Launching a new business or startup is usually a risky and challenging endeavor, so its founders look for technologies that can help reduce risk and increase the potential for success. Developing and implementing an MVP is one such technology. MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product, which refers to a working version of a program, product, or website that has the basic features required and allows customers to understand its usability.
Benefits of an MVP
Implementing an MVP allows you to get real customer feedback immediately and provides the opportunity to improve the product in the development stage, reducing the potential for bugs.
For startup companies, MVPs are a way to test and improve development, ensure successful market entry, focus on key aspects of the product, and not waste resources on unnecessary features. Key benefits include saving resources, early product validation, staying ahead of competitors, meeting customer needs, and increasing profits.
Identifying Your Audience
No good exists in nature that is necessary for all. Therefore, you should identify and understand your target audience to get the most useful feedback for your future business. These are the people who are potentially going to buy and use your future product. You should divide your target audience according to certain criteria: age, gender, location, work, and interests to define it as accurately as possible. It is also very important to understand if potential users will be able to buy your product, will be interested in using your product, and will be interested in promoting your product.
Defining MVP Features
To be successful, you must understand the need for your product in the target market, and this need must be long-term, i.e. it must not disappear before the product launch. Your product should not disappoint users and should meet as many of their expectations as possible. Therefore, you should make sure that you have high-quality software for your MVP, despite its limited functionality. A reliable and proven company that provides software development services for startups will definitely come in handy in this regard. Some of the key characteristics of an MVP include
· Average cost;
· Availability of a real product in the market;
· The ability to test assumptions without rolling out all product functionality.
Building the Prototype
It is often emphasized that an MVP and a product prototype are different things. But a prototype can be seen as a starting point for creating an MVP. The main steps of prototyping include the following
· Visualizing the product on paper or creating a plan from your own ideas;
· Identifying requirements and translating them into product components;
· Creating a virtual model of the prototype;
· Building the actual prototype and testing and improving it.
Prototyping shows what the product will look like after development. The goal is to build a simple experimental model of an idea at a low cost to test and validate the concept before investing in a real product. It allows for early feedback and greatly reduces the risk of creating unnecessary products.
Agile Development
The most commonly cited Agile Methodology for MVP development will include three main components:
1. Identifying the problem your users need to solve.
2. Choosing ways to solve that problem.
3. Delivering these solutions to real users and getting feedback from them.
Your MVP will be designed to help users and improve their lives. It is very important to choose the most important tools to solve a specific problem but not to overload your MVP with features that will most likely only make it more difficult to use. It’s much better to improve the product gradually, especially if you get positive feedback from users for a minimal core set of features.
Launch and Metrics for Success
The final and important step is to launch your MVP. Make sure your target audience has easy access to it. To make this task easier, announce the release of your product in advance and get potential users interested. Later, you will need to monitor your product, gather user feedback, and draw conclusions. Use the services of custom web app development companies. The following metrics can help you understand success:
· Retention — how many users come back to your product.
· Usage frequency — how often the product is used.
· Product market fit — whether the product meets user expectations.
· Product stickiness — the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users.
· Engagement rate — shows the level of interest in the Usage Frequency — how often the product is used.
· Click Through Rate — shows how many users click on ads.
MVP is a way for startups to test their product assumptions with minimal resources. As a result, they can avoid major failures in the testing of real market trends.