 All right, thank you so much. Who here is building an MVP? Show of hands. You found the right talk. Awesome, at least a few of you. Let me preempt my talk with, if the clicker works, let me preempt my talk with the one thing I want you to take away with, which is that MVP is not one thing. It might have been in 2011, one thing. Today, I think you need to think about it a bit differently. You need to think about it as more of a journey or a process. I like the third journey better. And to understand this, let's take an example of Liner. And let's take our early journey from our idea to essentially launching publicly and getting to product market fit. If you don't know what Liner is, Liner is a way of building software. It's the software project management tool. It was founded four years ago by me and two of my founders, Joe and Kari. And we're pretty successful in the startup scene. I think 50% of Icy companies in the last batch, for example, were using us, which is awesome. I am Thomas. I'm the co-founder and CTO of Liner. Prior to that, I was at Uber, where I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to scale mobile engineering. And I have to give a bird of caution. There's survivorship by us ahead. We have been so lucky that we've become somewhat successful, at least. And everything that I'm going to tell you is not ground truth. And you should think hard and talk with other people who have not made it, like we're one in 10 who've sort of gone over, have been able to continue working as a startup. So anything that I tell you, take it with a grain of salt and also talk with people, other people, in order to figure out what you want from an MVP. So to get back to the definition that Eric Ries in 2011 had on MVP, the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. So essentially what he's saying is, if you have an idea that you don't know if it's going to succeed in the marketplace, you should try to very quickly build something, whatever that is, to validate that idea. And by building something, it might be that you build a very quick prototype or a very quick product that you set out to your users. It might be something totally different as well. It might be a pamphlet that you use to sort of describe your idea. It might be a commitment from somebody to give you money or purchase your product when it's done. You might be selling a slide where whatever that is. My point today is that this was defined 2011, which is quite a bit of time, if you think about internet time, to give you a bit of sense what the time looked like. The presentation that Eric gave where he introduced MVP was done as a flash presentation, so you can no longer look at it. So why do you need to think about MVP more of as a journey and not this sort of quick hack to validate your idea? It worked back in the day when he sort of had something that needed validation where he didn't know whether there was a marketplace for your idea. If you take, for example, Airbnb, and some, well, not really Uber, but SimRide, for example, like those were ideas that might have gone totally wrong and you might not have a product. In the case of Airbnb, who started in 2009, so just two years after Eric came out with his MVP notion, they wanted to figure out whether people would be comfortable spending the night at a stranger's home and vice versa as well, and it is not clear cut. Today it's obvious that it worked, but back in the day when nobody had tried out that idea, it wasn't clear whether it would succeed. So what essentially they did, they built a very quick MVP at a conference in San Francisco and tried to invite people to their home to sleep on an air mattress and they got three people paying to sleep at their home. So that was sort of their validation for that idea and they set out and ventured forth. Same as SimRide, SimRide, which later became Lyft, had this idea, well, if people are commuting to work, why not just tag along and have some strangers get in the car with them to drive to the same location? Again, the same kind of idea like that wasn't readily available. Nobody had done it before, so it wasn't clear whether people would be comfortable just jumping in a stranger's car. Today, if you look at companies that have been founded, for example, in the past eight years, companies like Zoom, Slack, TikToks, Snowflake, Brovinhood or Gettier, those are not novel ideas. Those are great companies and great products, but they're not novel. They're not category defining. They took something and just made it better. So for them, an MVP wasn't about just figuring out whether the market was there for a new idea. It was trying to figure out something else. And to look at what that something else might mean, let's jump over to sort of a regular startup path that startups might take. You start with the idea, you build on MVP, you maybe iterate on that MVP, and at some point you're ready and you figure out that there's something here. There's an inkling of maybe product market fit, inkling of traction. Your idea might actually be able to fly. And that's usually the point when you start fundraising. Like you've got demonstrable traction and now it's a good time to start talking with VCs, get that money in, and effectively everything from there on out is just using that money to refine your product and moving ahead. So let's draw a line in between here. You get from idea using that MVP and you iterate. And at some point you reach through that iteration, you reach a line where you're comfortable with moving ahead, be it fundraising, be launching publicly. But