11 Minimum Viable Product Examples (With Actionable Tips)

If you’re knee-deep in building your product and you’re stuck, you’ve come to the right place.

In this guide, you’ll learn the 11 actionable tips (with real examples) on building a successful MVP.

This guide doesn’t feature the minimum viable product examples you’ve heard a gazillion times — you know, like Spotify, Airbnb, Buffer, Apple, Dropbox, Uber, and Amazon.

Instead, I’ll introduce you to the 11 small businesses that have nailed their MVPs and turned them into successful companies.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Research “Money” Keywords 
• Zoom Into Your Potential Customers
• Spy On Your Competitors
• Summarize Insights In A Master Plan
• Map Out User Flow
• Determine Your Core Feature Set
• Keep It Stupid-Simple
• Just Ship It!
• Promote The Heck Out Of It
• Obtain Customers’ Feedback

But first, let’s quickly recap on the basics.

What Does MVP Mean? (Featuring A Real Minimum Viable Product Example)

A minimum viable product (MVP) is an early version of a new product — with only one or a few core features — that meets the needs of a pool of early adopters who will then provide feedback for future product development.

That’s a mouthful, so let’s unpack it.

Coined by Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup, MVPs come in several forms, such as the Wizard of Oz MVP and Concierge MVP.

Source: Greenice

Here’s an example of a Concierge MVP.

When Adrienne Barnes, a freelance content marketer for B2B SaaS companies, launched her new buyer persona service, she only opened it to a few beta clients.

Source: Twitter

Adrienne worked with her beta clients one-on-one, using their feedback to help shape how her buyer persona service looks like today.

That’s the beauty of MVPs.

You get to test your assumptions and hypotheses with the least effort and eliminate wasted time on building a product or service that doesn’t work.

So whatever businesses you run — mobile app company, online shoe store, e-commerce site, etc — you want to first build an MVP before moving forward with a full-fledged product.

How Do You Create An MVP? (With 11 Minimum Viable Product Examples)

Even though an MVP consists of at most a few core features, it still requires big effort on your part to bring it to life. To make this section easier for you, I’ve categorized the 11 tips in three phases:

• Phase 1: Researching On Market Demand
• Phase 2: Building And Launching Your MVP
• Phase 3: Testing And Tweaking Your MVP

Phase 1: Researching On Market Demand

You’re now at the early stage of your MVP development process, so let’s start with getting in your target audience’s heads.

Put your research cap on! In this phase, you’ll learn how to analyze their needs, so you’ll know what to build and how to best target them.

1. Research “Money” Keywords

There are several ways to research your market and customers — one of the fastest and easiest ways is using Google Keyword Planner.

Source: YouTube

Here’s how it works: Pick a keyword your target audience is searching (make a guess!), and look at the search volume.

Focus on keywords with high search volume and low competition. Why? Because this tells you two things. One, there’s a demand for your actual product. And two, you have a chance of ranking on Google.

That’s exactly what the co-founders of Later did before building their software tool.

Their target keyword, “schedule Instagram post”, boasted a high search volume (9,900 searches/month) and low competition (SEO difficulty score of 31).

That’s when they realized they couldn’t go wrong with their scheduling tool:

2. Zoom Into Your Potential Customers

Target everyone, and you’ll reach no one.

You know it’s time to go back to the drawing board when you’re targeting a broad audience that doesn’t bite the bait.

Here’s a better way: Define your niche audience, so you’ll have a better shot at positioning your product or service as the go-to choice.

To narrow down your target market, answer these five questions:

• Who will use it?
• Why will they use it?
• Will they tell their friends once they do use it?
• How fast can you bring it to market?
• How much profit is each sale going to produce?

These questions will help you be laser-focused on your best customers and help you predict what to expect down the road.

Here’s a minimum viable product example to help you see this tip in action.

Brandon Schaefer, who does project management and consulting at Simple Business Help, uses these five questions when he created his new LinkedIn profile management service.

Using the questions as guidelines, he found his niche audience: CEOs who work in companies with 50+ employees and $10-50 million in annual revenue.

Note the difference it made in his positioning.

If he were to write this positioning statement in his cold emails, it’d be so much more memorable than the snooze-worthy “I help CEOs with their LinkedIn profiles”.

3. Spy On Your Competitors

Tools like Ahrefs and Similar Web make it easy to replicate your competitors’ success.

