotyping reduces the risk of failure by assessing market response early in the development process. A famous pretotyping story is how Tesla ‘faked’ their first electrical car, the Roadster, using a so-called ‘glider’ of a Lotus Elise to confront their potential customers with a ‘real car’, leading to 250+ launching customers who paid $ 5000,- in advance.

Here is what investors look out for from my perspective "MVPs that get traction from customers". So whenever I start on a new product, I do consumer research as to what the potential stakeholders need as a feature, prioritize the features -> First launch the ones that consumers are not getting in any other product -> Sure traction

Your MVP's success depends on what differentiating feature you plan on introducing. Your consumers should get a feeling that you understand them better than the product they are already hooked on.

MVP should give a clear idea of where your product is headed. While it will not have all the features, it will have its core functional offering.

MVP on a Budget: How to Use WhatsApp & Google Forms to Win Customers Early: One of the most practical ways to create an MVP is by using WhatsApp and Google Forms. Here is how. Some of the successful early-stage entrepreneurs I know have run an early MVP using the basic tools of WhatsApp and Google Forms to get requests, requirements, and feedback from clients and vendors. Once they've talked to enough people and gathered all this info, they start building their product. And guess what? Since they already know what people want, it's much easier and cheaper to make. So, instead of spending a ton of money and time on making something first and hoping it's what people want, they use WhatsApp and Google Forms to learn what to create.

When you talk to people about your business idea, they imagine their version of it depending on what they understood from you. So, the feedback they give you is not accurate. However, when you show people an MVP, you can observe how they react while they use it: do they frown as they navigate? Do they ask you questions that you thought were already very clear to do in the MVP? What do they ask you what the product can do? Plus, the process of building an MVP forces you to think through all of the details. You never know; you might also burn out and lose interest in the idea altogether. Abandoning the idea at the MVP level is easier and less costly than abandoning it at v1.

To be honest, today MVP is not enough anymore , your MVP should also be unique and Interesting . Absolutely, in today's competitive landscape, creating an MVP is a fundamental step, but it's no longer sufficient by itself. To truly stand out and succeed, your MVP should not only fulfill the basic requirements but also be unique and intriguing. Uniqueness and interest are the keys to capturing attention and retaining users. Remember that innovation and a compelling user experience can be just as important as the core functionality.

I see a lot of investors doing the "Make or Buy" analysis and trying to value your product from that perspective, I guess what they fail to realize is it is not that easy to simply buy the product. You build your product on certain assumptions/hypothesis and test it to see if it works. And while it may make sense to buy a product if your requirements are clear, it takes a lot to just build the MVP itself.

While you should learn about successful MVPs you should not copy them. In the VC world we call this cargo culting. Prior to building an MVP, you must understand market realities. Different market segments interact with your MVP differently. Dropbox success came from growth hacks which were originally aimed at other YC startups. The video was titled "My YC app: Dropbox – Throw away your USB drive." Rest as they say was history. Since then, they're many schools of thought. The most popular being do things that don't scale. I personally believe in this mantra and hence your MVP should be slightly broad so that you can test multiple customer segments. The world is very different to Dropbox days (2007). Avoid cargo culting.