Startup 101: MVP Is Passé. Start Working On A Minimum Billable Product

SUMMARY

The minimum viable product is the smallest thing you can build to deliver the value of your solution to your customers

Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, the founder of B2B SaaS accelerator Upekkha, shares with us his own version of MVP— MBP or Minimum Billable Product

An MBP is a product that people are not just ready to adopt, but something they're ready to pay for as well

“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” — Steve Jobs

This is one of the biggest reasons for all the kicks and punches wannabe entrepreneurs throw into their journey. Success or failure is a story for another time. Today we’re talking about just getting to the product stage.

People get startup ideas in all kinds of situations and places — while dreaming, playing a game of squash, cycling through the city, or even while watching Netflix. While many jot down their idea on a notebook in their to-do list, some of these people actually get up and show up on the battleground to take baby steps closer to their dream.

One such important baby step is building the minimum viable product or the MVP. For the uninitiated, the MVP is the smallest thing you can build to deliver the value of your solution to your customers.

The MVP is one of the most popular outcomes of the Lean Startup methodology by Eric Ries. The idea is pretty simple:

Build the minimum set of features that is viable enough to test your key assumptions
Learn more about your customers and the problem you want to solve

Sounds easy? There’s a lot more to it.

In this week’s Startup 101 series, Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, founder of Upekkha, a B2B SaaS accelerator, shares with us his own version of MVP — MBP or Minimum Billable Product.

Krishnamoorthy explains that an MVP is basically about the minimum set of features, functionalities, integrations, user experience, user interface, technology and whatever else it takes to solve that problem for a customer in a way that they are ready to take it and start using it.

However, he believes that instead of building an MVP, startup entrepreneurs should look at building a minimum billable product (MBP) to make sure that their product is not just something people adopt, but something they’re ready to pay for.

This differs in a B2C and B2B concept. “So, when you sell it to consumers, an MVP may be sufficient, but when you are selling to businesses, you may wanna do a minimum billable product,” he adds.

PS: We just gave you an edge over other wannabe-entrepreneurs!