Top 5 Successful MVP Cases and 10 Lessons You Can Learn from Them

If you ended up on the article about Minimum Viable Product famous examples, you’re likely familiar with this concept. Yet, often it’s still unclear how exactly you should use it and what benefits you can expect to get.

So let’s switch from theory to practice. We’re going to look at how today’s market leaders used the MVP concept to develop their ideas from tentative assumptions into million-dollar companies. And, moreover, find out what lessons from their mistakes and achievements we can learn right now.

In case you would like to refresh your memory or get a deeper understanding of the MVP concept, we recommend checking the following articles on our blog:

The webpage can be considered as a Minimum Viable Product definition by itself: no interactive maps, no options to choose from, no online payments. Only a few photos of the place, contacts, and address.

Yet, it was enough to get 3 paying customers, raise $240 and — eureka! — catch the idea that they’ve possibly stumbled upon a goldmine. However, they haven’t woken up as millionaires the next morning.

The guys have made a few more similar attempts during the 2008 Democratic National Convention and 2008 SXSW, at the same time reaching out to investors. None of that was much of a success.

2009 was the story-changing year for the company. The guys were finally noticed by Paul Graham, a VC and Y Combinator co-founder, who invited them to join the accelerator.

From that moment on, they’ve redesigned their website, changed the name from Air Bed & Breakfast to laconic Airbnb and took a new approach to add properties from other owners. Eventually, this site became one of the most famous Minimum Viable Product website examples.

The renewed strategy helped to double their weekly income from $200 to $400.

Interesting fact: the guys visited all their New York hosts to take professional photos of their places and write first-hand reviews.

In April 2009, Airbnb received its first major investment of $600,000. That was the moment when they finally enabled the rapid growth and made their way to global success.

The Lessons 👨‍🎓

What can you learn from Airbnb’s Minimum Viable Product examples?

💡 Lesson # 1: An MVP can help you validate your idea but you’ll have to look for growth opportunities on your own.

Some think that if an MVP doesn’t bring you a hundred thousand users and a few million-dollar investments, it is a fail.

However, as you can learn from Airbnb’s examples of a Minimum Viable Product, this concept helps to validate whether there’s a need for your product at all. But after you confirm it, there still may be a long way ahead.

💡 Lesson # 2: MVPs can be used to validate different parts of your Startup.

As a rule of thumb, you can create an MVP to validate your idea, solution or both of that. However, it’s recommended to start with the idea validation. Why? Because if you’re trying to solve the problem no one has or no one is ready to pay for, there’s not much sense in creating a solution to it, right?

Let’s get back to the story. When the guys launched the very first version of the website, they were testing the problem.

Would people want to stay at someone’s home instead of a hotel? Would they pay for it?

However, their MVP could hardly be considered as a solution. You couldn’t choose between different properties, leave or read reviews, pay online or even book via email.

Yet, after validating the initial idea and adding a few extra features, they’ve moved to the step of the solution validation. During this step, they were checking whether the product is able to solve the problem using the minimum set of viable features. Only then it would turn into one of the MVP software examples.

If you're interested in learning more about the Airbnb's way to success, watch this episode of the Y Combinator Startup School with Brian Chesky, the company's founder:

Houston then applied to Y Combinator. Despite his idea was appreciated, to get into the accelerator he needed a co-founder. Drew said that finding one was like a shotgun wedding: “It was sort of like getting married on the first or second date”.

Interesting fact: you can check Drew Houston’s application for Y Combinator here.

The future co-founder reached out to him after seeing Dropbox’s demo and after a 2-hour сonversation, he became a part of the team.

Then the guys got noticed by Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital’s chairman, and received $1.2 million for further development. In a year they publicly launched the product and that’s when one of the most prominent moments in Dropbox’s history happened.

To attract new users, the company created a few short demo videos. Instead of talking about some deep technical aspects of Dropbox or drawing a parallel with competitors, they’ve demonstrated a few real use cases. Videos were short, informative and generously flavored with humor:

The videos went viral, bringing hundreds of thousands of new customers to the service.

They’ve also introduced a referral program. It turned out to be even more successful. Dropbox offered free extra space for inviting a friend both to you and a person who signed up after following the link. That’s launched a new wave of viral shares, keeping the company’s growth rate absolutely organic, high and free eventually turning Dropbox into a product and company as we know it now.

The Lessons 👩‍🎓

“But,” you may say, “working on a product for a year with $1.2 million on your bank account hardly seems to fall in line with other MVP examples”.

However, one of the top challenges for Startups is not only to create a good product but come up with the right channel to promote it among potential customers. Dropbox did it well.

💡 Lesson # 3: A good Product with no promo is a bad Product.

Getting very first customers should be a natural process for a good Startup. After all, if you have developed a product to solve a specific problem, you know that the problem exists. And if you know that the problem exists, you should also know the people who have it.

