Thoughts on Pivoting and MVPs
“They claim they are ‘pivoting’—which means they have run out of business ideas but not money—on a regular basis.” http://t.co/Cgo6ylnOC4
— Stephen Fleming (@StephenFleming) March 2, 2014
To be successful, a tech startup needs to bring a right balance of customer development, marketing, and engineering together and iterate to improve all of those ingredients. The Stephen Fleming tweet above and the TechCrunch article by Bill Aulet entitled “Our Dangerous Obsession with the MVP” reinforce the idea that a good balance is needed.
Here are some thoughts on these 3 ingredients:
- Customer Development – a big shift in startups over the last 5 years has been to include a deeper focus on interaction with potential customers in the early stages of a startup. As a startup receives input and learns more about pain points, it will be able to better refine (or pivot) its products and business aims.
- Marketing & Engineering – there is a delicate balance between the desire to build a better mouse trap and the desire to offer it to the world today rather than waiting for tomorrow. Agreement upon MVPs (minimally viable products) is how these tensions are resolved. But MVPs are just a starting point in an ongoing journey towards better products and marketing machines. Really, MVPs happen with each new feature of a product. In our startup, we have these same discussions all the time: Is it ready? Is it good enough? Can we talk about it?
Startup advice is a tricky thing to receive. Each startup needs to find its own balance of customer development, marketing, and engineering efforts. There is no one formula that solves all problems.
What are your thoughts on pivoting and MVPs?