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

🏠 Airbnb: first — the Problem, then — the Solution

Modern Airbnb website has almost nothing in common with its initial version. However, this very first version is usually considered as one of the classic examples of a Minimum Viable Product. Here’s why!

The Story 📖

Startup Teams often wonder how much minimum their product should be. Well, I guess Airbnb’s Minimum Viable Product case study gives an irrefragable answer to this question.

The story begins in 2007. Friends from San Francisco decided “to make a few bucks” during the IDSA Conference that brought many visitors to the city. Foreseeing the hotel overbooking issue, they’ve decided to rent an air bad to visitors.

To promote the offer, guys made up a simple web page:

📦 Dropbox: the Marketing Trick that Changed Everything

Just like Airbnb, Dropbox can often be found on the list of typical Minimum Viable Product examples. It shows that the right strategy for reaching out to the audience is not less important than the product development itself.

The Story 📖

The idea for Dropbox was born out of personal experience. Drew Houston, the company’s co-founder and CEO, was tired of constantly carrying his thumb driver and bombarding himself with emails to move files between different devices.

The day when he forgot his flash drive at home one more time was the day when the first lines of Dropbox’s code were written.

However, it was quite a tricky technical task right from the start. Full implementation would require building an actual hardware infrastructure, integration with different computer and mobile platforms (iOS and Android), etc. All in all, it would take months to develop a product that no one may actually want. That was something he couldn’t afford to build on his own.

Here are a few tips on how you create content that can go viral:

• Make it fun & catchy. People like sharing content that makes them laugh (just like Dropbox’s videos). However, don’t overdo so as not to scare people off.
• Encourage sharing. Offer some extra value for people who share information about your product. For example, Dropbox offered extra free space for inviting a friend.
• Keep it short and dynamic. Like it or not but viral content is often fast-food content. People will unlikely read a 10-page story or a 15-minute video.

💡 Lesson # 4: Look for Startup ideas around. Literally.

Both Airbnb and Dropbox ideas come from the personal experience of its founders. It’s a good idea to remember when you’ll be thinking over your own Startup project.

Solving a problem that you, your family or friends have, may provide you with a bunch of advantages.

For example, it gives you a better understanding of the problem. When you know it from the inside, you’re aware of the smallest detail: what a need people try to fulfill, why alternative solutions don’t satisfy them, etc.

Also, you’ll have a few names on your list of potential customers right from the start. Despite they can’t be considered as the only source to validate your MVP examples, they still may give you valuable feedback.

After all, you will just have more motivation to do your best because, for example, forgetting your ******* flash driver at home every damn time drives you mad 🙂

📧 Groupon: Look at Your Users

If you’re looking for a “pre-launch page” MVP examples, Groupon perfectly fits this description. Let’s take a look!

The Story 📖

As it often happens, Groupon was built from the mistakes made on previous projects. Andrew Mason, the founder of both services, describes his first big project, The Point, as a “broader version of Groupon”.

The goal of the website was to bring people in groups so they can do together something that is too big for a person to solve alone. It could be anything from running a political campaign or a boycott to organizing a charity event. One of the ways people used The Point was collective buying.

The Groupon concept hit Andrew when he noticed that the big deal of people uses The Point for collective buying. So instead of keeping all the eggs in one basket, he decided to focus on this exact feature.

They would be curating and handpicking these campaigns on their own. Moreover, users would only receive 1 offer a day in their email box. Thus, it would be possible to channel the whole user base into one thing and get enough people to make a success. And it did!

Focusing on a specific niche will help you to deliver the ultimate experience to your users and solve a very specific problem for them. That’s exactly what the most of Minimum Viable product famous examples are about.

Moreover, if people start using your Product not the way you meant it, consider this as an opportunity to review and pivot your concept.

📆 Buffer: Test Before Coding

This service is one of the best Minimum Viable Product examples that show how you can validate your idea before writing a single line of code.

The Story 📖

Everything has started with a small idea. Joel Gascoigne, Buffer’s founder, had a Twitter account for tech & startup news. An increasing audience on his channel inspired him to tweet more. However, it was difficult to keep up the pace since you either had to spam your users with a bunch of tweets at once or visit the app many times throughout the day to post them regularly.

That was how Joel Gascoigne came up with an idea of the social media scheduling application. Simple as that.

Back at that time, he was already an advocate of Eric Ries’ Lean Startup principles. He learned a lot about the MVP concept while working on his first Startup. Yet, this time Joel wanted to adhere to its principles as much as he could.

Now you can probably guess that he’s succeeded. After all, that’s why Buffer often ends up on the lists of the best Minimum Viable Product examples.

Joel even started codding Buffer before he even tested the idea. However, since he promised himself to do everything right this time, he stopped coding and decided to gather feedback first.

So he created a 2-page MVP you can see below:

For young Startups, it may be tempting to build the best product they can. Often it may seem like the existing version of the product isn’t good enough.

Yet, keeping your product minimal is enough to validate the initial idea and align your product development with the needs of the audience.

Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder, shares the same opinion:

“Any time you're building a product, there are a million things you want to add to make it better, but the fact is the vast majority of them will not impact your success. It's more important to make those decisions well than it is to figure out how to increase productivity so you can add more and more.”

🚕 Uber: Scale Gradually

Finally, we couldn’t miss adding Uber on our list of the best Minimum Viable Product examples. Here’s why!

The Story 📖

The story of Uber takes us back to San Francisco. Just like hotels (which you could learn from the Airbnb’s Minimum Viable Product case study), taxies were another expensive thing about the city. Having got frustrated by high prices and the absence of affordable alternatives, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp came up with the idea of pairing drivers and passengers.

They launched the beta version of UberCab in 2009 and it was quite different from what we know now. However, this very first version of Uber soon got on the lists of examples of Minimum Viable Products. So what was it exactly?

• A PHP web application that looked like a mobile app (webview).
• You could order one from few cabs that were actually owned by the company.
• The app was available only in the San Franciso area and only on iPhones.
• However, you couldn’t download it from the App Store. To get the app, you should email any of the founders and receive a special code.
• In the very first version, you couldn’t pay right in the app. Yet, this feature was added after a few iterations at the beta stage.

Second, it keeps you focused on the problem you’re trying to solve instead of thinking about things that matter less. Actually, everything matters less than the problem.

Finally, it allows you to confirm assumptions and plan further product development based on the basis of proven information.

💡 Takeaways

That’s it! We hope that this article gave you at least a few handy ideas on your own Startup development.

Despite the mentioned Minimum Viable Product examples look different, they all prove the top 10 lessons we’ve highlighted:

1. A successful MVP doesn’t mean a successful Product.
2. MVP is usually used to validate a problem. However, you can also use it to validate the solution.
3. A viral promo can help a lot.
4. It’s good to have a personal relation to the problem you’re trying to solve.
5. Keep your Time to Market short.
6. Pick a niche.
7. Test your idea before you start coding if it’s an option.
8. Keep your MVP minimal.
9. There’s nothing wrong with pivots and iterations.
10. Scale gradually.

Looking for a Tech Partner in Crime to build your MVP? Drop us a line and we’ll do our best to build your next Web or Mobile Product!