Evan's Ladder

Now that you have an idea of what an MVP is, it's time to talk about how we test it. We do it through stages, each requiring a slightly more complex product and slightly more rigorous testing. If your MVP passes through all of them, congratulations! You've validated your idea. But hold your minimum viable pictures of horses, because your MVP has to pass through each one in sequence. You don't want to waste time building a super complex MVP when a few customer interviews could have told you it wasn't worth your time.

The steps are: 

• The Sniff Test - On our own, we test out whether or not an idea is worth pursuing as an MVP. 
• Customer Interviews - We actually talk to real people! The point of the customer interview is to test whether there's interest in buying our product. 
• Basic Pitch Experiment - We actually create a bare-bones landing page to test customer interest in the MVP, based on information we gathered from the interviews. 
• Complex Pitch Experiment - We create a more...you guessed it, complex site to measure customer interest, and whether or not they'd actually buy your product.
• The MVP - We actually build a minimum viable product, and test whether people will buy it.