The correct position on the viability axis will depend on the type of business you want to build. Experimenting on real users has one major cost: reputation. Starting too far to the left on the viability spectrum risks users remembering your first crappy product and not trusting you anymore. This reputational cost is very impactful for businesses that rely on subscriptions or long-term relationships with clients, so those businesses ought to start out already kind-of-viable. But if your business is something like a product that you only sell once, without any long-term client relationship then you can afford to alienate early users with a possibly crappy first product, and you should test stuff as soon as possible.
The correct position on the viability axis will depend on the type of business you want to build. Experimenting on real users has one major cost: reputation.
That makes sense. I agree that reputation is a big factor to consider.
It’s also worth mentioning that in The Lean Startup, the author mentions that you can consider releasing products under a different brand name for this reason.
But if your business is something like a product that you only sell once, without any long-term client relationship then you can afford to alienate early users with a possibly crappy first product, and you should test stuff as soon as possible.
In retrospect, this is an important thing that I failed to bring up in my OP. Better late than never though. Thanks for prompting me to talk about it.
I’d like to distinguish between two different things. 1) Feedback releases and 2) hypothesis test releases (I just made these terms up). In the former, you just are pushing new code and getting feedback from users about it. In the latter, you are intending it as a hypothesis test, where if the results are good you keep going and if they are bad you pivot. For feedback releases, I think there are few reasons not to be super aggressive about it.
But I think that in talking about MVPs vs AGPs vs MLPs, the crux of the disagreement is regarding that second type of release: hypothesis test releases. MVPs say that you can do this quite early on. MLPs say the bar is higher and you want to make sure the product is lovable before you pivot. My point about AGPs is instead of just defaulting to something like “viable” or “lovable”, you should consider the tradeoffs at play.
The correct position on the viability axis will depend on the type of business you want to build. Experimenting on real users has one major cost: reputation. Starting too far to the left on the viability spectrum risks users remembering your first crappy product and not trusting you anymore. This reputational cost is very impactful for businesses that rely on subscriptions or long-term relationships with clients, so those businesses ought to start out already kind-of-viable. But if your business is something like a product that you only sell once, without any long-term client relationship then you can afford to alienate early users with a possibly crappy first product, and you should test stuff as soon as possible.
That makes sense. I agree that reputation is a big factor to consider.
It’s also worth mentioning that in The Lean Startup, the author mentions that you can consider releasing products under a different brand name for this reason.
In retrospect, this is an important thing that I failed to bring up in my OP. Better late than never though. Thanks for prompting me to talk about it.
I’d like to distinguish between two different things. 1) Feedback releases and 2) hypothesis test releases (I just made these terms up). In the former, you just are pushing new code and getting feedback from users about it. In the latter, you are intending it as a hypothesis test, where if the results are good you keep going and if they are bad you pivot. For feedback releases, I think there are few reasons not to be super aggressive about it.
But I think that in talking about MVPs vs AGPs vs MLPs, the crux of the disagreement is regarding that second type of release: hypothesis test releases. MVPs say that you can do this quite early on. MLPs say the bar is higher and you want to make sure the product is lovable before you pivot. My point about AGPs is instead of just defaulting to something like “viable” or “lovable”, you should consider the tradeoffs at play.