The social media manager at my friend Paul Cartmel’s company needs to track 3 different Twitter accounts on Klout, so he sent an email to their support team to find out how to log out of their iPhone app. This was the response, which Paul kindly forwarded to me:

Yep. You have to delete the app to log out of it. This example reminds me of what Adaptive Path calls the cake model of product strategy. Watch this short video about it before you continue reading:

What Klout did with their iPhone app is a classic “Dry Cake” approach. Even though they probably have additional functionality planned to make the app tasty with filling and icing, the current iteration is dry and not very exciting since key functionality is missing. You can’t do anything except see the Klout scores of yourself and a few other people connected to you — there is no way to search for other users.

What they should have done is build a cupcake first — an iteration that feels complete, even if it doesn’t have an entire roadmap’s functionality built out yet. It should support basic actions like logging out and searching for other users. And despite not having all the features of the web site, it should be an app that can stand on its own, one that is engaging and desirable with the functionality it does have. It’s so much fun to go from cupcake to cake to wedding cake if that first iteration is something that users are excited about.

So when you think about building your own product, remember to make your minimum viable product a tasty cupcake, not a dry cake with some vague promise of filling and icing somewhere down the line.