Fail Proof New Product and Service Development...For Pocket Change

Minimum Viable Product, a new phrase, a new idea, but it makes a lot of sense. It works like this.

Historically, the release of a new product occurred after a significant investment in expensive development and then a heavy investment in actual production, usually all behind closed doors. A big secret until the day of release and the big announcement, hoping, betting the company's future and possibly the company itself, that it will be well received and will bring back the return expected and projected....and if it doesn't, then what?

It has certainly happened enough times.

Now the idea is to meaningfully test without making the huge investment in development and production. Finding out if it will really sell or not.

In the past market researchers and small business owners would ask around to customers, distributors, whomever, if they would buy this new product. Just as frequently they would get positive feedback supporting the go ahead decision, and thus dive into this major investment as every new product or service release requires.

The operative question being "would you buy this?"

The important point is that frequently despite a person saying he would buy, businesses learned this opinion may not actually transfer to a real purchase.

Now with the economy being as depressed as it is, small business owners cannot afford to launch failures and the cost of development is too high to speculate on.

So we use the Minimum Viable Product development process as follows:

With the advent of the Internet, smart small business owners have figured out that a web site page can be made for very few dollars and ideas can be marketed for sale without any investment in development or production at all...yet. If enough purchasers are willing to buy as indicated by a purchase request, an actual order then make it and ship away, knowing in advance it is a winner.

No sales, drop the idea or product.

With this concept you no longer ask for opinions. You can count the orders and determine if interest is high enough to warrant the investment.

You can also figure out price points, and valuable features all by what is offered and what is purchased.

Clearly there is the issue of the time involved from order to shipping, if you have not yet manufactured, but presumably you have it all figured out.

No expensive mistakes, very low cost to test, and very reliable results. Makes sense. Since new product and services are the lifeblood of business, this concept has much value and power.

Use it.