Unicorns Aren’t Built in a Day: 5 MVP Success Stories

Every startup founder wants to create the next unicorn product, but that doesn’t happen on day one after launch. It’s not easy to predict if your startup idea will be a success or not. Even the most experienced Silicon Valley venture capitalists often miss the mark.  It’s not easy to predict if your startup idea will be a success or not. Even the most experienced Silicon Valley venture capitalists often miss the mark. So how do you move forward with an idea without knowing how it will fare among your customers? How do you invest your time and resources into something which may not be well-received among your audience? The answer is an MVP or a Minimum Viable Product.

MVPs offer a low-cost way of testing how an audience will react to your product and maybe even generate a profit out of your investment. Some of the top unicorns and best-performing startups rolled out their services initially as MVPs and have proven that the model works. Starting with a solid MVP (rather than a full-fledged, robust solution) allows you to find what works, learn enough about customers to create the best version of the app, scale sustainably, and pivot early if needed.

Here are five startups that began with an MVP and are absolutely killing it now.

Calendly – Atlanta’s Hottest Unicorn

As of January 2021, Calendly was valued at $3B and is one of the most popular apps to schedule a meeting.

The idea for the app came to the founder CEO Tope Awotona after being frustrated with sending multiple emails to set up appointments. In 2013, he launched a minimum viable product that allowed users to set up appointments. The product wasn’t initially open to the public and the first users were members of a Bay area company.

Soon Calendly offered the product to a school that used the app to set up PTA meetings. When the school wanted to add more users, they made it possible for individuals to invite team members and soon the app reached its first 1000 users.

What can you learn from Calendly’s MVP?

True to MVP style, the team added just enough features to make it useful for the end-users. But they prioritized the user experience and made sure that the limited functionality was easy to use. Unlike a prototype, the goal of an MVP is to see how the end-users would react, and hence the UX was very important here.

The team also focused on user acquisition first and offered all the features for free. Then as they gained more funding, they tried out different pricing strategies. The lesson here is that startups should try to understand the customers when rolling out an MVP. They should try to know which features customers value most and which will lead to more users. This understanding should drive further product development.

Another lesson is that the team made marketing a part of the product. When someone sent a Calendly link, they also sent an invite to join the platform.

DoorDash – The Original No-Code MVP

DoorDash is one of the most profitable unicorns with a total value of orders and subscription fees at $13.53b in the third quarter of 2022. But they started with a bare-bones MVP.

The founders were all students at Stanford University at the time and they just made a website with menus from nearby restaurants. There was no online booking; users had to call one of the founders to place an order. They didn’t hire any drivers either, they just listed the times when they were free and could make the deliveries themselves.

Once they built a solid user base, the team branded the company as DoorDash, started automating the process, and adding drivers.

What can you learn from Doordash MVP

DoorDash really took Minimum Viable Product to the absolute bare minimum. They showed that you don’t have to invest in a lot of tech to test the product. The idea behind an MVP is to reduce the risk of an idea not being accepted by the users and they took that to heart.

They took their time to test the idea and see if it gained any traction.

The DoorDash team also took the time to talk to their users. They spoke with restaurants and understood their pain points. When they built their MVP and scaled up later, they drove their service on these pain points.

Amazon – King of the Tech Unicorns

Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world offering a range of services and products from eCommerce to digital assistants and cloud computing services in the form of AWS. But they started out with a very simple MVP: a website listing books for sale.

They didn’t even build an automated system to manage the orders. When someone placed an order for a book, Jeff Bezos would go to a bookstore, buy it, and ship it to the customer.

Once they started gaining revenue, they used it to iterate their MVP and add more features.

What can you learn from Amazon MVP

Even before Amazon launched its MVP, Jeff Bezos had the idea for an eCommerce store where you could buy almost anything. But instead of trying to do everything at once, he decided to sell just one thing: books. Books didn’t need complicated supply chains or warehouses. It brought down the initial capital they needed to almost nothing.

Unlike most startups, Amazon didn’t focus on building the tech first. They focused on testing their idea well, fine-tuning it, and building a customer base. Once they started generating revenue, they iterated their solution and kept adding more features.

Dropbox – Give Users What They Want

As you can probably imagine, it’s not easy to make an MVP for a solution like Dropbox. It will take significant resources to build even a prototype. So how would you make an MVP and test how the users would respond? Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox had an answer: make a video.

He made a video that showed exactly how the product would work – how you’d add files to Dropbox and how they’ll sync across devices – and he showed it on his PC and his Mac. The video didn’t describe the features but showed what it would look like once it was fully developed.

The video triggered 75k users to sign up for the beta.

What can you learn from Dropbox MVP?

The product video wasn’t just a mockup with fancy effects. It looked exactly like the real thing. Drew himself narrated the entire video and he never listed down the features but rather showed them. While the users couldn’t use the product themselves at that point, the video showed it as if they were.

During the narration, he added a lot of subtle easter eggs – references to shows and memes that they knew the audience would love.

The Dropbox MVP looked very much like the final product and they designed it so that the user base would sit through it the whole way.

While the video got a lot of views, what drove the team was the signups they had, and the number of people who took action after seeing the MVP. They focused on a metric that reflected the number of people who may actually use or pay for the final product.

Spotify – The Classic MVP to Unicorn Story

Spotify is one of the giants in the music industry now and paved the way for other music streaming services. But they had their beginning when finding music online legally was not easy.

Spotify founder Daniel Ek started the development when Napster was in its end stage which made him realize the space for legal music streaming. They also realized that there was no single platform where listeners could stream music legally and in a user-friendly way.

Spotify was founded in 2006 and opened its free tier registration in the UK in 2010. By 2011, they had hit one million users.

What can you learn from Spotify MVP

Before they added any features besides music streaming, the Spotify team focused on the user experience and worked on bringing the latency down to the bare minimum. They wanted the user to feel as if they had all the music in the world downloaded with them.

After the launch, they experimented with different pricing strategies until they found the one that ensured maximum user acquisition and revenue. They wanted to strike the balance between paying a premium for one track and downloading it illegally for free; the Spotify team focused on making listeners find value in streaming music.

Test out your startup idea with an MVP

While you may not find a golden rule for successful startups from the above examples, you can find a couple of best practices.

For instance, startups should focus on the user experience and building a user base. They should focus less on the tech, but at the same time, make sure that the value proposition is clear to the user.

At LunarLab, we help startup founders and businesses bring their ideas to life. Our goal is to reduce the time to MVP with a solid design strategy and validate startup ideas with user research.