at least you have an idea of an inkling of your product being able to fit into that market. And in the lack of sort of having a term for that, let me try to coin one today. Eric has his MVP. I'm trying to coin the Foundational Market Promise as an acronym, FNP. So the idea, the thing that an MVP does is try to get your idea through prototyping, through building out your product to the place where you think you have Foundational Market Promise. Where you think your company can succeed in the market, where you have users, maybe you have paying users, but at least users who you think will sort of make your company fly. To illustrate our journey and to give you sort of concrete examples of what we did in this journey from this idea to this inkling of product market fit, the Foundational Market Promise, let's start with the beginning. Linner's idea was that there's a need for modern software project management. We talked with a lot of users, like I was at Uber back in the day, Kari, my other co-founder was at Airbnb and Jory was at Coinbase. And talking with users, we sort of figured that all the ICs that we talked to really didn't like whatever project management tool they were using. Like they were really pretty harsh in their feedback. And we found that super strange. We were like, why is that? Like why don't people like whatever they have to use daily? And if so, why hasn't anybody built anything better? So we probably spent six months just discussing this idea, but we didn't want to do anything about it because project management is pretty boring as a category. So we didn't want to jump in. And it took us a while to understand the mission is not really to build a project management tool. The mission is something bigger. The mission is to help companies be better at building software. And that was a mission that we could get behind. And like now we had a purpose. Like we knew that this was actually something that we could sink our teeth into for the next 10 years. And from that mission, you have to think big. Like you have to figure out before you even start building out your MVP, you have to figure out like where do you wanna go? Like what is the end goal of your startup? And to us is that it, we want linear to be the standard in building any kind of software products. Big vision. Now how do you use an MVP to get on your journey? There's some validation here, sure. Like we need to figure out whether our idea actually matters. Whether people feel the same as we do. Whether we can build something modern and people would want to use it. But we have this big vision of project management. Like do we have to build the entire suite of tools, all this functionality in order to validate the idea and get started with an MVP? I don't know. What we can do is we can scope down. And that's what we did. And one of the key realizations that at least I had when we started linear and when I look back at the journey was that the key to building a successful MVP is to scope down as much as possible. Again, you're competing against somebody else because your idea is probably not novel. If you have a novel idea, then congrats. You're going to define a category. That's awesome. But the rest of you are probably just not just. You're competing against somebody else. Your idea how to compete might be novel, but you're still in the same category. So you have to build something better. You have to build a product that competes with the rest of the industry. So we said, well, if we have to compete with somebody, let's compete with a very, very, very narrow target segment and start that way, which still goes into the direction of building a company that will be the standard of building software in the future. So we said for us to build something like we're gonna target ICs at very, very small startups. We're gonna take startups that have maybe five people, all engineers or maybe even a designer throw them in. And that is our target segment. So what can we build for them? And we said, well, we don't need to build project management because they don't need project management. We can start with issue tracking, the atomic units of what companies need. And that was our idea for our MVP, or our first MVP. We've got many, and by the way, we never call it MVP, which is called the product, and I think that's fine. And we said, we're gonna be a fast, modern application that has multiplayer capabilities. Awesome. So we said on our way and said, from scoping down to prototyping, let's try to build this as quickly as possible, and we build that version for ourselves. Like we had the opportunity to build something for ourselves because we were direct users of the product, which made things much easier. And sorry, I was behind in the slides. There you go. So after we prototyped something, and we thought we had something that might be competitive in that small target segment, like we started showing, sorry, protests having an outment, right. I'm sorry, I'm sorry with the slides. So after scoping down, and we had a prototype that we were happy with, we wanted to show it to a few friends. And I showed it to one and they explained, like we've got these three pillars that we built this application for. Like we want it to be fast, and we want it to be sort of modern with keyboard shortcuts and all that, and we want it to be multiplayer so that everything updates in real time. And my friend came back and said, well, whatever I'm using currently is fast enough for me. And secondly, like I don't really need keyboard shortcuts, like why. And multiplayer, I don't really