Twelve business models that you can use to launch early and get to profitability in a hurry.

1. Every MVP Idea Ever
THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO
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presented by:
Twelve business models that you can use to launch
early and get to profitability in a hurry.

2. What is an MVP?
The term “MVP” gets thrown around a lot in the startup
space. Pretty much everyone agrees that every startup
starts with an MVP, a Minimum Viable Product. But not
everyone agrees exactly what an MVP is.
The correct definition of MVP is: “The simplest version of
a product that delivers actual value to the customer”.
An MVP is not the same as a prototype. A prototype is a
simple version of a product that demonstrates what the
product may do someday. On the other hand, an MVP
does what it says it will do, and it does it today.
An MVP is also not a sloppy or half-built product. It may
have a lot of potential, but it is also actual; in other words
it actually does something valuable. Many examples in
this book actually provided a very polished user
experience, even though they were far from where their
founders envisioned them to be.
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3. What is an MVP?
“Minimum”
An MVP is minimum because it must reduce your risk. It’s the least
amount of product that you can build, while still satisfying your
customers and making money.
You simply can’t afford to build a maximum viable product. And
that wouldn’t make sense anyway because
1. the first point of an MVP is learning, and…
2. the second point is to discover if your solution solves a real
problem that is worth paying for.
Your goal is to expend the least amount of energy and resources
as possible on your way to a feature-complete product.
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As your product matures layers of complexity will be added to it, but at each stage the goal should
be to add the least amount of code and complexity that is required. This minimalism should not be
construed as laziness or stinginess; rather the goal of minimalism is to reduce waste and risk.

4. What is an MVP?
“Viable”
Viable is the most important word in the phrase “Minimum
Viable Product”.
Your product needs to work. It needs to deliver on the
promises that you’re making.
In order for your MVP to work it has to be viable. It has to
deliver value to the customer (it has to be worth paying for)
and it has to deliver value to you (it has to make you money).
If it doesn’t do both of those things then the MVP fails.
Your MVP must answer the following questions:
1. Someone has a problem or pain, and your product will
solve it.
2. You can reach these people with your product.
3. People will pay for your product to take away their
pain*.
* To be fair, not all the products in our lineup had a
paid MVP. But most of these are “unicorns”, like
Twitter. You’re much more likely to achieve success if
you charge for your product from the beginning.
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5. What is an MVP?
“Product”
It has to be a product. It can’t be fake, or hollow, or a sham.
Now, what do we mean by this? The product must deliver
value to your customer in some way. It doesn’t matter if
you’re using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or if you have an
army of friends paid in beer and potato chips working nights
and weekends to fulfill orders (the Wizard of Oz), or if you’re
piggy-backing on someone else’s technology (OPT).
What does matter is that your product has to create or
deliver value.
How you supply the that value is irrelevant, as long as the
customer gets value out of your solution. You can scale
later. But you can’t fudge your way to a successful MVP.
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6. Table of Contents
01 Other People’s Technology
02 Dogfooding
03 The Wizard of Oz
04 Flintstoning
05 The Concierge
06 The Imposter
07 The Specialist
08 The Cupcake
09 The Multi-Stage Rollout
10 The Airplane
11 The Piecemeal
12 The Kickstarter

7. 01: Other People’s Technology
The idea behind Other People’s Technology is to harness
existing platforms, systems, and technologies to deliver
your product without having to create the technology
yourself.
Later on, when your product has proven itself, you can
begin to build your own technology.
We’re so used to seeing the polished social behemoth, It’s
hard to picture what twitter’s MVP might have looked like.
It might surprise you to know that twitters MVP was just
short messages sent via SMS.
Everything was done via sms: you could send a text
message to 89887 (TWTTR on a numeric keypad), and it
would be delivered to all your followers. Twitter’s 140-
character message limit came about because of the
character limit imposed by sms messages.
If you had a “Twttr” account, you could send a short
message and have it delivered to your friends’ cell phones
via sms. You could also follow your friends, and then you’d
receive their updates via text message. That was pretty
much it, but it was enough to get people hooked on the
idea.
