How We MVP Organic Traffic as a Lead Gen Channel
Minimum viable product (MVP), as defined by Eric Ries in the Lean Startup, is a fascinating term. It has a specific meaning in the context that he defined it, but it also has a highly-inferable, slightly-wrong meaning if you simply happen to know what each of those three words mean. I imagine a whole lot of people have inferred the definition without reading the book:
A minimum viable product is the earliest, feature-poorest version of your product that can survive in the market, right? Right!?
Turns out, not exactly. According to the source:
The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
I’ve always thought of the Lean Startup as a book about applying the scientific method to business. And so I’ve thought of an MVP as an experiment rather than a product, myself. How can you form and then verify or disprove a hypothesis as quickly and cost-effectively as possible? This is the core question of the MVP.
(As an aside, if legibility and lifecycle of buzzwords is a topic that interests you, I once spent a whole blog post musing about this.)
Against this backdrop, I’d like to formalize an offering we’ve been doing more frequently of late: our organic traffic MVP.