What is Concierge MVP and When Do You Need It?

Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is an important milestone in transforming an idea into a product-market fit. It provides an opportunity for rapid learning and early validation from actual customers.

The goal of an MVP is to prevent companies from overinvesting in ideas that have yet to be validated and to avoid wasting time, money, and talent on throwaway work.

However, creating a viable, working first version of your product might still require significant investment. Even though the MVP is "minimal," that doesn't mean it's always fast and easy to build.

In such a case, product teams need smarter ways to validate and increase their confidence before building the MVP. One strategy is the Concierge MVP.

What is a Concierge Minimum Viable Product?

A Concierge MVP creates a setup that mimics your product's behavior from the customer's perspective without implementing the full product. It emphasizes the product's adaptability and high level of customization based on user needs and preferences.

The difference between the MVP and the Concierge MVP is that in the Concierge version, humans manually manage parts of the product to provide a customized and tailored experience to the customer.

A Concierge MVP is an important strategy of the Lean Startup methodology. Like all other types of MVP, it promotes quick learning cycles, de-risks the biggest assumptions, and focuses on customer needs and value.

Pros and Cons of Concierge MVP

Pros

By implementing a Concierge MVP, you can delay implementing a complex or expensive part of your product or service until you are more confident it is needed. This strategy helps assess the riskiest part of the business idea, diving into implementing the hardest part of it.

Through its customizations and adaptability, the concierge MVP also provides a deep understanding of customers’ needs and problems. By studying how the user needs change and what difference it makes, you can arrive at more informed decisions about the scope of your product idea.

Another benefit of building a Concierge MVP is that you can build an operating business with revenue while manually performing part of the operations. This is a great signal for potential investors and mainstream customers that you build a strong product. As long as you can handle the manual load, the automation can be done later behind the scenes and without customers even realizing it.

Cons

A Concierge MVP might require significant manual labor. However, if the process can be automated or productized with a reasonable amount of effort, this might be a more appropriate path.

As a good practice, you can clearly define the extent to which you plan to use the Concierge MVP: Is it only to validate your product, or do you plan to operate your business in this mode for a while? If the latter, how much time can you handle it?

You can measure it by the number of users or another metric that makes sense. This will be a good indicator of when you need to have a better solution in place to ensure your business's growth and scale.

Best Practices for Implementing a Concierge MVP

1. Define Objectives

To maximize the value of your Concierge MVP, you need to be explicit about the learnings you want to extract from it. A good objective at this stage might be:

• Understanding customer needs,
• Validating assumptions,
• Gathering feedback.

2. Select the Right Audience

The best people to try your MVP are different from the mainstream customers you plan to target. At the earlier stages, you are looking for early adopters willing to experiment with new products that are still not ready for prime time and want to share feedback about their experience. Such candidates might be:

• Technology enthusiast,
• Industry leaders looking for the next big thing,
• Specific customer segment that has an acute need for your product.

3. Design personalized interactions

This is a key step as it’s the essence of the experiment you are designing.

There are different approaches you can take to planning your interactions depending on the situation:

• Which part of your product are you most uncertain about and need customer input?
• Is there part of your product for which the technology doesn't exist yet?
• Which part of the product will take the most time and effort to be implemented?

If you can answer any of these questions, you will have good candidates for parts of the product that can be personalized through interaction.

4. Implement feedback loops

The feedback is the value you will get out of the Concierge MVP. Ensure you have integrated feedback loops so that there is a stream of information for you from the early adopters. The feedback might be captured in different ways, which has its pros and cons:

• Surveys - great for capturing data at scale but doesn’t provide nuances, and results can be heavily skewed by the way questions and answers are phrased,
• Interviews - interviews provide a lot of details about the customer experience and can expose blindspots in your hypothesis but are hard to scale to a large number of participants,
• Analytics tools from behavioral data — behavioral data is a very objective method of observing users’ interactions, but it cannot provide the reasoning behind their interactions.

