Starting a business was a leap of faith a few years ago. When you execute an idea, you risk losing it all. If it turns out to be successful, great. Otherwise, you lose your time, money, and dignity.
Things are entirely different these days. Risks have become calculated because of MVP (minimum viable product) development. Before going all-in on an idea, you can see if it’s feasible and has market demand. This way, you can save your hard-earned money and efforts from going to waste.
In this blog, we’ll discuss what an MVP is, why it matters, and how to build an MVP from scratch. Let’s begin:
What is an MVP?
MVP refers to a minimum viable product—a simplified version of a product with just enough features to satisfy early investors and gather feedback from them. The idea is to quickly release the product into the market, collect feedback, and iterate the MVP based on the findings.
Let’s understand an MVP with an example. Suppose you have an idea for a social media app that allows people with mutual interests to connect and share updates. An MVP, in this case, would contain only the essential features like User Registration/Login, Profile Creation, Interest-based communities, post creation/sharing, feed/activity stream, and basic messaging.
These features are enough to capture the interest of early users and investors. As you receive feedback, you can decide to integrate advanced features like geotagging, AR/VR capabilities, and live streaming.
Why is Minimum Viable Product Essential for Your Business?
A minimum viable product is essential for businesses because:
1. MVP Reduces the Time-to-Market
Developing a fully-fledged app can be time-consuming. As a result, you can lose the competitive advantage of being first, which is a key differentiator in today's hypercompetitive landscape.
However, when you develop an MVP, you only focus on the essential features. This way, you reduce the time it takes to get your product into the market. As a result, you can gather feedback and iterate your product faster.
2. MVP Makes Product Development Cost-effective
Building a product requires considerable time and resources, which can be challenging for a startup with a limited budget and resources.
MVP development solves this by letting you wisely use your resources. Development becomes more manageable as you focus only on the core features needed for the initial release.
Also, once the MVP is ready, you can release it in the market to generate revenue. Then, as you collect the feedback, you can use the gathered money to develop and refine your product further. As a result, you can bring your idea to life with a fully-fledged product without burying yourself under financial stress.
3. MVP Helps You Gather Valuable Feedback
Feedback is crucial in product development. It gives you the right direction and ensures you build a product that resonates with your target audience.
MVP allows you to gather valuable feedback from investors and early adopters by releasing it into the market as soon as possible. This feedback helps you understand the likes and dislikes of your target audience, identify potential issues, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your product in the future.
This way, you will have enough time to decide whether to proceed with your product idea and, if so, in which direction.
4. You can Eliminate the Risk of Failure by Building an MVP
Building a product without validating its feasibility and market demand is risky. If you fail, you lose everything.
MVP development helps you mitigate the risk of failure by testing assumptions and gathering investor feedback. This way, you can pivot or tweak your idea before developing the product.
That’s what the founders of Slack did when they discovered after gathering feedback from their MVP that there was more demand for a messaging app than the game they were developing. Today, all major companies use Slack for communication purposes.
5. MVP Development Ensures Final Product Meets User Expectations
Continuous testing and feedback are the keys to building a product that meets the requirements and expectations of your target audience. MVP development helps you approach constant testing and feedback through iterative development.
When you release the MVP in the market, you analyze user behavior and identify the scope for improvement. Then, you iterate the MVP further based on the gathered findings. You repeat the steps until you are assured that the final product meets the expectations of your target customers.
How to Build an MVP on Your Idea?
Here are the steps that you must follow to build an MVP on your idea:
Step 1: Define the Problem You’re Trying to Solve
Every founder’s biggest nightmare is to build a product no one would use. The only way to prevent this is by clearly defining the problem you’re trying to solve.
Here are a few ways to define the problem you’re trying to solve:
- Market research: Analyze the market size, trends, customer demographics, and customer pain points.
- Customer Interviews and Surveys: Talk to potential customers directly to understand their challenges, needs, and opinions on existing products.
- Focus Groups: Join online discussions and forums with a small but diverse set of potential customers to understand their attitudes, expectations, and possible reactions to the problem you’re trying to solve.
- Social Media Engagement: Run polls on your social media accounts to gather direct feedback or gauge interest in the problem you’re trying to solve.
