"Concierge"

[nelsonic]

In "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries dwyl/library#74 He describes how to create an MVP where you manually guide the person through the solution to a problem.

https://ibuildmvps.com/blog/the-concierge-minimum-viable-product-maximizes-customer-learning/

[SimonLab]

The idea of the "Concierge Minimum Viable Product" is to validate and idea or feature by solving it manually instead of creating all the code of this feature. This is a short term solution which can' scale but it allows to test a product quickly and if necessary change or pivot the product idea.
Apart from the "next step" feature describe here #27 (comment), do you see any other aspect of the product that we could test using the concierge method?

[nelsonic]

@SimonLab good question. In general, yes. From experience it's a careful balance of effort.
Sometimes it requires more effort to create a concierge than to just build a feature and test it with real people.
It's best to assess features on an individual basis to estimate their complexity. 🔍

From The Lean Startup the classic case was Zappos (online shoe store) where instead of building the entire e-commerce website (with checkout, payment, inventory and fulfilment up-front) just to test if people would buy shoes online, Tony Hsieh & Co simply took photos of shoes from an existing real-world shoe retailer and put them online and took/prepared/shipped orders manually. That makes perfect sense to test an idea as fast as possible and for the lowest cost. Building the system would have been weeks/months of work; the concierge took a few hours for them to setup. 💡