What Is a minimum viable segment ? And what role does it play in product market fit ?
Simply put, The Minimum viable segment or minimum viable audience, is about focusing on a market segment of potential customers with the same needs to which you can align. Defining and focusing on your MVS is vital because, without it, potential users who have divergent needs will quickly pull your MVP in many different directions. This, in turn, will bloat — not minimise — your product requirements and drain your limited startup resources. And you won’t just feel that drain in product development. It’ll come back to haunt you in any go-to-market (GTM) activities and then again in customer service and support, potentially paralysing your business model.
Here are two examples.
Securing strong reference customers. Strong references are critical in the early days of your GTM activities. But they can’t reference each other if they don’t have the same needs.
Customising customer support. When it comes time to service and support customers, if you’ve built different solutions to different needs, they aren’t likely to have the same service and support problems. As a result, they’ll stretch your services teams.
If customers did have the same needs and solutions,
1) they would be relevant references, and 2) they might even support each other in a customer community. That could save you a lot of time and money.
But too many entrepreneurs (especially those who follow the Lean Startup methodology) become too focused on the “product” part of product-market fit. They become consumed with their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and forget about the “market” part. So while the MVP is critical, it’s missing its partner in crime: the Minimum Viable Segment (MVS).
It represents the smallest possible audience that can sustain your business as you get it started from a micro niche (the smallest subset of a market). The main aspect of the MVA is to zoom into existing markets to find those people whose needs are unmet by existing players.
Find the Same, Similar, or Very Closely Related Needs
To be explicit about this, it is the same needs you are looking to fulfill — not features you want to build. What’s the difference? For starters, customers don’t think in terms of features. They think in terms of pain and need. And while a feature might address their initial need, it’s not likely to stay on course with their needs as they evolve if they’re different from other customers. And as you’ll see below, it also becomes important beyond your product alone.Focus on finding a set of customers who have the same or as similar a need, pain, or problem as possible to those of the other customers in your MVS. In today’s time, there are many approaches to enter the business world. One way is through the Minimum Viable Audience. With the Minimum Viable Audience, rather than try to do something for everyone, we’ll try to build something exceptional for a small group of people, whose needs are unmet by the current market. Contrary to what happens in other markets, finding your Minimum Viable Audience means having a group of people that are willing to sustain and preserve your business as this adds so much value to them.
Minimum = Small Enough to Dominate
The minimum part of the MVS is about keeping your segment as small as possible to dominate it. Once you dominate it, you can claim leadership. Even if this leadership is just in your MVS, it’s valuable to your positioning and reference-ability for the next segment you want to go after.
Minimum = Small Enough to Dominate viable = Where You Can Succeed With Your MVP
As you think about your MVP, look at which segment will have the least product requirements.
Thinking Ahead to Expansion
Once you’ve dominated an MVS and are ready to expand, it can help pick adjacent segments that closely align with each other and have similar attributes. That way, you can leverage work from one MVS to the next.
In summary, Minimum Viable Segment is such an obvious concept once you see it in practice. However, so many entrepreneurs lose sight of it — focusing too much on product, rather than zooming out to see who they’re building their product for. Others simply can’t resist the temptation to take money from any customer, believing they’ll succeed regardless.
Yet, with some simple work to define an MVS, you can focus on the right product issues to address — e.g., those that will target the common needs of your MVS customers. And you’ll build a much more profitable GTM and business model.
So focus, find your MVS, and start refining!
コメント