MVT & MVP and why you should care

MVP (minimum viable product) is an essential concept for founders to understand. The principal behind an MVP is that instead of building a complete launch-ready product, you create the simplest and fastest version of your product and get it in the customer's hands. A good MVP will allow you to test your assumptions and the customer's response before investing too much time and money to build something only to find that nobody wants it. 

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Runway is a term used by startups to determine how much time a company can continue to operate before they run out of money. We prefer to define runway as the number of tests of a product offering a company can run before running out of money. Think of it this way, two companies get started at the same time, and each has 12 months of cash in the bank. If Company A only manages to run a couple of tests in that time and company B runs a test a month, which Company has the higher probability of success? They both had the same amount of time, but one Company managed to run more critical tests than the other and thereby increasing their likelihood of finding problem-solution fit before running out of money. The point is that the faster the cycle times on your tests, the higher your chances are of being able to create something that people actually want. 
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The genius of an MVP is that it helps founding teams avoid spending all their time and money creating what they believe is a perfect product. In that scenario, you are either right or you're wrong. Sadly most startups are wrong about most of their assumptions. The entrepreneurial graveyards are full of great products that customers didn't want. However, the downside of an MVP is that founders sometimes get hung up on the word "product" and take too long to build their MVP. So how do we make sure we still run critical tests before even building a product?

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This is where the MVT (minimum viable test) comes in. The idea behind an MVT is that instead of creating a product, you break down the core assumptions behind the product and its offering to the customer, and you test each of those. This way, you can ensure that you're headed in the right direction before building a product. MVTs should be fast and inexpensive to run. The key is to make sure that you design test's to answer the right questions. You figure out what the right questions are by getting very clear on what your fundamental assumptions are. We go into this more in other articles, so we will keep it high-level here. Every founder's biggest assumption is that their target customers want what they're going to make. But there are many more assumptions that you need to identify when designing MVTs. 

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Here's a great article on the process of designing MVTs with examples from several tech startups launched by the author. Just keep in mind that you don't have to choose between MVTs and MVPs. Ideally, you can and should do both. It doesn't matter how many MVTs you run; it's not the same as giving customers a product. But by running MVTs before you build your product, you make sure you get much closer to problem solution fit before spending valuable resources. 

Below is a great video by Steve blank explaining how a great MVP is about testing your assumptions and doesn't even require you to build a product. Whether you call your early tests, MVPs, or MVTs doesn't really matter. What matters is that you begin testing your assumptions before building a product and continue testing throughout your product development process.