This is Part 3 of a three-part series on building an MVP in the UK. Part 1 covers what an MVP costs and how long it takes, and Part 2 covers what actually belongs in one. Here we put both into practice on a real project.
The brief #
Let’s talk about a real application - one we’re actively working on. The founder makes her living as a singer, so she travels to gigs around the country, taking her dog whenever she can. The app she wants to build is a sort of “TripAdvisor for dog owners” - a site that showcases dog-friendly hotels, bars and cafes, so people out with their dogs can find places where both they and the canine part of the family are welcome.
First contact was a list of features that didn’t really tell us why customers would use the system. This isn’t uncommon - founders naturally have specialised knowledge of their subject and don’t always realise why others don’t “get it” straight away. To them the benefits are self-evident, so we get a list of features. We don’t own or travel with dogs, so to us it was a lot less obvious.
Does it have legs? A free service to discuss your ideas #
The internet is full of ideas. Far too many solve problems people either don’t have or are unwilling to pay for. Before engaging with anyone, we like to be as certain as we can that their idea has legs. It’s not our style to just take the money, so we offer an initial “does it have legs” conversation for free, just so everyone’s clear on why users will love using what we build.
After a fun hour bouncing ideas around, we agreed the main benefits were:
- Users find cafes, bars and pubs where they can go with their dog
- Members contribute to the site, so venues stay current and relevant for the dog-loving community
- Members create personalised lists of places they’ve liked or want to visit, and share those lists with others
- Members share venues they’ve liked on social media
- Members can plan dog-friendly trips and journeys
- Businesses can update their listing and respond to reviews
- Businesses can advertise offers
We followed up with a little homework of our own and, a little surprisingly, couldn’t find anything similar already out there. The founder isn’t looking to build a billion-dollar company, just something that returns revenue commensurate with the work put in.
So let’s start thinking about what this MVP looks like. The smallest possible thing that would validate the idea is the first benefit - users finding cafes, bars and pubs where they can go with their dog. That activity underpins every other member and business benefit on the list, so it’s clearly our MVP.
Best possible MVP, not just best guess #
Based on the matrix in Part 1, this looked like a “Simple web MVP”. In old-school development terms that’s 2-6 months and £10k-£30k. In our AI-first world, that’s £10,000-£18,000 in 10-18 days.
The spend is lower and the time is a lot shorter, but really the most important thing AI gives us here is the ability to produce a working prototype fast.
Before AI, we’d probably have advised that this wasn’t a viable project - the build costs would have been too high relative to what the founder could commit:
- Weeks of planning and design requiring significant input from the founder
- Months developing the best guess that came out of that planning and design phase
With AI this is now a viable prospect, because it changes the way we build things:
- We produce a prototype in a couple of weeks
- We then iterate on that with the founder, to get to the best possible MVP, not just the best guess
An MVP is the smallest usable version of a product that can test an important business assumption with real users. Real users are there for the benefits, so an MVP should always start with the most valuable benefit - and we get to that by turning the feature list into stories that illustrate how users will actually interact with the site.
From feature wishlist to user journeys #
You’ve probably come across the old trope “emphasise the benefits, not the features” - easily said, but it doesn’t really explain how founders tell us what they want us to build. A benefit such as “easily buy a shirt online” is supported by multiple features: search, shirt collections, a product page, add-to-basket, checkout.
This founder had done her homework and had sketches of how she’d like the site to look, plus a substantial shopping list of features:
- Search for dog-friendly venues
- Detailed venue pages
- The ability for users to leave reviews and upload photos
- The ability to moderate those reviews
- A blog where the site owner can give personal reviews
- Saved places and lists for users who’ve created an account
- Detailed walks, or walk-and-pub combinations
- Trip planning
- Accommodation
- Beaches
- Special offers
- Events
- Business accounts and analytics
- Booking and affiliate integrations
Founders dream big, and rarely come to us with just an MVP in mind. It’s a lot to build up front, and a good MVP validates the idea before too much time and money is spent on it. That validation matters, because first contact with real customers can easily change the plan - and successful founders tend to be the ones who give their customers what they actually want.
To distil a strong MVP from a feature list like this, we group the underlying user journeys into categories. For this community-based site, those categories were:
- Finding somewhere I can go with my dog
- Contribution journeys
- Community journeys
- Social journeys
- Trip and personalisation journeys
- Business journeys
- Admin journeys
Within the first category alone, the stories look something like:
- “Find somewhere dog-friendly”
- “Find somewhere near me”
- “Is this place dog-friendly?”
- “Find somewhere suitable for my particular dog”
- “Discover somewhere new”
- “Find a walk with somewhere to eat afterwards”
- “Plan a dog-friendly day out”
- “Plan a dog-friendly holiday”
The core proposition #
The core proposition for this site is that users can search for dog-friendly venues by location and get helpful information about each one. Anything that supports this is in the MVP; anything that doesn’t can wait.
You could argue the blog isn’t strictly MVP, but the founder is a dog owner herself, and her personal input into the site is a key part of establishing trust in the brand early on - so it stayed in scope.
Beyond the core proposition, there’s plenty more the site can eventually do, but none of it can exist without the core proposition in place first:
- Saved places and lists for users with accounts
- Detailed walks or walk-and-pub combinations
- Trip planning
- Accommodation
- Beaches
- Events
- Special offers
- Nearby vets and services
- Business accounts and analytics
- Booking and affiliate integrations
All of that becomes the roadmap for what comes after the MVP proves the core idea out.
One thing worth remembering #
If your product is novel, your MVP can stay quite basic, because you’ll attract early adopters happy to look past the rough edges - though that’s a mixed blessing, since early adopters can give you a misleadingly rosy read on demand.
If your product isn’t novel - e-commerce selling everyday things, say - you’ll need to get closer to the existing competition before users take you seriously. The upside is you already know what works, because someone else has already proven it.
That’s the whole arc: from a long list of features, to a handful of real benefits, to the one workflow that has to exist before anything else does. If you’re sitting on a feature list of your own and aren’t sure what the smallest viable version looks like, that “does it have legs” conversation is free - get in touch.
