tech-company, lean-startup, minimum-viable-productSummary/ TL;DR: How does one do/don’t for MVPs and the context of the case study that I’m interested in is Kanoa’s recent shut down (for the sake of making things concrete).
I was reading the lean startup and it mentioned how important it is to get the real users use your product to test if the idea itself is something people want. I am interested in understanding effective ways to actually do a MVP and ways to definitively NOT do it. I choose the Kanoa headphones example because I feel a good way to study this is with a case study and because I found this video that actually made their entire company shut down. I guess what I am curious is how exactly does one get one’s product out there and do a MVP without having their company receive irreparable damage like Kanoa did. Is the issue with this specific case study that:
but besides point 2 which should always be obvious, how does one actually gain customers that want to try a unfinished product or an MVP? Are there any principled ways or standard resources people use to get their MVP out their without their company suffering a huge loss? Was the main issue with Kanoa was that they raised capital from real customers without actually delivering them any type of product? From the lean start up it seems to me that customers are suppose to pay for the MVP, so how is what Kanoa did different? Is it that they didn’t actually deliver them anything, not even a MVP? Would the right choice is to stay in investor capital mode until the product is ready to be deliveried? Or how does one actually get MVPs out their without damaging one’s reputation as a company?
What are general guidelines for MVPs on do’s and don’ts?
There are many questions here, so I hope you won’t mind me sticking to the one in your title:
How did Kanoa fail at delivering Minimum Viable Products (MVP)?
I suspect it’s because they never tried to deliver one in the first place.
From the looks of it they hyped a pre-launch campaign, pre-sold boat loads of units, and then set out to try to deliver the moon with only a rough idea of whether they can even get there.
This video - or maybe it was the latter’s first part - has one of their team members bragging about having asked their user base as to what counted most, but this doesn’t seem to pass a sniff test. Their site’s early sales copy has a laundry list of features that can be summarized as “everything you ever wanted” - so certainly not a minimum viable product. This more recent version spells out what customers care about: good sound, comfortable, secure fit, good quality, but also things like good battery life, low weight, and resistance to splash, dust, and sweat.
Put another way, it looks like they did interact with users and used it to improve their marketing, but look closer and you’ll notice the two pages’ feature lists aren’t that different. The real difference is they’re doing a better job at highlighting what their users are after.
Just spitballing here, but were I to try to market wireless headphones to sports fans, the must-have shortlist I’d anticipate would look something like this: secure fit and sweat/splash/dust resistance because sports, and comfortable enough with enough battery life to last a sports session. This is not asking for the moon; it’s a wireless sports headset.
Plus the obvious of course: the headset should pair, charge, and basically work - including when the phone is in the back pocket or when the charger itself is plugged in. In this respect, the video review you highlighted is scathing.
That feature set would describe an MVP: the absolute minimum set of features you need in order to answer your audience’s specific requirements well enough that you can start selling your product. It won’t sell without them; anything beyond will sell too but is more work.
Now, if you assume they had built and pre-sold a few MVPs before their pre-launch campaign, then their MVP was not in any way Minimum, and they failed at customer development in that they a) completely overshot client requirements and b) did not in any way prototype the MVP before going after a much larger audience. (The original set of users would have let them know their product didn’t work long before the reviewer.)
If, on the contrary, they did not produce an earlier MVP, then there was no MVP at any point in the process. They presumably did a market study. During it, they compiled a vaguely discriminated client wish list. They then ran a pre-sales campaign and found market interest. And then they tried to build their product but eventually realized it was way harder than they thought it’d be.
Key takeaways IMO:
Selling first usually is good. But selling tons first is terrible if you’ve no idea how you’ll deliver.
Building an MVP is not about collecting a laundry list of features and then making a Bloated yet Viable Product. Nor is it about building a Minimum Unviable Product that won’t sell because it’s b0rked or doesn’t meet client requirements.
Mind UX and QA. Theirs was inexcusably bad if the review is anything to go by.
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