Building & Testing an MVP in the Middle East

So continuing on our series on Startups in the Middle East, today's discussion is how to build and test a minimum viable product or an MVP.

So let's go back to more than 20 years, in the 1990s.?

You have a business idea, you believe it would be your escape from the corporate world, and you dream of the millionaire life you will be having after your business succeeds. Making you the CEO of the year or any of the fancy headlines you normally read on the newspapers back then. Your next step would be building a business plan, then going straight ahead for financing and starting the business. Couple of years down the line, if you are from the ordinary 95% of startup owners, you would probably have failed and lost all your savings or you would be living day to day hoping the revenue would cover the ongoing expenditure.

Sounds familiar??

Back to 2022, we are witnessing a big hype in the startup ecosystem, fundraising achievements in every local and international news and startups succeeding every single day. Why is that? I believe one of the main reasons is the easiness of presenting a business idea to the market and testing it through an MVP in a minimal effort without huge investments.

So what is an MVP?

Image Source: How to Build an MVP from?Spark Solutions

As shown in the above illustration, when you have a promising business idea, you can convert it to either a prototype or a minimum viable product (MVP).

While prototypes are basically used to show the idea behind a product, an MVP is a real usable version of the product where users can actually test it but with a limited functionality or feature list. For example, if you have an idea for a B2C travel website, a prototype would be the UI design with a basic feature plan. However, an MVP will be the actual website maybe built on Wix or Wordpress but with only the homepage or a couple of pages, a huge opportunity for the startup founders to showcase and test their business ideas to investors and users before rolling it out to the market. This is also where you can hear the word pre-seed fund where investors would actually place their bet on an MVP before the business is officially opened.

So assuming you have an amazing business idea, you already built a basic MVP by yourself or through a freelancer, and you want to start testing its value to the market, how can you do so?

In the below list, i am exploring 5 different ways to do so:

Family and Friends?

Although this is by far the easiest go-to audience to test your MVP, you need to be aware of biased observations. We always tend to support the people we love by showing support to what they do and that includes a startup MVP. However, you need to ask them for a fair review, to really test the product for few days/weeks and give all the feedback they can give, the worse the better!

Crowdfunding websites

So you probably heard about crowdfunding websites where you can pitch your idea and get funding from actual users who can pre-purchase the product or get a stake at the company itself. Another very interesting use of these websites is to see how valuable your MVP actually is! Post your product on?kickstarter.com?or?indiegogo.com?or even a local crowdfunding website as Dubainext.ae and see how the crowd actually perceive the idea.

Incubators or Accelerators

A rising pattern in the last few years was the huge demand for accelerators and incubators for startups. What add values to that, is that their mentors and experts can test your product and give you feedback even without directly being under their umbrella. In the middle east, you can check Flat6Labs, Falak Startups, ITIDA Egypt, MBRIF or DIFC to name a few.

Surveys and market research

Although not the most common way to test an MVP, you can use online survey tools as?surveymonkey.com?and send out a survey to a sample you choose to test the product and get feedback. Their paid packages can help you customize the right questions to get the best out of their tools. Alternatively, you can hire a marketing research expert as a freelance instead, check out our friends at?stllr.co?for some high quality mentors.

Focus Groups

If you have the time and the right connections to market leaders, you can do a small focus group with professionals and get their feedback while the MVP is being developed. You can do it on weekly/monthly basis depending on their time and in-return you can offer them a small seat on the table or your time in a task they need as well. Win/Win situation, right?

To summarize, MVPs are your road to building your own business. Unlike before, there are many ways to get market approval on your product, you can try on of the five ways mentioned above or you can create your own way.

In all cases, you need to start now. Let me know in the comments if you have any other ideas?