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How to Find Your Minimum Viable Customer
You can’t boil the ocean, but you can boil a cup of water
The concept of a Minimum Viable Product or ‘MVP’ is often discussed in startup circles — the idea that you need to start by creating a simple prototype that you can put into the hands of customers to test your hypothesis and iterate your product forward.
However, what is often overlooked is that one of the most important pieces of information you’re trying to gather with your MVP is the identity of your MVC or Minimum Viable Customer. Too often founders release their MVP into the wild, they start to get feedback from many different types of customers and those customers are telling them to go too many different directions. Founders try to please them all and diligently build all of their customers’ feature requests to proudly say they’ve listened to customer feedback. However, what they end up building is a Frankenstein product with no clear customer in mind. No one loves the product, let alone is willing to pay for it. Here’s how to avoid that.