‣ Repurpose an existing technology, like SMS
‣ Use an existing platform, such as Wordpress
‣ Sell on Etsy or Amazon FBA (fulfillment)
‣ Create a Shopify store
‣ Create an online course on Teachable
‣ Host online workshops via webinar
Real-world examples: Twitter
How to make it work
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8. 02: Dogfooding
If the thought of eating dog food grosses you out, don’t
write it off just yet.
Legend has it that the president of Kal Kan pet food used
to eat the company’s dog food at the annual
shareholders’ meeting, just to make a point. I mean, if it’s
good enough for him, it’s good enough for your dog,
right?
Maybe “scratching your own itch” sounds more palatable.
The idea is that you build something that you would use
yourself.
Basecamp
This is exactly what 37signals did when they created
Basecamp. Existing project management at that time was
horrible and didn’t meet their needs. So they made their own,
based on the way they wanted to work with their clients.
Eventually Basecamp became their core product, and
37signals stopped doing client work entirely.
Source: The story of Basecamp
Patagonia
Patagonia is another one famous for using their own products.
Founder Yvon Chouinard set up a blacksmith’s forge to make
their own climbing gear, which they both used and sold.
Source: Wikipedia
‣ Build the core features of your app, and don’t build
anything that doesn’t directly create value for the
customer.
Real-world examples
How to make it work
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9. 03: The Wizard of Oz
In “The Wizard of Oz”, Dorothy’s dog Toto pulls back a
curtain to reveal that The Great and Powerful Oz was
actually a man hiding behind the curtain controlling the
display.
In real life, the Wizard of Oz often consists of a web-
based app that takes data from users and then appears
to do something in the background, and then returns a
result to the user.
While it may appear to be an automated process, what’s
happening behind the scenes is done by hand, by people
instead of machines. The background data processing
may involve a person doing research, creating a report, or
doing some customized work for the customer.
Finally, that product is delivered to the customer through
the web interface in a way that makes it look automated.
CardMunch is an app that digitizes business cards. OCR
(optical character recognition) technology available at
the time was not up to the task, and developing their own
would have been prohibitively expensive. Instead the
team used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to “automate” the
tasks using human labor. (source: FastCompany)
‣ If your product will have features that require complex
processing on the backend (such as reports), see if it’s
possible to use human labor to get the job done.
‣ Crowdsource your task using Amazon’s Mechanical
Turk.
Real-world examples
How to make it work
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10. 04: Flintstoning
Flintstoning is a variation on the Wizard of Oz.
Did you ever watch the Flintstones as a kid? Remember
their car? It had wheels, but that’s about it. There wasn’t
even an engine—they powered it with their feet. You
could see their feet sticking out underneath the car
paddling like mad as they sped down the road.
The idea behind Flintstoning is that you build the critical
features of your app but skip anything that can be
skipped, even if it makes a little work for you in the
meantime.
Freckle
Amy Hoy set a shipping deadline for Freckle, her famous time-
tracking app. They knew they had to nail the core experience—
time tracking had to be spot-on. But some other things could
slide. So the first shipping version left out some very basic
things: password reset, data import and export, admin
dashboards, and even some billing features were built later.
Source: The Fine Art of "Flintstoning"
ContentUpgrade.me
ContentUpgrade.me is a lead generation tool that we built for
Medium. The idea is that you can create a lead magnet, and
then embed a nice-looking lead generation form in your
Medium articles. The first version did that really well. But like
Freckle we had the barest of bare-bones payment forms. You
could enter your card and start your subscription, but you
couldn’t upgrade your account, change your credit card, or view
invoices. That all came later.
Source: BoosterStage blog: ContentUpgrade.me
‣ Build the core features of your app, and don’t build
anything that doesn’t directly create value for the
customer.
Real-world examples
How to make it work
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11. 05: The Concierge
The Concierge is sometimes confused with the Wizard of
Oz. In both cases, a human is doing the work on the
backend.
