Seasoned entrepreneurs know how important it is to test a business idea before building a complete product. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a simplest form of a product with basic features to prove its technical, functional, financial and market viability. Building an MVP requires less hours and a small budget, whereas a polished and shelf-ready product demands substantial amount of time and money. MVP enables entrepreneurs to receive valuable feedback from the actual users / customers, which result in a great final product that customers really want.The following companies leveraged the concept of MVP and created some of the most popular products during the recent years.

How Uber started with an MVP to become a $68 billion unicorn

Uber was commenced  in 2009 with the name ‘UberCab’. They started with a small fleet of cars and a simple app that was used only by the founders and their friends. With the ‘invite only’ marketing tactic, the list of users grew slowly. In July of 2010, they released the product in San Francisco. During next year, they released it in New York and Paris.The following are the screenshots of Ubercab beta’s website and app from 2010:

How did it help Uber?

Uber is a good example for MVP (Minimum Viable Product) model. During its initial days, the UberCab was a Web based basic transportation application. The first version had a few features. It was developed on PHP, which used to allow customers to ‘hire’ a car, one and only car owned by Uber at the time. However, the application used to display the location of the car. It is unsure whether the application contained any time-estimation.At the beginning of the organization, Travis (co-founder and CEO) and his friends alone used the mobile app. Those, who wanted to join the app, were supposed to send an email to Travis, who used to provide the applicants with code giving access. At first, the list was very small and had grown in course of time. Later, Travis arranged a few more cars for his organization.However, Travis felt it difficult to manage all the travel requests with a few cars. Then, he called 10 car drivers and explained them his business concept. Three out of ten drivers showed interest immediately in his business proposal. It was Uber’s first success and the rest is history.Starting with an MVP helped Uber fine tune the product as well as the whole business model. Releasing the MVP among a small set of early adopters helped the founders lay a strong foundation for a product which could be scaled up smoothly after the launch. After getting a sense of the potential demand, they could design their platform based business model.

Airbnb used MVP to launch in San Francisco and then to 34,000 more cities

In 2007, the attendees of Industrial Design Society of America Conference faced a problem in finding accommodation as all the hotels in San Francisco had been overbooked. The founders of Airbnb, realizing this problem, setup a website to advertise their available house. They arranged air mattresses in their living room and even offered breakfast to their paying guests.In August of 2008, they launched AirBedAndBreakfast.com, which received 1 million bookings within 3 years.

• Places
• Experiences
• Guidebooks

How Dropbox achieved a valuation of $10 Bn starting with an MVP

• Collaboration
• Microsoft Office Integration
• Automatic uploading of media files from camera, tablet and smartphone
• Dropbox for Business

How Zappos used MVP to scale to become the most loved eCommerce store

The Founder of Zappos, Nick Swinmurn, loved shoes and had a hypothesis that people would be interested in buying shoes online. To validate his idea, Nick once went to a shoe store in San Francisco and asked its owner about current inventory. Then, he made a deal saying that whenever someone buys shoes from his website, he would come over to buy the shoes from the store owner. The owner agreed, and Nick started a basic website with a bunch of shoe photos taken by himself at the store.