Article · ~10 min read

Zappos MVP Case Study: How a Wizard of Oz Test Built a Billion Dollar Shoe Empire

What Is MVP Free Beginner

Before building any shoe inventory or logistics, Nick Swinmurn photographed shoes from local stores, posted them online, and manually bought and shipped whatever sold. It shows how to test a completely new behavior (buying shoes sight unseen) by faking the back end and watching real purchase decisions, not opinions.

  • Fake the operations behind a new offering so customers experience it as real while you learn cheaply.
  • Real purchase behavior, even at a loss, is a far stronger signal than a survey saying yes.
  • Let the ugly, manual, unprofitable version run long enough to see if demand is real before you scale it.
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The question it answers

  1. How do I do user research when I'm building something nobody has seen before and can't describe what they want?

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