With an MVP, you’ve picked an idea and you’re rolling with it, which means putting in a little more effort. The idea is to come up with a variety of prototypes, and be able to change, adapt, and throw away ideas very quickly. A prototype is something that you can put very little time and effort into. The scope of a prototype and an MVP vary greatly. If we had to break it down very simply, we could say that the main differences are: What is The Difference Between Prototype and MVP? Once they proved that there was a demand for an online voucher marketplace, they invested in building a more elaborate backend.Īs of 2018, they have sold 1.5 billion vouchers to almost 50 million annual active users. At launch, they had a very basic WordPress site, and would email normal PDFs as vouchers to subscribers. It started out as a real bare-bones operation. While they didn’t exactly invent the voucher (extreme couponing has been a hobby for generations!) Groupon helped it become a staple of our social lives and shopping habits. Without testing, and understand what works and what doesn’t, you might have given them a skateboard with a Nintendo Wii strapped to the front instead. So eventually you give them a car with built-in radio. It does the job, but now they want something waterproof, with some kind of entertainment system. You get the feedback that they want something motorized, so you get them a motorbike. Think of it like this: if someone needed transportation between Point A and Point B, and they’re not sure how best to get there, the first thing you give them wouldn’t be a Tesla! You might start with a skateboard, or a scooter.
Or you could have built something way better if you’d pivoted halfway through.
Only to find that at launch, nobody wants it. Sure, you could dive right in, spend months developing an expensive product with all the bells and whistles. Prototypes and Minimum Viable Products (MVP) are a critical part of product development.