Rethinking "minimum viable"
Our approach to our first trade show
Hi all —
I’ve always been a huge supporter of minimum viable products (MVPs): We can’t know what the market needs, so we need to ship small, working versions of our product quickly that allow us to learn from customers.
The image I keep in mind for MVPs:
But I wasn’t thinking about MVPs in the right way, as I learned this week.
We went to our first trade show with the goal of learning if trade shows are a worthwhile sales channel. If we’d approached it with the traditional MVP mindset, we probably would have been unsuccessful.
Because the MVP mindset would have said: Just show up to the trade show, do a minimalist booth (or, don’t get a booth), and see if we get any sales. And if we’d done that, we probably wouldn’t have gotten any sales.
Instead, we spent a lot of money on this trade show and tested a bunch of wacky things. Our team dressed up in Where’s Waldo costumes, we hosted a rooftop barbecue for conference attendees… crazy, from an MVP mindset.
But because we tested a bunch of different things, we had a bunch of opportunities to find signal at the trade show. We learned what works and what doesn’t, validated trade shows as a core GTM channel, and came away with a plan for future trade shows.
Yes, we wasted a lot of money. But it would have been worse wasting a little less money getting inconclusive results. This experiment gave us extreme clarity on how to spend our trade show money in the future.
So as I think about MVPs now, I’m refining how I think:
FROM: What is the minimum amount of time, money, effort, & product that we can put into the world to potentially start learning?
TO: What is the right amount of time, money, effort, & product that can get us the necessary signal to figure out whether/where to double down?