Step 2: Define Your Target Audience
Most products fail because the founder tries to build it for everyone. Don’t make the same mistake. Building a product for everyone wouldn’t get you anywhere unless you create something everyone needs. Instead, it’s best to start with a niche group and then expand further. That’s why you must define your target audience.
For this, you must build user personas. These personas are profiles of your ideal customers containing information like age, location, education level, and profession. They give an insight into the psyche of your ideal customers. This way, you can decide what features to ship and how to cater to your target audience.
Step 3: Decide on the Essential Features
By now, you might have an idea of what features your product must include. The next step is to prioritize features based on user stories and market demand. One good approach is to categorize features as must-haves, should-haves, could-haves, and won’t-haves (the MOSCOW method) or prioritize them based on customer satisfaction.
Ensure your MVP only includes the most essential features (must-haves in the MOSCOW method). For example, if you’re building an eCommerce website, only include the features necessary to make a purchase in the MVP, such as:
- Creating an account
- Choosing a product category
- Opening the product pages
- Buying the product
- Checking out
You can add the rest of the features later in future iterations of your MVP.
Step 4: Prototype Your Solution
You wouldn’t want to skip this step as the prototype would help you map out the user flow, estimate software development costs, and gather actional feedback. You can prototype your solution using Figma, Marvelapp, Miro, or AdobeXD.
Once the prototype is ready, present it to early adopters to test their interest. Use their feedback as the basis to refine and enhance the prototype before you build an MVP. This feedback will be critical in shaping the design and functionality of your MVP.
Step 5: Build the MVP
Once you’ve built and released the prototype of your solution to early adopters and gathered their feedback, build an MVP, creating all the must-have functionalities. You can do this in three ways:
- Many brands have used a no-code approach to build the MVP. Dropbox gauged market interest by making a short video instead of building the solution. On the other hand, Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn posted photos of shoes from local stores and bought them himself after receiving an order to see if people were willing to buy shoes online.
- Using drag-and-drop tools like Softr, Bubble, or Glide. They usually work well for simple products.
- Hiring a company offering MVP development services. It is generally the most efficient approach, as these agencies have the necessary experience and expertise to pursue your idea.
Step 6: Gather Feedback and Iterate
Once you’ve released the MVP into the market, the next step is to test it and gather feedback. This helps you see how your target audience perceives your idea and whether there's any interest in it. This feedback also serves as the basis for further refining your idea.
Here are a few ways you can gather feedback on an MVP:
- Conduct free-form surveys to ask what they liked and disliked about your product.
- Encourage users to share feedback through visible feedback mechanisms like a feedback button.
- Monitor user interactions on social media, such as comments and conversations about your MVP.
- Ask for feedback from loyal customers through email.
- Track user behavior and engagement through analytics tools.
Don’t stop after gathering feedback on your MVP. Instead, acknowledge and respond to the input as it builds trust and loyalty.
The whole startup world has become inspired by the idea of building Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) after Eric Ries popularised it back in 2008. It has become a trendy word in the tech world gradually turning into a misleading concept.
As a result, we have companies that are not willing to use the MVP approach as they don’t 100% understand it, experts who state the concept is wrong and clients who often get hot under the collar after the suggestion to try out a minimum viable product.
Сonsidering the fact that MVP remains one of the most important components when creating software, it would be unreasonable to drop it just because some people misuse the concept.
Let’s talk about why this lean tool becomes confusing, what mistakes you should avoid and, more to the point, what is the right way to build an MVP.
In a simple phrase, an MVP meaning is a product, which includes minimum features, or one main feature.
Well, there are lots of reasons, and the main is that customers can start using it before the overall product appears.
Thus, a user gets acquainted with the idea or concept of the future, more complex product and even can influence on its development.
In such a way, the product owner can create an app, which satisfies his and customers' requirements.
Yet, lots of startupers are prejudiced against such development method.
They are frightened that they won't be able to show the overall idea with an MVP model.
In order to enter the market with a new proposition, it is worth spending time on testing, learning, and improvement.
The main point here is to follow the step-by-step approach that includes the following stages:
This is a common thing when the company gets the project idea and wants it to become a reality.
The idea is an inevitable part of any product, but what’s more its purpose should be concerned first of all.
Every professional MVP development company knows that it is not the easiest but really important stage for careful consideration.
The improvement stage concentrates on testing and learning the quality to reach the initial goal.
