I Want to Build an MVP. How to Begin?

Introducing a new product on the market is always a risk. The good news is that you can stay on the safe side and offer a product meeting the actual requirements of your clients. To achieve all that, you’ve probably decided to get a minimum viable product or MVP. Let’s see it through then.

The guide you’re reading is a representation of the methodology we use at Fively dealing with development projects for our clients. You may take it as a part of your strategy no matter what developer you’re going to work with.

Define the Issue You’re going to Solve

According to the classical theory of marketing, you should start with market research, analyze the niches, and define where to enter. However, in practice products are really viable and competitive when created as a solution to a specific urgent problem. It can either be a situation you‘ve faced personally or know from other people. This way you’ll also define a particular segment of your audience.

Get to Know Your Competitors

When you decide on the problem and key idea, take a look around at your existing rivals. It would be naive to trust in some killer ideas blindly and not to analyze the real state of affairs. Even if you know that your product will be unique, it’s not a valid point to get straight to programming. Check indirect competitors too.

Depending on the platform of interest, the tools for competitor analysis vary. Use Google Search and Google Trends for identifying websites, app stores for app search, SimilarWeb, Moz, the tools of Neil Patel, Ahrefs for deeper analytics.

Determine the User Journey

Think about how the customers will use your software. Decompose the process into particular stages, it will be easier to name the software features for a particular step after that.

You may have one user category or more which depends on your market sector and the problem you’re going to solve. For each category identify the actions to be done so that a user could accomplish a goal with the help of your product. The desired actions may also vary - a purchase, booking a ticket, calling a taxi. Determine it for all cases.

Make a List of Features

As soon as you’ve prepared a customer flow map, you can easily describe the features to be provided for each situation. Here you should decide which features are more important and which ones you can exclude without losses.

To make the decision-making process more structured and transparent, define the key feature for each stage, justify the importance of additional features, and add them to the list in priority order. Cross out the features you don’t really care about. 

Make a Prototype

Now you have a solid foundation for the future MVP. Before moving to it, define the number of key features for the initial version of your product or a prototype. The main profit of a prototype is the ability to test your product, its design, and logic. You’ll make sure you’re going in the right direction and won’t waste money.

Develop and Test

You have all the necessary requirements to instruct developers. When your MVP is ready, invite QA specialists to find possible bugs. After that, test it on so-called early adopters and analyze their feedback. The reviews of your first customers may lead you to the modifications of the MVP or even of the prototype. Changing, testing, analyzing steps should repeat until you come up with a mature product.

Now you know how to get down to MVP creating. If any clarifications are required or you would like to announce your plan to us for further deployment, feel free to contact Fively team.