The Minimum Viable Testing Process for Evaluating Startup Ideas

The traditional dogma in the startup ecosystem is that you can’t predict whether people will want your product. Instead, you do some customer research, throw an MVP out there as fast as possible, and hope it hits. That’s not how Gagan Biyani approaches things.

And he’s drawing from a well of experience. Biyani has been early at four startups: Udemy, Lyft, Sprig and his most recent venture, Maven, a company that empowers experts to offer cohort-based courses directly to their audience. (As proud seed supporters, we're glad to see how several Review favorites have spun up their own Maven courses, like Arielle Jackson's on brand strategy, Chris Fralic's on cultivating your network, or Lenny Rachitsky's on product management fundamentals.)

But back to that pattern: At three of these companies Biyani was at, the team achieved over $1M in run-rate in their first six months of going live. “I don’t think this is an accident. I generally think this early success could’ve been predicted before a single line of code was written,” he says. “That’s because we didn’t start by trying to build the product and test it in the market.”

Enter the Minimum Viable Test, Biyani’s alternative to the classic MVP. Here’s how he describes the difference: “An MVP is a basic early version of a product that looks and feels like a simplified version of the eventual vision. An MVT, on the other hand, does not attempt to look like the eventual product. It’s rather a specific test of an assumption that must be true for the business to succeed.”

We think this metaphor he conjured captures it nicely: “In an MVP, you try to simulate the entire car. In an MVT, you are just testing whether the drivetrain is more powerful with an electric engine or a gas one.”

This requires a different method of company building. “With the MVP strategy, you have no strategy: You throw things at a wall until it sticks. In the MVT world, you take your time to discover a strategy but once you have one, you move forward with conviction and more appropriately match the realities of startups: It takes two to four years to know if you’re right.”

Today on The Review, Biyani discusses why traditional MVPs can lead founders astray, outlines his 3-step framework for developing a Minimum Viable Test, and shares examples from his own career, including real-life company value propositions, analysis of risky assumptions, and the experiments he ran to test the  "atomic unit" of what would make his startup ideas work.

It’s a great read to return to over and over again, whether you have a startup idea right now, dream of starting a company someday, or are a product leader charged with getting a new offering off the ground.

As always, thanks for reading and sharing!

-The Review editors

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