(9) For Startups, Itʼs No Longer About Having an MVP, but Rather an MVJ | LinkedIn 9/25/17, 8*22 AM

For Startups, It’s No Longer About

Having an MVP, but Rather an MVJ
Published on December 1, 2015

Flickr: visualpun.ch

Steve Blank is quoted as saying that "startups aren't real companies." He

suggests that startups are actually temporary organizations trying to find a
scalable business model. It’s not until that model is uncovered that a “real”
company is born.

During this time of trying to become a “real” company, every startup knows
about focusing on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). I love Eric Ries and
completely agree with his Lean Startup methodology which focuses on
iterative product releases and “validated learning” to figure out how to meet
the needs of early customers. However, many startups still struggle on

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correctly defining and figuring out what is their MVP. And because we use
the word “product” I often see startups focusing on features and benefits
where they convince themselves that they need more features to differentiate
their “product” before launch.

What if I challenged your thinking and said we need to change the focus
away from products? Instead ask yourself, what is the Minimum Viable Job
(MVJ) that someone is willing to pay for? There is a great paper from
Christen, Anthony, Berstell and Nitterhouse from 2005 in the MIT Sloan
Management Review that got it right.

"Most companies segment their markets by customer demographics or

product characteristics and differentiate their offerings by adding features
and functions. But the consumer has a different view of the marketplace. He
simply has a job to be done and is seeking to 'hire' the best product or service
to do it.”

What I love about this shift is that a job is something someone is willing to
pay for. So your focus as a startup radically changes. Most startups begin
with an idea (which hopefully solves a problem—a job to be done) and then
start thinking about the product they are going to build but really, your first
task is to simply test your idea which is nothing more than a hypothesis at
this time, you should not be building a product at this early stage. Start
simple and figure out what is the minimum job to be done, because in
today’s noisy marketplace, if you build it, they won’t necessarily come.

Airbnb is a great example of uncovering a MVJ. They did not start building
an entire platform from the get go. Let me repeat this: they did not built a
platform to start. Instead, they had an idea and simply built a quick and
easy website with a blog and with maps to test out it’s effectiveness (i.e. test
their hypothesis) within the market. That’s it. Then they started to re-iterate

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their offer and came to the realization that they needed to improve the photos
on the site. From there, things started to quickly turn around and today, the
company has a $10 billion valuation.

Too often we see startups building out huge platforms with all of these
features, only to learn much too far into the process that the consumer is not
interested. Instead, do this: start small and find a niche “job” to offer within
the existing marketplace. Fake it until you make it and start getting some jobs
to pay the bills to keep the lights on - early on.

Originally posted on TechVibes: http://www.techvibes.com/blog/startups-

minimum-viable-job-2014-05-13

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