I’m a fan of creating and selling Minimum Viable Products (MVP). I don’t know how many times I’ve quoted Eric Ries‘ recounting how Zappos started selling shoes:

Photograph at a retail shoe store →

Post online →

Purchase at a retail to satisfy online demand →

Ship to customers →

Learn, refine, repeat

Why? All to test their online selling concept before investing in warehousing. Gives you a few goose bumps, right?

The Twist

Yet I recently blogged about my son making $27.3 billion starting a new airline. In a nutshell, he crushed competition by delivering massive customer value. And he forecast the market challenges of the Airbus A380. The A380 — a plane he loved before starting his airline — never won significant penetration in his mythical airline fleet because it didn’t fit the market.

Using Air Tycoon — an iPad simulation game just real enough for children to understand (and possibly too real for many adults!) — his drive to win pushed out Airbus capacity and range for Boeing fuel efficiency and point-to-point flexibility.

Are your rolling your eyes? Have you concluded I’m an idiot?

If so, you’re thinking something like: “Real life is nothing like a stupid iPad game.”

How sure are you? What if Airbus had created a game with just enough realism and allowed their executives (or their executive’s children) to play? And what if none of the winners bought A380s for their fleet? Are you actually saying that wouldn’t give you a moment’s pause in your strategy of “massive over nimble?”

And guess what? It’s hard to build a minimum viable airplane. Super hard. Expensive. Slow. It’s BETTER than trusting a game. No question. Better. It’s more realistic and forces real customers to spend real money and vote for or against you with their dollars. But … it takes billions and decades.

And if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Faster Path to Product/Market Fit?

So it’s time for a parallel question: “Can a minimum viable model (MVM) accelerate our time to product/market fit?” And if so, can embed that model in a game to test that market fit?

A minimum viable model wouldn’t replace a minimum viable product. But in some industries, it should come first.

Takeaways

  • While you’re busy making your minimum viable product (MVP), start your minimum viable model (MVM).
  • Determine how long it will take to deliver MVP, if you can embed your MVM in a simulation or game in less than, say, half that time, try it.
  • If you have reached MVP already (or are close), determine what market factors your MVP ignores – and model those for versions 2.0 and 3.0.

 

Image: “Desarrollo creativo idea” by Energy Sistem – www.grupoenergy.com. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desarrollo_creativo_idea.jpg#/media/File:Desarrollo_creativo_idea.jpg