Page - 76 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

to identify if a certain topic catches attention. The level of customer-problemfit is best achievedwith thehelpof intensecustomerdiscovery interviews.At the levelof problem-solution fit, the core idea is to run a pre-sales test, where potential cus- tomers signal their willingness to buy the product at a particular price.We define experiments at this level of the venture pyramid as smoke tests. These smoke tests can be triggered by landing pages, an email, or a customer interview. FollowingRies (2011, 2016) andDuc andAbrahamson (2016), we distinguish four types ofminimumviable products (MVP) that are able to create the targeted product experience at a low level of cost in order to validate product-market fit: • The single featureMVP focuses on the development and implementation of the most important feature of a particular product. A very prominent example is Google’s search engine.Google startedwith a performing search engine tofind manually listedWeb sites. • Developing a concierge MVPmeans being in contact with the end-user. The founding teamispersonally involved indeliveringvalue to thecustomer.Airbnb is an often-cited example of this experiment. The owners identified that design conference visitors in San Francisco were not able to book a hotel. As a con- sequence, the founders offered three airbeds and breakfast in their flat. • TheWizard-of-OzMVP tricks the user as the user experiences the product or service with full functions and as completely automated, but the startupmocks the process in the back. Zappos is one startup that had to validate that people were willing to buy shoes online. The front end illustrated a fully automated process, but in the back, everythingwas operated by humans. • Groupon is one startup that used a piecemeal MVP to validate the continuous demandofusers.ApiecemealMVPmeans that the initial versionof aproduct is developed on standardized components. Table 3 aims to provide examples of MVPs for the different digital business models toworkas inspiration for startups tofindaway toachieveaproduct-market fit and for researchers to initiatemore intense research onMVP types. The use of the 4-C business model typology focuses on the functional aspects of digital business models. Different approaches to business model typologies (e.g., with a stronger focus on operations) might add additional value to the development of minimumviable products. 3.3 Case Studies Inorder to illustrate our thoughtswith somepractical insights,wehave created two different case studies with startups based in Germany (Siggelkow 2007). We conducted structured interviews that followed an interview guideline. The respec- tive companies have been selected randomly. BusinessModel Development and Validation… 79