The Real MVP | Aslam & Co.

MVP stands for minimal viable product. The basic gist is defining the smallest scope in which a product can be delivered to test it’s viability to an external audience. Often times this starts either as something small and then develops feature creep or becomes an endless list of tasks with no possibility of ever seeing the light of day. When it comes to the MVP, we have to be careful and consider, what’s really needed to test a thesis.

The best way to figure this out is to really walk through an example. Joe Blogs is starting a new venture. He wants to start a blog and a mailing list so he can educate people on his area of expertise, home DIY. He’s recruited his best friend, who happens to be a software engineer to help him out. Joe’s friend starts listing off the variety of tools he’s going to need to signup to and setup before getting started, as well as the need for a domain, email and web hosting. Not only that, Joe’s engineering friend has decided self hosting a lot of this will be best route forward since he knows how to do all that.

Joe’s starting to feel a bit overwhelmed. What’s this going to cost? How’s he going to maintain any of it? He doesn’t know the first thing about web administration let alone email hosting or domain management. Joe’s friend is insistent though, so he let’s him get on with it. A few weeks go by and Joe’s no closer to launching his new venture. Apparently there was a need to build a subscription mailing list from scratch because there was no viable alternative and all the web hosting software had “terrible editors” so he chose something called github pages and jekyll instead.

Leave a Comment