What is a Concierge MVP?
A manual minimum viable product (MVP) that uses none or the minimum amount of technology to validate a hypothesis and gather feedback from a target audience.
At the heart of lean methodology is the idea of producing value with the least amount of effort.
This is particularly important for entrepreneurs, companies or teams that are bringing an innovative product, service or experience (i.e. a creation) to life; without knowing whether the they have a product-market fit (i.e. if a creation will bring value to a target audience and result in a return on investment).
As part of most design thinking innovation models or processes, it is recommended that companies, teams or individuals write a hypothesis and validate that they are producing value by interviewing the target audience verbally or with prototypes as part of In-Depth Interviews or Focus Groups.
Given that producing high fidelity prototypes or go-to-market MVPs is too expensive and time consuming, Eric Ries's The Lean Startup suggests that companies, teams or individuals develop and test a creation through manual work.
This suggestion comes in the form of a concierge MVP and involves finding a paying customer and offering them the creation through a laborious, human driven process that makes use of the minimum amount of technology.
The example that Eric gives in The Lean Startup is that of Food on the Table whereby Manuel Rosso and Steve Sanderson marketed the idea that families could create meal plans and grocery lists from food that you enjoy and benefit from cost saving measures from your local store.
Given that this is extremely complex technically, Manuel and Steve found a paying customer and visited them once a week giving them the concierge treatment.
As part of this concierge treatment, Manuel and Steve would carry out an In-Depth Interview with the customer to determine their preferences and would search the database of the local store and match it to a suggested list of recipes.
After a laborious process, Manuel and Steve would give the meal plan / grocery list to the customer and take $9.95.
Each week they would return to the customer and offer the white glove service, drawing insights as to how the technology should work and what brought value to the customer. Soon enough their customer base scaled to the point that their hypothesis was validated and they proceeded to build the platform.
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