5. Set boundaries for manual interactions

Doing manual work for customers can easily get out of hand and consume much of your time. There are several limits you can put to make sure you are not consumed completely by the experiment:

• Define which parts of the experience are subject to customization and personalization and which are not
• Set proper expectations for the period in which you will provide the concierge services
• Put in place a roadmap for productizing your findings and moving away from manual operations

6. Be open and transparent

There are many ethical considerations when performing a Concierge MVP. Building trust with the participants is important, as they are great candidates for future customers and can also become your brand ambassadors in their networks. To build trust, it is important to:

• Be transparent about the manual work involved in providing the service
• Set the proper expectations for what is possible and what is not
• Share progress updates and follow-up information

Real-life Examples of Concierge MVP

"M"

In 2015, Facebook launched a digital assistant called M, which had unique capabilities. Before the rise of generative AI, having a contextually aware chatbot was impossible. When interacting with such assistants, you have to be very explicit. A query like: "Book a table for my wife and me in our favorite restaurant and add it to our calendars" would be impossible since the bot doesn't know anything about:

• which is your favorite restaurant,
• who is your wife,
• how to book a table.

However, M could handle such queries, which was amazing. It turned out that only the very simple interactions are handled with AI, and everything else detected by the chatbot as something it cannot handle is redirected to a human operator.

Eventually, Facebook discontinued the assistant due to limited adoption and other reasons and downscaled it to M Suggestions. This illustrates how Facebook avoided developing a very expensive solution for a problem that isn’t important enough for its customers. M Suggestions are still around, suggesting events, responding to chats, etc., without human operator involvement to provide the experience.

This is a great example of how you can progress with your product and validate customer demand even when the technology to build a full-blown solution is not there yet.

Airbnb

After realizing the importance of good photos for their listings, Airbnb’s founders offered free photo-shooting sessions that were personally conducted by them. This helped them understand the challenges during the process and all the specific needs that hosts had in order to present their listings in the best possible way.

Once the insights were captured, the process was scaled, which became a key factor in Airbnb's differentiation.

Other Smart Ways to Validate Your Product

Painted Door Experiment

A painted door experiment is a setup in which you market your product to the target customer segment and invite them to buy it or engage with it in another way.

The actual product doesn't exist, but users don't know that. So, by engaging with your campaign, they express their desire to commit to your product, which is a great validation even before you have built anything around it.

Landing Page MVP

Creating a simple webpage with your value proposition and even some mock-ups of the product is another powerful technique for gauging and validating customer demand. It includes a value proposition and a clear call to action, such as Register, Buy, etc.

Once learners click on the call to action button, they are notified that the product is still not available. However, you can keep them informed about your progress and let them know when the product is ready. This is a great way to validate the product and build a database of potential early adopters.

Crowdfunding Campaign

A crowdfunding campaign is a way to pitch your idea before it’s built and ask people to pre-order to finance the development. While funding your idea is great, the bigger upside of this approach is that you validate your product before investing the time and resources to build it. It’s especially appropriate for physical products where manufacturing is especially costly and risky.

Wizard of Oz MVP

The Wizard of Oz MVP concept is very similar to the Concierge MVP. They are both Lead Startup strategies for testing a product idea without building a fully working product.

The two concepts differ in several aspects:

User awareness: In the Wizard of Oz MVP, users are not aware that they are not interacting with a fully functioning product, while in the Concierge MVP, this is at least implied.

Personalization: Wizard of Oz MVPs focus on mimicking a specific feature to understand whether automating it makes sense. A concierge MVP provides intentionally tailored service for each user, creating a user experience that is very specific to the user's needs.

Intent: Wizard of Oz helps assess the value of a specific feature or product. Concierge MVP focuses more on understanding the customer's problem and needs.

Wrap Up

A Concierge MVP can significantly accelerate your learning and reduce the risk of overinvesting in a poorly validated product or feature. It's part of the paradigm of following a structured approach to entrepreneurship which is deeply embedded in the Icanpreneur platform. If you are looking for more ways to validate your idea chech out Icanpreneur.