From MVPs to Pivots: A Hypothesis-Driven Journey of Two Software Startups

Abstract

Software startups have emerged as an interesting multiper-spective research area. Inspired by Lean Startup, a startup journey can be viewed as a series of experiments that validate a set of business hy-potheses an entrepreneurial team make explicitly or inexplicitly about their startup. It is little known about how startups evolve through busi-ness hypothesis testing. This study proposes a novel approach to look at the startup evolution as a Minimum Viable Product(MVP) creat-ing process. We identified relationships among business hypotheses and MVPs via ethnography and post-mortem analysis in two software star-tups. We observe that the relationship between hypotheses and MVPs is incomplete and non-linear in these two startups. We also find that entrepreneurs do learn from testing their hypotheses. However, there are hypotheses not tested by MVPs and vice versa, MVPs not related to any business hypothesis. The approach we proposed visualizes the flow of entrepreneurial knowledge across pivots via MVPs.

Lean Startup, Agile Methodologies and Customer Development for business model innovation

“…According to the authors, entrepreneurs with no prior market knowledge struggle to interpret market information collected through experimentation. Such finding relates to results presented by Khanna et al (2018), in which the authors reveal entrepreneurs learn from hypotheses testing and MVP creation; however, the amount of learning possessed by the entrepreneur also depends on user involvement and previous existing knowledge about the market.…”

Startup ecosystem effect on minimum viable product development in software startups

“…After a systematic analysis of the 22 definitions, the authors concluded that the most accepted meaning of minimum in MVP comprises minimum features or minimum effort. In a recent study [36], the authors observed that the association between business hypotheses and MVPs in 25 two software startups was non-linear, and the process affected the entrepreneurs learning in terms of hypothesis testing and pivots.…”

Understanding Barriers to Internal Startups in Large Organizations: Evidence from a Globally Distributed Company

“…Lean Startup is often called hypothesis-driven development [18]. Relying on hypothesis-driven development requires a framework for conducting continuous experiments.…”

“…Continuous learning is a key activity when doing continuous experimentation (the 4 th principle). Khanna et al [18] argued that the amount of learning entrepreneurs achieve depends on user involvement and their existing knowledge about the market, industry, and technology. Little user involvement might lead to little knowledge gained from testing hypotheses.…”