Yet, reaching out to a wider audience usually requires some extra effort. Small Startup companies usually don’t have enough resources to invest them in advertising. Moreover, viral content is always highly appreciated since its promotional impact is much higher than creation costs.

However, The Point didn’t skyrocket due to a number of reasons. So Andrew Mason got on the list of Minimum Viable Product famous examples with his another startup, Groupon.

The project took 10x less time to launch. Moreover, it was quite simple from the tech perspective. Not to say primitive.

The service started as a WordPress blog. To generate coupons they’ve used FileMaker, a simple MacOS application, and then would run a script to email the coupon PDF to people on the mailing list.

But the truth is that they didn’t need any sophisticated product. At that moment, their goal was to validate the idea and gather feedback.

The service turned out to be popular, letting them build the voucher system and backend, and eventually become one of the most successful MVP software examples ever.

The Lessons 👨‍🎓

There’s quite a lot you can learn from both Andrew Mason’s projects. Moreover, in this interview, he underlines a few important conclusions for Groupon that he managed to draw out of his failure with The Point.

💡 Lesson # 5: Keep your TTM (Time to Market) short.

The Minimum Viable Product definition itself is all about reaching potential customers and validating your idea as fast as possible.

Just to compare: Andrew launched Groupon in 1 month while it took about 11 months for The Point.

The idea here is very simple. Getting in a loop of endless product development and improvement requires many resources. And here’s what may happen:

• You’ll be polishing a Product that people don’t need or aren’t ready to pay for. Instead, you could pivot or iterate your idea at the early stages and really get the most out of available resources.
• There may be other people working on a similar idea. Launching first may be your big competitive advantage.

💡 Lesson # 6: Look at how people hack your or existing solutions. Pick a niche.

The Point was about getting people together around some ideas. However, the concept itself was too abstract. Projects, even if they seemed ambitious, didn’t get enough support.

The reason for that was because there was just too much of everything right from the start. Charity fundraising, kickstarting, campaigning attracted people with different needs and interests, making none of these successful.

But let’s back to the lesson you can get out of Groupon’s Minimum Viable Product case study.

The aim was simple: to check whether someone at all needs such an app. Joel simply tweeted the link to ask what others think about it and waited.

Soon he got a few emails and Twitter messages with feedback. Moreover, some people have even left their email addresses in order to get notified when the app is out. Joel considered this to be enough for the first “validated learning”.

Then he decided to add a pricing screen to learn more about his customers. These 3 pages make up one of the most popular Minimum Viable Product website examples:

By showing pricing options he was able to verify whether people were ready to pay for the solution. After validating this idea, he finally moved on to development itself.

It took 7 weeks to create the first version of Buffer. However, Joel usually coded in the evening and weekends so it could be done faster.

The Lessons 👩‍🎓

Buffer is one of the classic Minimum Viable Product website examples. Here’s what we can learn from it.

💡 Lesson # 7: If possible, test your idea before you even start coding.

This lesson could be considered as one of the basic MVP development principles. If it’s possible to get any feedback on your idea before you write a single line of code, do it!

However, keep in mind that there’s a huge gap between “I will buy your product” and the actual purchase. 100 people that have signed up for updates likely won’t turn into 100 customers but at least it shows that they’re interested in your idea.

On the other hand, if your concept has no support right from the start, it’s a vivid sign that you need to pivot.

As Buffer’s and Airbnb’s Minimum Viable Product examples show, one of the best ways to test the idea without starting to build the Product itself is by creating a landing page.

💡 Lesson # 8: Keep your product really minimal.

Today in Buffer you can schedule posts for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin. Also, you can engage with comments, automate answers, get analytics and reports.

However, the first version of Buffer allowed only scheduling tweets. Yet, it was enough to attract some users, validate the idea and only then — scale.

It’s also interesting to notice that at first all the orders were handled manually. Yet, after acquiring a few more cars the process turned out to be too difficult and resource-consuming. To solve this, Uber’s CEO contacted drivers and offered them to accept and manage orders on their own. 3 out of 10 agreed, giving a start to the business model that made it the #1 taxi app in the world.

The Lessons 👨‍🎓

The lessons you can get out of Uber’s MVP software examples сomplement the ones from previous cases.

💡 Lesson # 9: Pivots and iterations are ok.

Sometimes you may decide to change a part of your Startup when you’re already working on it. In general, these changes may refer to your problem or customers (pivot) or your solution (iteration).

While iterations make up the organic development of your product (as you add new features, for example), pivots are something not every Startup faces.

However, as you could see, Uber had to switch from its initial business model and establish a channel for direct communication between a driver and a customer. After all, this model has made Uber famous and even made its way to other industries.

💡 Lesson # 10: Scale gradually.

Most of the Startups mentioned in this article started small. They were available only in the home area of founders and were aimed at solving one specific problem.

First, such an approach lets you get out with the minimum waste of resources in case your product doesn’t go up.