I first read about the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) by Eric Ries, if you haven’t heard about it already check out:
http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-product-guide.html

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/03/minimum-viable-product.html

And I believe the most important take away from these posts is in this quote:

Some caveats right off the bat. MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. If your goal is simply to scratch a clear itch or build something for a quick flip, you really don’t need the MVP. In fact, MVP is quite annoying, because it imposes extra overhead. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics.

For my own startup my first MVP was the aggregate individual twitter feeds (example http://twitter.com/jobs_losangeles) and the purpose of them was to learn if people were even searching for jobs on twitter, how often, the rate of customer acquisition, etc

My next MVP was to list all the cities I was publishing Jobs in on my own website http://www.jobshoots.com/ market it through twitter, and collect analytics and solicit user feedback through direct email.

Next I took everything I learned and begun talking to a bunch of potential customers in the jobs space: recruiting firms, staffing firms, executive search, temp firms, consulting firms, etc with the goal of learning how they operate, who the major players are, what tools they use, who in their firms are the decision makers, what problems they are currently facing etc.

And finally we are launching our next release in 2 days and test our assumption of our business model out in the market place! Stay tuned for that update.

Don’t get me wrong though this process wasn’t as smooth as I made it out to be. On more than a couple occasions my co-founder and I got completely sidetracked with the wrong type of customers, we half built a useless product, and we lost focus many of time. It’s really hard when your hearing input from many very different types of customers who’s problems and need are different but everything seems to blend together after awhile. Keeping organized and synthesizing all that information helps a lot though!