Gael Donnay

The session

Premium40 min

Digital Advisory

How to build an MVP without blowing your budget

What Gael teaches

1. Write the one-sentence version of your product before anything else

   Gael's first step is a piece of paper: what does the idea do, who is the audience, what is the target market, what is the business model. Then compress it to a single sentence, for example "a solution for business owners and entrepreneurs that lets them network and meet each other". That sentence becomes the test every feature has to pass.

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2. Work backwards from your feature wish list to find the MVP

   Take every feature you have imagined and remove them one at a time. For each, ask whether the solution still does what it needs to do and still delivers the value it has to deliver. What survives is the lean MVP. Gael quotes Steve Jobs: simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

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3. Sort features with the MoSCoW matrix and only build the must-haves

   When scope gets hard and budget is fixed, split every feature into must have, should have, could have and won't have. Only the must-haves belong in the MVP. Could-haves come later if budget allows, and Gael's view is that they generally should not. Be honest in the sorting, and expect your tech partner to push back.

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4. Treat prototypes as throwaway and MVPs as foundations

   A prototype is built fast, costs close to nothing and gets binned. An MVP is the bare bones commercial product you will keep building on, so it has to be stable because everything else sits on top of it. Confusing the two is how founders burn money rebuilding what they thought was their product.

   From How to build an MVP without blowing your budget →