Ideas & Opportunity

What is a concierge or Wizard of Oz MVP and when should I use one?

A starting point

A concierge MVP means you deliver the service by hand, personally, for your first few users, while they think it's a product. It's the fastest way to learn whether people want the outcome without building the machine that produces it, and you often discover the real product is nothing like what you planned. Use it whenever the promise is a result (a matched vendor, a curated list, a done task) rather than a piece of software people need to touch every day.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

2 resources 2 link-checked Watch Read

Watch

▶️ Video

✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it This is the canonical talk on why early founders should do unscalable, manual work to get and understand their first users, told by people who lived it (DoorDash's Stanley Tang, Teespring's Walker Williams, Twitch's Justin Kan). Tang describes running DoorDash by literally testing demand with a landing page and then delivering orders by hand, which is a concierge MVP in practice. It is the honest counter to the instinct to build automation before you know anyone wants the thing.

Doing Things That Don't Scale, PR, How to Get Started (How to Start a Startup, Lecture 8)

On Y Combinator / Stanford CS183B by Stanley Tang, Walker Williams, Justin Kan ~50 min

Test demand first with something tiny (a landing page, a few calls) before building, then serve early users manually even if it does not scale.
Doing things by hand is how you learn what customers actually need, not a failure to be embarrassed about.
You find a way to scale later, the early job is delighting a small number of real users.

Watch on YouTube youtube.com →

Read

📄 Article

✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it This is the cleanest short explanation of the two manual-first MVPs and, more importantly, how they differ, which is where most founders get confused. Concierge means you are the visible front end doing the work by hand, Wizard of Oz means you have a real interface but a human quietly runs the back end. It walks a single concrete product example through both, so you can see which one actually answers the question you are trying to answer.

Wizard of Oz vs Concierge Testing: Behind the Curtain or Behind the Desk?

From Mind the Product by Amanda White ~8 min read

Concierge MVP: no interface yet, you personally take inputs and deliver the result by hand, and the user knows it is manual.
Wizard of Oz MVP: a real front end that users think is automated, while humans do the work behind it, useful for testing whether people will use the interface itself.
Pick based on what you need to learn: concierge tests whether the service is wanted, Wizard of Oz tests whether the product experience works before you build the automation.

Open mindtheproduct.com →

People also ask

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