Milestone 3 & 4: Most Valuable Product vs Minimal Viable Product

Is a minimal viable product sufficient enough

In recent years Minimal Viable Product has lost some of its glory, and some experts question whether it’s sufficient. Users expect a high degree of professionalism and high-quality user interfaces that, when testing out a true MVP - validation can be slightly skewed.

Enter Most Valuable Product, and it’s more about building the right product for your users, not just an essential product with basic features.

It doesn’t have to have all the bells and whistles but needs to solve the core problem for your users. Users need to understand the core use cases and solutions to adequately provide feedback.

Business in the front, party in the back!

The backend is a little messy and needs a little work, but users won’t touch it, so as long as I can navigate it and it’s scalable - it serves the purpose. That said, there were a few things that still needed to be built to serve the proper content.

• Ability to add athlete profiles with image upload and meta details like bio, age, country, and experience.

• Ability to link keywords/channels to that athlete.

• Ability to aggregate related content via keywords and channels.

• Ability to manually add content that I chose to source.

Primarily for this milestone, the focus is to provide a suitable front-end and promote an excellent quality user interface.

• Ability to show a “lane” for “Followed Athletes.”

• Ability to show a “lane” for “Watch Later Items.”

• Ability to order lanes on the landing page

• Ability to find an athlete profile page and follow

What to call this thing?

While my developer works on this, it truly is a skeleton; there are no styles, no colours, no brand - just functionality and a little bit of structure.

Before I jumped into designing any brand or hi-fi experience, I wanted to make sure this was somewhat feasible and ticked a few items off the validation list.

As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been stewing on this idea for a while now. For me, ideas and branding come easy, and this is no different. Being in the CrossFit community and building a CrossFit niche app helps. AMRAP TV came up as I brainstormed several keywords and slang words used in CrossFit. Sure outside of CrossFit, the acronym AMRAP doesn’t mean much, and maybe that’s a problem; for now, I think it works. The focus is to build a niche platform; I don’t expect many people to find AMRAP TV before finding CrossFit - I don’t think it’s a massive problem now. Finding names is more complex and challenging as you need to secure social handles and domains. This is part of the process and why I ended up on AMRAP TV. I was able to grab both AMRAP.TV and AMRAPTV.com, which is pretty huge.

I made a quick logo, added some primary colours and typography, and we have a brand. Again I don’t want to spend too much time on this right now as it’s an MVP.

Meanwhile, the experience.

Have the back-end moving in the right direction and have a brand. I just need to put these together to start building the experience. There is an endless amount of OTT platforms streaming serves to get inspired from, and as many of you know - they all operate similarly. Again for the MVP, I don’t need to innovate the experience and, for a good reason, should stay consistent with how users interact with streaming applications

As you can tell, the experience is similar to NetFlix or Disney+. I need a landing page with lanes, a video profile and a basic detail page that, in my case, will showcase athletes and brands.

Right now, this will only be used for desktop validation; of course, I need to make this viable for a mobile device. For now, TV operating systems are out of scope. Keeping this in mind, I’m validating whether there is a user base for this application.

Hopefully, next time we are talking, I will have a real MVP that you can visit and see for yourself!