Hello, this is Dr. Jim Watson from growth strategies International. Here to talk to you about how to develop a new product and take it to market. This is section two concept analysis, the second part minimum viable product. So what is a minimum viable product and MVP is a product that only has the minimal set of features necessary to demonstrate the ability of the part to satisfy a customer's need. In other words, an MVP minimum viable product is a version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning data about customers with the least amount of effort. The final complete seat features will be designed and developed only after considering feedback from the products initial users.

So you don't want to spend a lot of time and money developing your vinyl Only to find out. Now that's really not what the customer wanted. Get something out there in their hands that they can take a look at, give you some feedback, make changes along the way. A minimal viable product has enough value that people are willing to use it or buy it initially. to try it out. You may use some crowdsourcing to find out how well your product is received before you actually launch it.

And minimal viable product. It demonstrates enough future benefit to retain those early adopters. Early Adopters are the ones that want to be out there first with the latest product. It also provides a feedback loop to guide future development. So from the feedback you'll get from your customers, you'll know how to evolve your product with new features and capabilities as you grow the product line. One key characteristic of an MVP and assumes that these early adopters can see The vision of the final part and provide valuable feedback to guide the product developers forward.

One of the techniques used for minimum viable product is called rapid prototyping. Rapid Prototyping is defined by Wikipedia as a group of techniques used to quickly fabricate a scale model of a physical part or assembly. Using three dimension computer aided design. Construction of the part or assembly is usually done using a 3d printer or some type of additive layer manufacturing technology. I'll give you an example. This right here is a salt and pepper shaker.

It was it was my mother bought this back in 1940 and it's made out of pewter. What I wanted to do was replicate this design. So I used a program called on shape o n sh AP. It's a free computer aided design program. And by taking the dimensions of this little iron is an iron with with two holes in the front for the salt to come out and a cork in the back to put the salt in. I made an almost identical design of plastic that was 3d printed.

This cost about 30 cents on the turtles it took me about an hour to make the three dimensional design it's pretty much identical to the pewter one, it's made out of plastic. It's got the same size dimensions and and holes in it. And but it costs about 30 cents to make and and about an hour to produce Now you won't want to mass produce it. But if I wanted to take this and go to the marketplace and say What do you think about this? Would you buy this? Maybe I could cost me 30 cents to make it on the 3d printer.

Maybe I can sell it for $5. How much would you pay for it? That information is very valuable. Because the customers always say, well, though, it's actually I would like the handle to be a little bit thicker than that. Or I would like the holes to be a little bit bigger, or I would like it to hold more salt or pepper. Anyway, getting customer feedback is essential.

So I have a videotape in my presentation on YouTube, called MVP in action, and I encourage you to watch it. There's also a link in there for some MVP tools that you can use in developing your minimal viable product or your prototype to take to market for market testing. And there's also another video in their YouTube video called what features are relevant. So when you Develop your minimal viable product is an exercise you can go through in determining how to quickly validate your product but by taking the right features in developing your prototype once you have your prototype developed or your MVP developed, then you're ready to start testing the hypothesis. The hypothesis is will the market actually be interested in buying you're buying your product and what can you sell it for? So there's a chart in the presentation on the the pre commercial arena versus the commercial area.

Now you're in the pre commercial arena right now, if you have an idea, and you're taking developing a prototype product to test it in the marketplace, you're doing invention, innovation, we just talked about proof of concept market validation. Ultimately, by this by generating your ideas and prototyping, presenting it to the market collecting data, doing analysis and learning you're developing information you need to develop a viable business model to take your product to market. you're answering questions like, Who's your target customer? What customer problems or challenges are you solving? What value do you deliver? How you reach, acquire and keep your customers?

How you define and differentiate your offering, how you generate revenue, what's your cost structure? What's your profit margin, all that goes into your business model. Once you've answered those questions, then you're ready to commercialize your product, which we'll talk about in Section four, when you develop your business plan, and go to market so that's called scaling your business. Once you've validated your business model, you've got the problem solution fit, you've got the problem market fit, you've completed your experimentation. Now you're going to focus on growth and scaling your business to optimize your product to get get at the lowest cost, the best performance and really knock the socks off the competition. So why do new products fail?

Sometimes we over champion them, we promise too much that they don't deliver. Okay? So we're we're not meeting customers expectations, because we're over champing, over promising. Sometimes we overestimate what the demand is. And that can be very costly mistake if you're purchasing a lot of raw materials and you end up sticking with them stuck with them in inventory. Sometimes design is just poor doesn't hold up.

It's not reliable. Sometimes it's just poor marketing execution, knowing how to get out to the customer, how to promote your product, and we'll be talking about that in section three customer acquisition, how to promote your product to get market traction. Sometimes the development costs are too high. The costs are so high that you can't sell it and make a make a profit at it. And sometimes just a strong competitive reaction, especially if you don't have any luck. intellectual property protection, everyone's going to come after you with with a lower price solution.

So we're going to try to get away from all those negatives about products fail and make sure your product makes it the market. So in summary here, minimal viable product again, as a minimal set of features necessary to demonstrate the ability of the product to satisfy customer needs to bring a new product to market requires experimentation to determine a viable solution solves a real problem that customers want. I look forward to seeing you in section three. customer acquisition. We'll talk about the product market fit. Thank you.