How Minimum Viable Product is a way to validate your ideas and give proof of concept?

The notion of an MVP (a minimum viable product) should be widely known by any person who has ever been connected to the startup or the business world. There are two people who started to popularize this term.

They were the startup gurus namely, Eric Ries and Steve Blank. They define an MVP as a different version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning and insight about customers with the least effort.

However, when it comes to an MVP development and changes and lots of people get confused about it. Some people say that an MVP is just a landing page that provides the customers with the most required and necessary information.

Some people say that it’s a fully and wholly functioning product with most of the features. Others are of the opinion that an interactive prototype is already an MVP.

But the problem is that this notion is far more complicated than what one can imagine and there is a certain list of features that can be acquired to every single MVP available. The approach to building an MVP is highly individual and personal.

Now, let’s find out why it’s so critically important to have an MVP for your startup.

1.????The first and the most appealing reason for any businessman out there is that it helps save your money. When you are just at the very beginning or at the initial stage, you can’t be sure that your idea will certainly win. Therefore, you need to put it to the test. At the same time, you don’t want to spend a lot of money on something that you think may not give you the expected profit. In such a case, an MVP is something that you should focus on and build first.

2.????Secondly, if you already have an MVP you can go to the market in order to test your idea. In that way, you can find early adopters for your product.

3.????Moreover, by connecting early with the users you can easily find out what they think of your product overall, what features they find the most useful and helpful, what features they lack in, and, in general, understand if they’ll actually use the product in future.

Unfortunately, many people mistake minimal with simple. If you build an MVP, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should sacrifice the quality of the product. Yeah, you heard it right.

Build a product with very few features, but at the same time, the product should be highly qualitative, that will perform at its highest potential and capacity.

So, we’ve come to the conclusion that an MVP is a crucial requirement for your startup. However, the next and the most challenging thing is how to find those features that are needed to be built.

Well, firstly, you should figure out who your target audience is. Of course, you’ll have various different types of users that will buy your product in the near future. But, at the beginning stage, it’s necessary to target only one particular audience.

Think of your user persona overall including, gender, age, education, hobbies, and how your product will solve their problems.

The second step would be to write a storyboard. In other words, you should actually think of a way that your user would go through while using your product.

When building an MVP it’s actually good to remember about the Pareto principle which reveals that: 80% of the features you build would require 20% of your efforts, whereas, the remaining 20% of the features would need 80% of your efforts.

So, while you build an MVP you need to pay better attention to that 80% and choose from them the most relevant ones.

It’s also an extremely good idea to create a list of features for every new stage of the development process. Then prioritize the list of features inside the list according to need. Ask yourself the following questions:

?How important is this feature for my product? How often or frequently will it be used? How many users do I expect would use this feature? and the list goes on. It’s also a good idea a rate the features from 1 to 10.

Like, let’s say, 1 —is the least important, 10 — would be the most important.

What are the common features that are included in most of the MVPs?

Here are a few features that you'll come across in most MVPs:

Login:

Your MVP should at least offer a secure login/authentication feature so that users are able to easily register and use the app without much difficulty.

Basic content:

Your MVP should include the basic content that helps users navigate the app thoroughly and understand its features better.

Ability to gather data from users:

Most applications should collect some data about their users, even if that data is limited to their interactions and selections only within the app.

Interactive elements to achieve the app's intended purpose:

The MVP should have extremely interactive features that would enable users to actually engage with the key functionalities.

Revenue generation/checkout:

The MVP should also include monetization features that would allow you to generate revenue from your individual product and begin optimizing the actual checkout flow for the maximum conversions.

CONCLUSION:

Therefore, as an important rule, we start by finding out the core feature that is critically crucial for your MVP. Once the core features are properly outlined, you then prioritize them from the most important to the least important ones based on what you have found out. And after that, we move to the development stage, which takes 3 months.

Hence, a Minimum Viable Product is actually the product that could solve your buyer’s main problems better than any existing product. After you’ve built your MVP completely and proved that it’s exactly what your users need, you can eventually move to the next step and focus on the next version of your product.

Thoughts?

?