Three that started as something else
YouTube launched in 2005 as a dating site: everyone would upload a video introducing themselves. According to co-founder Steve Chen, five days in, nobody had uploaded anything. So they opened it up to any video.
Slack came out of Glitch, a video game that didn't work out. To build it, the team, spread across Vancouver, San Francisco and New York, had put together its own chat. They shut the game down and went out to sell the chat.
Instagram was called Burbn: an app to tell people where you were, make plans, earn points and post photos. What people used most were the photos, so they cut almost everything else.
None of them got the first idea right. What they did right was launch something, watch what people did with it and keep what worked.
What a minimum viable product is
A minimum viable product (MVP) is the smallest version of your idea that someone can actually use. It isn't a mockup or something half-built: it's one thing, complete and working, that lets you see whether people use it.
The key word is viable: it has to be useful, even if only a little. A page that doesn't load or a button that does nothing teaches you nothing.
What "something small" looks like for a business
- Instead of a store with 300 products, a page with your 10 best sellers and a button to order on WhatsApp.
- Instead of a booking app with payments and reminders, a booking form that notifies you on WhatsApp.
- Instead of a company-wide system, a dashboard for the one thing that wastes most of your time today.
If it works, you add to it. If it doesn't, you lost weeks, not a year.
What to watch after you launch
- What they tap. How many come in, which button they press, where they leave. Any website can measure it.
- What they ask. The messages you get tell you what's missing and what isn't clear.
- What they come back to. What people use more than once is what matters.
- What nobody touches. That can go, even if it cost you.
Asking "would you use it?" isn't enough: almost everyone says yes. Watch what they do.
The usual mistakes
- Waiting to have it all. Every month without launching is a month without knowing if it works.
- Adding features before seeing whether people use the first ones. Burbn had everything, and people used one thing.
- Falling in love with the idea. If people use something else, that's the good one.
How we do it at Exos
We tell our clients the same thing: start with the part that can help them sell the most, launch it fast and measure. Then, with what people do in plain sight, decide what to add. That's how we build websites and systems.
And if the first thing you launch is a website, also check how it looks when someone shares it: it's the first thing people see when they come from a recommendation.