THE CONCIERGE MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT

 

Consider another kind of MVP technique: the concierge MVP. To understand how this technique works, meet Manuel Rosso, the CEO of an Austin, Texas–based startup called Food on the Table. Food on the Table creates weekly meal plans and grocery lists that are based on food you and your family enjoy, then hooks into your local grocery stores to find the best deals on the ingredients.

After you sign up for the site, you walk through a little setup in which you identify your main grocery store and check off the foods your family likes. Later, you can pick another nearby store if you want to compare prices. Next, you’re presented with a list of items that are based on your preferences and asked: “What are you in the mood for this week?” Make your choices, select the number of meals you’re ready to plan, and choose what you care about most in terms of time, money, health, or variety. At this point, the site searches through recipes that match your needs, prices out the cost of the meal for you, and lets you print out your shopping list.6

Clearly, this is an elaborate service. Behind the scenes, a team of professional chefs devise recipes that take advantage of items that are on sale at local grocery stores around the country. Those recipes are matched via computer algorithm to each family’s unique needs and preferences. Try to visualize the work involved: databases of almost every grocery store in the country must be maintained, including what’s on sale at each one this week. Those groceries have to be matched to appropriate recipes and then appropriately customized, tagged, and sorted. If a recipe calls for broccoli rabe, is that the same ingredient as the broccoli on sale at the local market?

广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元

After reading that description, you might be surprised to learn that Food on the Table (FotT) began life with a single customer. Instead of supporting thousands of grocery stores around the country as it does today, FotT supported just one. How did the company choose which store to support? The founders didn’t—until they had their first customer. Similarly, they began life with no recipes whatsoever—until their first customer was ready to begin her meal planning. In fact, the company served its first customer without building any software, without signing any business development partnerships, and without hiring any chefs.

Manuel, along with VP of product Steve Sanderson, went to local supermarkets and moms’ groups in his hometown of Austin. Part of their mission was the typical observation of customers that is a part of design thinking and other ideation techniques. However, Manuel and his team were also on the hunt for something else: their first customer.

As they met potential customers in those settings, they would interview them the way any good market researcher would, but at the end of each interview they would attempt to make a sale. They’d describe the benefits of FotT, name a weekly subscription fee, and invite the customer to sign up. Most times they were rejected. After all, most people are not early adopters and will not sign up for a new service sight unseen. But eventually someone did.

That one early adopter got the concierge treatment. Instead of interacting with the FotT product via impersonal software, she got a personal visit each week from the CEO of the company. He and the VP of product would review what was on sale at her preferred grocery store and carefully select recipes on the basis of her preferences, going so far as to learn her favorite recipes for items she regularly cooked for her family. Each week they would hand her—in person—a prepared packet containing a shopping list and relevant recipes, solicit her feedback, and make changes as necessary. Most important, each week they would collect a check for $9.95.

Talk about inefficient! Measured according to traditional criteria, this is a terrible system, entirely nonscalable and a complete waste of time. The CEO and VP of product, instead of building their business, are engaged in the drudgery of solving just one customer’s problem. Instead of marketing themselves to millions, they sold themselves to one. Worst of all, their efforts didn’t appear to be leading to anything tangible. They had no product, no meaningful revenue, no databases of recipes, not even a lasting organization.

However, viewed through the lens of the Lean Startup, they were making monumental progress. Each week they were learning more and more about what was required to make their product a success. After a few weeks they were ready for another customer. Each customer they brought on made it easier to get the next one, because FotT could focus on the same grocery store, getting to know its products and the kinds of people who shopped there well. Each new customer got the concierge treatment: personal in-home visits, the works. But after a few more customers, the overhead of serving them one-on-one started to increase.

Only at the point where the founders were too busy to bring on additional customers did Manuel and his team start to invest in automation in the form of product development. Each iteration of their minimum viable product allowed them to save a little more time and serve a few more customers: delivering the recipes and shopping list via e-mail instead of via an in-home visit, starting to parse lists of what was on sale automatically via software instead of by hand, even eventually taking credit card payments online instead of a handwritten check.

Before long, they had built a substantial service offering, first in the Austin area and eventually nationwide. But along the way, their product development team was always focused on scaling something that was working rather than trying to invent something that might work in the future. As a result, their development efforts involved far less waste than is typical for a venture of this kind.

It is important to contrast this with the case of a small business, in which it is routine to see the CEO, founder, president, and owner serving customers directly, one at a time. In a concierge MVP, this personalized service is not the product but a learning activity designed to test the leap-of-faith assumptions in the company’s growth model. In fact, a common outcome of a concierge MVP is to invalidate the company’s proposed growth model, making it clear that a different approach is needed. This can happen even if the initial MVP is profitable for the company. Without a formal growth model, many companies get caught in the trap of being satisfied with a small profitable business when a pivot (change in course or strategy) might lead to more significant growth. The only way to know is to have tested the growth model systematically with real customers.