With Ahrefs, you can see where your competitors get the bulk of their backlinks and the keywords they’re showing up on Google’s first page.

Source: YouTube

Flawless Content Shop, our next minimum viable product example, goes a step further.

Before launching a custom local SEO product, the founder, Lotus Felix studied not only the best but also the worst competitors in his niche.

Lotus did this for one big reason: He wanted to recreate the proven strategies and avoid those that don’t.

In the end, he discovered two critical things in his competition analysis:

The most successful competitors invested heavily on user-generated content and word of mouth marketing in their social media campaigns. The worst competitors did the opposite — they neglected their PR efforts and had an almost zero market awareness.

Key takeaway?

As you research your most and least successful competitors, pick what’s working and ditch those that are not. Experiment, borrow a few ideas, and see how you can do differently.

4. Summarize Insights In A Master Plan

By now, you’ve unearthed heaps of insights.

Now’s the time to digest everything you’ve learned and summarize your master plan in a business model canvas. (Psst! Grab your free business model canvas template here.)

This canvas should include relevant information, such as your value proposition, customer segments, and revenue streams. In other words, it should resemble something like this:

Source: Sumo

Revisit your business model canvas frequently as you build and market your MVP. This helps to ensure you’re heading in the right direction.

Phase 2: Building And Launching Your MVP

You now know your target customers inside out, so much so that the nuts and bolts of your MVP are starting to form in your head. Now the fun begins. Let’s handpick the core features and bring your MVP to life.

5. Map Out User Flow

Not so fast, tiger.

Before you determine the core features, you should first identify the key pathways and create an MVP flow outline.

Focus on your users’ needs and then plot out the steps they need to take to accomplish a task. Once you’ve defined the steps involved, you’ll be able to move on to the features.

Source: CareerFoundry

Because of the complexity and expertise involved, consider hiring a professional — this is assuming your skills fall outside the realm of user interface (UI) and user experience design (UX).

You don’t want to DIY with something you’re unfamiliar with. This cautionary tale by our next minimum viable product example serves as a good reminder.

When John Croyle, Founder of W-9 Form Manager, created his website, he ended up creating a less-than-intuitive experience. To make matters worse, he’d spent tens of thousands of dollars.

6. Determine Your Core Feature Set

A great poker player never reveals a royal flush early in the game.

The lesson here: You want to avoid packing your MVP with all features — at least not in the first version.

What you want to do is include just one or at most, a few core features.

For their online digital marketing program, Dotcom Dollar created five-minute videos that gave viewers a glimpse of what was included in each course.

Each video was released every week for two months and promoted to email subscribers and social media followers. In total, these videos were viewed more than 10,000 times.

Don’t reveal all the bells and whistles in your MVP all at once. Observe how customers react to your product and then scale it further to let users tap it for the utmost efficiency.

Allan Borch, Founder of Dotcom Dollar

After launching, sign-ups for Dotcom Dollar went through the roof. Today, 900+ students have registered for the program.

Pro Tip: It’s tempting to get too caught up with unnecessary features. To keep yourself accountable, work under a tight deadline.

Laura Moreno deliberately gave herself two weeks to create an MVP for HomeFlow, and it worked.

7. Keep It Stupid-Simple

When John Doherty from EditorNinja created his first MVP for Credo on WordPress, his tech stack only involved a membership plugin and Gravity Forms.

Take a look below, and you’ll notice Credo’s original website is a far cry from its current one.

It worked.

And get this: John only started custom building Credo when he hit $18K in monthly revenue.

It’s worth following John’s steps. Sometimes all it takes is a simple website to get the ball rolling.

If you want to create a simple website for your MVP, check out Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode.

This placeholder website platform allows you to choose from 170+ themes and over a hundred million pictures (thanks to Depositphotos and Unsplash integrations).

If you’re feeling fancy, you can even add a video background to wow your target users.

Get the Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode annual deal on AppSumo today for $69.

8. Just Ship It!

Don’t let perfectionism stop you from shipping your MVP.

If you spend the initial days questioning if your product’s enough, you’ll be forever stuck in the “What if?” phase.

Snap Search, a privacy-first browser for Android, has come a long way since it’s first MVP — and founder, Rajat Vaghani, has no qualms about it.

This minimum viable product example ties in with one of the tips above: Keep it stupid-simple and just ship it!