care. Like I can refresh the page, no problems. So I was down for like a minute. I was like, are we building the right thing? Like this is our MVP moment. Like we've built something, we showed it to the first user, and they just shut it down. Thankfully, I went ahead and we showed it to a few others, not friends, but just other random people. And I've got my confidence back and said, they liked it and they were happy using it. And I thought we were onto something. So after the prototyping stage when we were happy with the product itself, we did announce it. And the main reason for the announcement was to start building out a wait list. And to early validate our idea as well. So you can think the announcement as some sort of MVP as well, where you sort of post a block post about it and then see what the kind of reaction is. And the purpose of the wait list was to sort of start getting some traction and getting people in line to try out the product, which we'll use later to sort of refine it. And then after the announcement, after we had gained some wait list users, we were ready to sort of open up for early access. And the whole points and idea of that early access and private beta was to utilize our wait list to find that foundational market promise. So again, we had built something that was super small, had almost no functionality, it was a sort of very basic issue tracker. And we had 10,000 users lined up on our wait list. And the key realization that, the second realization that I had when I built Linner was that the wait list really is the fuel that lets you refine your product and launch publicly. So we've got the small MVPs, got the small prototype and you've got 10,000 users. Now, literally what you do is you exchange that wait list for a more refined product. And the way we did it is we asked specific questions when people signed up to that wait list. We asked things like size of the company, role at the company. We asked sort of what they were currently using or what their VCS was. We only had GitHub integration, so we didn't want to sort of have people who had something else use our product because they wouldn't get much out of it. And then also, why would you use Linner? And this helped us sort of categorize who we let in first. Like we wanted people that were, that probably would be comfortable using Linner for at least some time. Like that were, we resonated already where the initial blog post resonated with them where they wanted something that was fast and something that was multiplayer and something that had keyboard shortcuts so that we could gain some users that we could ask questions from. Like if you invite the first, if you want the incorrect users to use your prototype, like they will just churn away and you will learn nothing. So you had to sort of hand pick and that's what they did for the first month or so. We just literally hand picked individuals or individual companies from that wait list, invited them to Linner and then had sessions with them. We looked at how they use Linner, we talked with them, we had chats with them, we had Slack channels with them and we tried to learn as much as possible. And that also gave us sort of direction what to build next. And when we started, like when we didn't hear any sort of requests anymore or any comments that were new, that was sort of a good indication for us that it's time to expand and it's time to invite more people from the wait list and maybe sort of expand the target segment as well a bit. So invited a few larger companies in there, saw them churn quite quickly, tried to reach out and figure out why that happened and again got some ideas on what they need if you want to go into the larger target segments. And we kept on doing that, we kept on iterating on the product, building something out for the users that were there, seeing that they were happy when they had no requests anymore, we tried to invite new users from that wait list. So effectively over the course of a year, we exchanged our wait list for a more refined product. So wait list looked approximately something like this, like we had 10,000 users at best I think on the wait list. And then over time we just cut down on that until we got maybe to half of the entire wait list. And at that point we were confident enough that we had a great product that had some foundational market promise, the FMP hashtag, and that we were able to give it out to the world and have people just sign up on their own. So because the wait list at least, I think is the most important tool that you can have, we can spend some time figuring out like how to create a large wait list because for me this wasn't sort of clear cut at all. And I made some mistakes in my prior work as well. So the best way to get a big wait list is to get a huge social following prior to starting up. We were lucky that we had Kari who had, I don't know, 15,000 users on X. And that was literally the way that we got our message out there and we got people signing up on our wait list. What I didn't realize, I had spent five years at Uber prior to this and we were working on stuff that was pretty incredible on the mobile side. And I should have sort of used that back in the day to sort of really get some following. Like I could have posted about the work that I do at Uber and then try to get a following of myself in order to sort of have a better initial audience. And that's maybe something that you should think about if you're working at larger companies or even smaller companies that are doing amazing work. You should use that to just