The Concierge provides a highly customized, valuable
service to the customer. The idea is to interact with the
customer personally, carry out the functions of the
product manually, learn from the process, and then apply
that learning to an automated product.
Unlike the Wizard of Oz, the fact that a real person is
doing the work is part of the value. Where the Wizard of
Oz tries to conceal the human behind the curtain, the
Concierge highlights and celebrates the human
involvement.
Rent the Runway is an online dress rental service. But
they didn’t start by offering dress rentals online. Instead,
cofounders Jennifer Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman set up a
pop-up shop at their college campus where women could
try on expensive cocktail dresses in-person. Only after
they confirmed that the idea had legs did they set up
their online store. Rent the Runway now serves over 6
million members online. They still maintain physical
stores in five different cities where women can try on
dresses in person before renting them.
Sources: The Opportunista, Wikipedia
‣ Build a website with Wordpress and use WPForms or
TypeForm to collect responses from your customers.
‣ Set up a pop-up shop in a strategic location to provide
your service in person.
Real-world examples
How to make it work
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12. 06: The Imposter
It’s not as bad as it sounds.
The Imposter is closely related to the Wizard of Oz. Where
the Wizard attempts to mask some technical process
with a manually-done process, the Imposter masks a
business process that doesn’t yet exist.
The Imposter works well when your business will rely on a
process that relies on expensive capital. If your business
process requires expensive inventory, deliveries of
physical product, or other large capital requirements,
consider creative ways that you can deliver the product
to the customer and demonstrate the value that your
product will provide.
Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn wasn’t sure people would
buy shoes online. So they took pictures of shoes at a
local shoe store and posted them online. When people
ordered the shoes Zappos would go down to the shoe
store and buy the shoes retail, then ship them to the
customer.
They lost money initially, but they proved that people
would order shoes online, before building warehouses or
fulfillment systems.
Source: Business Insider
‣ Re-label: Sell your product at a loss (Zappos re-sold
shoes that they bought at retail) aka “Imposter”
‣ Sell it before you’ve figured out how to source it (Look
for Nike’s story in Shoe Dog)
Real-world examples
How to make it work
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13. 07: The Specialist
The Specialist MVP is a focused, single-featured app. The
Specialist only does one thing, but it does it really well.
The mark of a Specialist is that the product often focuses
around a single user interface element—it might be a
single button that does all the work, like Uber, or a play
button that streams music, like Spotify.
Uber
Uber’s first MVP was an extremely simple iPad app that
just had a map and a button to summon a car—that’s it.
It’s worth noting that Uber received their first revenue
before they even were out of beta.
Source: UberEstimate.com, Twitter
Spotify
Spotify is built on the core assumption that music
listeners are happy to stream music rather than own it. To
test this idea before they invested in music licenses and
software builds, the team hacked together a rough
interface and focused on getting the music into listeners
ears. Later versions have added many channels and more
features, but at first there wasn’t even a music selection.
It just did one thing: you pushed play, and it played.
Source: Crisp’s Blog
‣ What is the one thing that your Specialist does? Focus
on really nailing that user experience.
Real-world examples
How to make it work
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14. 08: The Cupcake
A Cupcake is small and desirable. It delivers some value
to the customer in a way that leaves them smiling and
wanting to do it again.
Just as a cupcake costs much less to produce than a
full-size cake, the Cupcake MVP is built small on purpose.
Building a small, desirable product is a great way to test
for a larger market.
Like the Specialist, the Cupcake MVP is small and does
only one thing, but it is polished and attractive. This
approach is often used by well capitalized startup
founders that desire to thoroughly test an idea before
expanding the business.
The Cupcake requires a lot of resources because the MVP
is polished to a gleaming shine. The first version does
what it says and does it with style and panache.
Groupon
Even though it was only a Wordpress blog, it looked great and
it did what it said it would do: it gave you a new great deal
every day. Source: The Next Web
Virgin Atlantic
Virgin Atlantic: Virgin Atlantic started with just a single
Boeing 747 flying a single route, from London to Newark.
