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MVP: What is the best method for presenting minimum viable products to potential customers?
TW
TW
Tom Williams, Clarity's top expert on all things startup answered:

You have asked two questions. The first is what is the best method for presenting your MVP to potential customers.

A deck and a landing page is likely insufficient for an MVP so I'd suggest that you're still in the earliest stage of customer development which is design research.

The good news is that design research is all about asking the right questions. Questions around your concept might be:
What kind of collaborative efforts are you engaged in right now that require you find new and unknown collaborators?
When seeking new collaborators or looking for new collaborative work, where do you currently look?
What are the most significant problems associated with finding new collaborative work or workers with these existing sites or platforms?
On a scale to 1-10, 10 being most painful, rate the frustration you feel from the problems associated with the current state of finding new collaborative work or workers.

From there, you know what and who to optimize your product for, assuming you get enough validation from this process to proceed to build a real MVP, and that is going to need to be more than a deck and a landing page because you need to prove that people will sign-up for this AND that business can be transacted from these profiles in order to show that this is a viable business.

There have been a number of startups that have tried but died or pivoted away from the idea of a professional profile and a number that continue to struggle so I'd caution you to really do a lot of design research including ensuring you look at everything like this past and present.

To answer what will make the MVP investor-ready, it's evidence that you can inexpensively acquire people willing to complete a profile, and that there is business that can be conducted specifically because of these profiles, and specifically through your platform with some truly minimum viable number of profiles and transactions.

Happy to talk through this in a call. This is in a related space to my company so I monitor it fairly closely.

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