9. Promote The Heck Out Of It

Every day, hundreds of entrepreneurs launch their MVP projects in hopes of becoming an overnight success.

How do you stand out from the pack?

Sure, listing your MVP product on sites like Haul Drop or promoting it on Kickstarter and your favorite social network channels might get you initial traction.

But it’s unlikely to sustain you to build a profitable business.

Here’s a better tip: Make sure you surpass a threshold of time or money invested in your MVP to keep the momentum going — meaning, aim for a minimum of three months or $1500 to promote it.

When Michael Alexis launched Tiny Campfire, a virtual team-building event, he and his team promoted it on their blog and other marketing channels.

Take this blog post, for instance.

Source: Museum Hack 

It currently ranks on the first page of Google for the keyword “virtual team building”.

After noticing a massive surge in March, Michael and his marketers decided to add Tiny Campfire in the list.

Within a few days, they saw an increase in leads and sales.

Despite this, it took the company at least three months to stabilize into reliable sales and operations.

Today, Tiny Campfire runs 100+ virtual team-building events every month.

If you, like Michael, want to drive targeted traffic to your website, check out Frase.

This SEO tool identifies the questions your target audience is asking online and creates in-depth content briefs in under 12 seconds.

It even optimizes your article to boost search rankings.

Get your Frase lifetime deal on AppSumo today for $69.

Phase 3: Testing And Tweaking Your MVP

You’ve built your MVP and presented it to your users. Now you’re ready to collect their feedback and fine-tune your product. Let’s dive in.

10. Obtain Customers’ Feedback

Most companies poke around their analytics dashboard to dissect their users’ activity.

That’s cool, but these reports and metrics only show how users behave — they don’t tell you why.

If you want to understand your customers, you need to obtain the maximum amount of feedback from them.

Send your user base a survey — or, better yet, pick up the phone and start chatting away! The point of having these conversations is to have them walk you through how they’re interacting with your product for the first time.

If it weren’t for customer feedback, the team at Huan, a smart pet tags company, wouldn’t have known how their customers feel about using GPS.

A good rule of thumb: Avoid planning even a single feature until you obtain your users’ feedback.

Surveying can be a messy process. If you’re looking for a zero-fuss form builder for your WordPress site, check out HappyForms.

This drag-and-drop builder offers unlimited forms and unlimited responses with no hidden drip fees. Whether you’re looking to build a signup form, survey, or poll, it’s got you covered.

Get the HappyForms lifetime deal on AppSumo today for $49.

As you prepare your questions, focus on questions that center around these themes:

• What do these users want to accomplish?
• What alternatives have they considered?
• Why did they buy your product?
• How did they find you?
• How well does your product meet their needs?

Pro Tip: If you’re interviewing customers, record them. This makes it easier to review transcripts.

You’ll be able to summarize the interview nuggets, how they think about their problems and the language they use. All this information will help shape your product and marketing.

When Mike Lingle, Founder and CEO of Rocket Pro Forma, interviewed his customers, he realized it helped him adjust quickly.

Looking for an affordable solution to transcribe your customer interviews? You can’t go wrong with Happy Scribe.

Simply upload your audio clip to the transcription tool and leave it to do the rest.

Source: Happy Scribe

It’s easy collaborating on Happy Scribe. The transcription software tool allows you to download transcripts in various formats, like a PDF or a link with editing options.

Happy Scribe supports +119 languages and accents, which is definitely a plus if you have customers all over the world.

Grab the Happy Scribe lifetime deal on AppSumo today for $69.

Don’t Get Stuck In The Weeds: Ship Your Minimum Viable Product 

With the tips and minimum viable product examples in this guide, you’re now armed with knowledge.

You know what steps you need to take and you have the confidence to build your first (or second or third) MVP.

To recap, here are the 10 tips you’ve learned:

• Research On “Money” Keywords
• Zoom Into Your Potential Customers
• Spy On Your Competitors
• Summarize Insights In A Master Plan
• Map Out User Flow
• Determine Your Core Feature Set
• Keep It Stupid-Simple
• Just Ship It!
• Promote The Heck Out Of It
• Obtain Customers’ Feedback

Above all else, do NOT let perfectionism delay your launch.

Your MVP will never be fully polished.

And that’s okay. Because, usually, done is better than perfect.