gain a following. It will immensely help to get a big wait list. I teamed up with Kari who had a following already which helped us get the 10,000 users. Had a good presence as a company on social media obviously as well and build it out in the open. Like be super open about what you're building. We did that from day one. Like whenever somebody asked us what we're doing, we were open about it. Or even walk people through our code if they were interested. And just be a sort of good citizen in the Syrup scene. And you can also get angels that can help you sort of build out that initial wait list. So when do you know if your product is ready to get out of this MVP stage or MVP journey where you've taken the idea, you've built and iterated over your initial product using your wait list. How do you know that you're ready for public launch? Well, the first thing is to talk to your users. Like you will have a gut feeling about whether you're ready or not by just talking with everybody. Have slacks with them, have one-on-one conversations and figure out like how happy they're using the product. Secondly, you can do a market product market fit questionnaire. Like Superhuman, I think four years ago made it very popular here. You could ask them how sad would they be if they could no longer use your product and use that as a way to judge whether you have built something that people really, really want. We did that for a while. We had, as part of a, if you wanted to open a support ticket or wanted to give us feedback, there was this quick questionnaire that you could do. Maybe for us the wrong place, like if you have a problem with the product and you then ask the question how unhappy would you be if you could no longer use the product, maybe make the questions or the answers a bit biased. But at least it gave us a nice trend upwards. And lastly, you can ask your users to pay. That's the ultimate way of figuring out whether your product is ready. If you force people to pay, and they do, they're happy with it. But what we did before we forced them to pay, we actually told them that they can pay if they want to. They don't have to, but we put up a Friends of Linear plan that people would find in under settings. There would be a new subscription options. And we just said, if you subscribe to this plan, I think it was $10 per user per month, we're gonna be friends forever and we're gonna appreciate you. And people did. People signed up for that without really getting any benefit out of it. So that gave us the confidence that we're really ready to open it up. And we launched publicly. And then forced everybody to subscribe to a plan. So once you're at that stage, like the MVP has served you well and you're now sort of in the product business trying to sort of find product market fit, you're at the next stage. You're probably ready for funding or might have been ready for funding even earlier and you're ready to sort of scale your team. So to recap, you should be thinking about when you're building an MVP. The first and most important thing that you should be doing is figuring out what your target audience is and scope it down as much as possible. If you can find sort of a handful of users that probably will want to use your product, that's a good starting point, but make it as small as possible. Once you have the target audience, you need to figure out what the functionality is. Keeping in mind your long-term vision. You want to go somewhere and you need to figure out what is a good foundation that you build upon in order to get there. And that's the functionality that you build for your target audience. And hopefully that's very little that you have to actually build before you can sort of ship it to them. And the last thing is that is often forgotten when you talk about MVP's is quality. One of the main points that I hope I made today is that you're competing with somebody because your idea is most likely not novel. So you need to have a competitive product and usually that means building a real high-quality product as well. If you don't, like if you're in the space where you don't, where you have a novel idea, then you don't even know if there's a target audience and then probably quality doesn't really matter, but most of you will be there. So let's try to redefine what MVP stands for, you know, using what I've said today. So to me it is sort of the minimum effort required to build a competitive product that is viable to a specific selected target audience. So a few takeaways. Narrow done, your original audience. The biggest takeaway of all, try to figure out who you're building it for and make it as small as possible. Secondly, build something competitive for them. Like you're competing against other companies in the space unless you're building something novel. So you need to build something great, something that feels good, something of high quality that people will love. Thirdly, your rate list is literally that fuel that will get you from your idea to funding or, you know, financial market promise. Use it well, build it out, make sure that you have a big one because you will be exchanging that. And the worst case that might happen is that you have a weight list and you run out. Like you're halfway through and then you've got nobody on that weight list. Now I have a real problem. I don't know how to solve that. And lastly, do not trust your friends when I tell you that you've got a shitty product. Thanks. If you want to get linear three for three months, there's a link. The coupon is slash 2023. Use it and use it for free. Thanks.