According to Wikipedia, an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback on future product development. The term was coined by Frank Robinson in 2001 but was popularized by Eric Ries and Steve Blank. The idea was centered around building a usable product for users, validating business hypotheses, and testing a particular business model with customers to see if it resonates with the market.
Developing an MVP is more like laying a foundation before building a house. Without an MVP of your product, you'll most likely build something complicated that users neither want nor need.
Here are some reasons why your first line of action needs to be a well-thought-out MVP.
- Right Product Build: Starting lean will help you build a product with depth instead of a full-fledged product packed with unnecessary features. An MVP would lead you to build what the user wants.
- Time-to-Market: This is the time it takes for your product to go to market. MVPs are designed to reduce the launch time for your product as building an MVP should not take more than 3 months.
- Reduced Cost: Planning an MVP reduces the development costs since you aren't integrating all the product's features immediately. This validates that you don’t need millions of dollars to launch your product or to solve that problem.
Stripe: Stripe is a US-based payment processor that has processed billions of dollars worth over $74 billion. But before it reached this height, its name was first /dev/payment. In its early days, the founders integrated the payment processor for their clients by going to their offices.
Airbnb: This is another example. In their early days, they had no map view feature, no payment system, you had to pay the host in person.
- Define the Need Gap: Write down the problem you want your product to solve. In doing so, you might discover the points at which your solution doesn't meet market demand.
- Conduct User Research: User Research is the conducting of interviews, surveys, etc and it can be broken down into two categories- Primary Research (conducting interviews, surveys, and feasibility studies) and Secondary Research (research based on work done by others mostly found in books or articles.)
- Create a hypothesis: A hypothesis is an educated guess about what you think the solution to a problem is. You can use the if/then format or the "we believe" format. For example "We believe that a product tour would educate them about the app usage so that they can hire dog walkers"?
- Define & Prioritize Features: You can brainstorm on features that would help solve the problem. Make a list of every possible feature you can think of. After that, with your team, prioritize them using the feature matrix. Score each feature on a scale of 1-5. For example, score how likely a certain feature will help you to acquire a new customer on a scale of 1-5. A higher score would equate to ease.
- Build the MVP/ Launch: Setup a team of developers & designers to help bring your product to reality. The engineers would develop the prioritized features.
- Iterate: After launch, collect feedback from your existing customers. You can use tools like Canny and Hotjar for surveys. With those feedbacks, you can build customer-centric features using the data provided by your users.
The process of building MVP at?Droomwork is similar to the flow above. We start with the problem our client wants to solve and develop it into an MVP to check for feasibility.
Have something you want to build? Contact us today.