Virgin gambled that travelers wanted a better experience, not
just to get from points A to B. Even though it just did that one
thing, Virgin nailed the experience and became one of the
most highly regarded airlines. Source: Rob Kelly
‣ Spend extra time in design before beginning to build your
product with the goal of creating a polished first version.
‣ Pay attention to what makes customers smile, and
double down on that.
Real-world examples
How to make it work
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15. 09: Multi-Stage Rollout
If your product is complex or has heavy setup
requirements, you may be able to roll it out in stages. This
is particularly true in an enterprise environment where
product adoption is mandatory.
Swedish Police
The Swedish Police used a Staged Roll-Out model to
introduce a new computerized crime reporting system to
over 12,000 officers. But they didn’t do it all at once—
instead they introduced a very early working version with
only a handful of features to a single region in Sweden.
This enabled the product team to quickly act on feedback
from the officers while they added features to the product.
Gradually the system was introduced to additional regions
and features were added until the product was finished
and completely adopted by all 12,000 officers.
Source: Crisp’s Blog
‣ Work with early adopters to decide which parts of the
product will be built and deployed first.
‣ Set expectations with your users so that users know
when to expect new features to be introduced.
Real-world examples
How to make it work
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16. 10: The Airplane
Imagine taking off in an airplane that is only half-built.
The rest you’ll build while you’re flying.
Sounds crazy, right? But for some startups, launching
first and building later can provide an opportunity to
listen and respond to customer needs.
Stripe: many features weren’t actually built until they
were required by paying customers. The interface was
there, but the actual workings were not.
‣ You have a strong engineering team who can
implement features quickly.
‣ You have a large number of early adopters who love
your core product and can offer feedback that will lead
to new features.
‣ You have a strong core product, that, while not
finished, is a solid start.
Real-world examples
The Airplane works best if…
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17. 11: The Piecemeal
Piecemeal strings together multiple microservices using
API technology to build something larger.
Services like Zapier and IFTTT allow you to set up triggers
for common actions like filling out a form or clicking a
button. When a user completes that action a notification
is sent through the API, which causes other services to
fire, etc. and on down the line. With some imagination
and creativity it’s possible to put together some pretty
sophisticated workflows this way.
GreenSocks is a matchmaking service for homeowners
and lawn care providers. Rather than spending time and
money to code an app, founder Richard Eastes built a
workflow using Zapier, and had paying customers the
very next day.
Source: Zapier Blog.
‣Set up a Zapier account and browse through the
hundreds of services that they support.
‣Create a form using TypeForm and have Zapier fire off
tasks when the form is submitted.
Real-world examples
How to make it work
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18. 12: The Kickstarter
The Kickstarter is named after the kickstarter.com, the
famous crowdfunding platform.
Kickstarters are usually physical products, but not
always. Font Awesome’s Dave Gandy raised over $1M to
develop Font Awesome 5.
Selling a product that doesn’t exist is generally frowned
upon, except in this one special case: a Kickstarter
project makes it crystal clear that the product doesn’t
exist, and that money is needed to fund the development
of the first version.
Customers (Kickstarter calls them “backers”) are
enthusiastic early-adopters who are willing to pay up
front to be a part of something special.
The Kickstarter works best for ideas that are truly
innovative and brands that have a loyal following,
Linjer was founded by Jennifer Chong and Roman Khan,
two marketing execs who weren’t satisfied with the
quality of leather handbags out there. Jennifer and
Roman did extensive research and design, including
investing almost $20k of their own money before setting
up their first campaign on kickstarter.com, which raised
over $150,000.
TropicalMBA: The Creation of a Brand
‣ Building a community around your brand is key. Find
out who else shares your problem and connect with
them online. Your early fans will become your early
backers.
‣ Set up a campaign on kickstarter.com, but remember
the winners have also invested heavily in their brand
and in the campaign.
Real-world examples
How to make it work
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19. Ready to get your MVP off the ground?
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