What is a Minimum Viable Product and Why Does Your Startup Need One

Whether you’re a first-time founder or a seasoned entrepreneur, you need an MVP for your latest startup, especially if you’re building a digital product.

But what exactly is an MVP?

An MVP is an approach that enables entrepreneurs to validate their ideas and assumptions by building a basic product with minimal time and money invested upfront.

The key benefit of crafting an MVP is that it lets you get an early version of your product in front of real customers.

Their feedback reveals whether you’re on the right track or if a significant pivot is needed before going all in.

Instead of perfecting a product in a vacuum for months or years, an MVP approach focuses on building an initial prototype designed to validate or invalidate your riskiest assumptions.

This fail-fast mindset allows entrepreneurs to rapidly iterate until they find a model customers truly love.

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What is an MVP?

We can define what a Minimum Viable Product is in a few easy-to-understand points:

• An MVP helps you work out the core features of your product and create a design that is both attractive and works to solve the problems of your customers.
• For entrepreneurs, an MVP is a fast and budget-friendly way to test and research your original hypothesis and product. It gets you ready to attract your first paying customers

The Basics

Creating an MVP app allows a business to identify the strong and weak points of its business model.

It also allows a company to test the market and see if customers would be willing to pay for and are interested in their product.

Learn more about MVP in software development.

Why Do You Need an MVP?

Less Guessing, More Data

Many business hypotheses look convincing on paper and this leads the vast majority of founders to mistakenly focus on digital product development, with little to no regard as to how their product will be received in the real world.

The only person who should really approve your startup is your customer. It doesn’t matter how many fans share your vision, all that really matters is whether people are willing to pay to use your app.

In that sense, an MVP keeps things together. Your product has to be representative of your brand, with a light interface and helpful features. An MVP is a cheap and fast way to make sure you are creating a worthwhile product.

The Pros of an MVP

The secret to budget-saving is to focus on a particular pain. When you do this you receive the following benefits:

• Minimizes spending. Simple business logic means easy development and the money you save can be put towards promoting your product.
• Helps validate your idea. Before even starting the development process, a company must undertake in-depth market research but an MVP allows you to continually validate the strength of your product.
• Increases the speed of adaptation.  Fast changes are the strongest point for any MVP, they allow for quick adaptation and flexibility, ensuring the product is something consumers both need and love. An MVP also allows you to keep refining your product through constant feedback, helping you maintain the attention of your customers over time.

In short, an MVP for your startup is like a trial run of your vision, allowing you to make mistakes at the point when there is less to lose.

As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” It is the spirit of an MVP.

How to Build an MVP

Plan Before Building

Now you understand the ‘Whys’, it’s time to ask “How”. Let’s take a look at the benefits of creating an MVP framework.

• Inspiration.  From the moment your idea was born, it’s important to begin analyzing it. The more questions you ask, the clearer your vision will become.
• Analysis.  Now it’s time to pay attention to what currently goes on. Look around and understand how important the problem is. How frequently it appear? What is the current solution? Who is your customer? Who is your competitor? And so on.
• Validation. The easiest way to validate your vision and give you confidence is to ask your customers for feedback. But find the right customers is another challenge.

What Should You Plan Before Coding Begins?

• Gather the team. One of the most important things at this stage lies in supporting each other, mutual criticism, and exchanging expertise. A strong team is also one of the main requirements for a venture capital fund. So, how to build the dream team?
• Develop an MVP. Now it’s time to find adequate developers, who can provide you with a quality technical solution. To do so, you need to collect your business and technical requirements, then prioritize them before beginning the development process. Let’s read how did I collect my product requirements! Before making a hiring decision, explore the cost of hiring a software developer and what factors to consider.

As a personal advice, do not assume an easy-looking plan will be easy to follow. Often the more detail the better to help keep disciplined and on track. Remember an MVP is only the first step to building a successful app.

What Comes After an MVP?

Track Key Metrics

The basic principle of lean startup design is to build, measure, and learn.

It’s very important to choose the correct metrics of measurement since there is no standard. This approach depends on your business model. For example, the SaaS product of an MVP is based on the following metrics:

• The lifetime value of a customer.
• Cost of acquisition of a customer.
• Churn rate.

Tracking customer retention is essential, and this churn rate calculator can help measure your customer loyalty.

Keep attention, the wrong chosen metrics could make you follow the failed vector of the development.

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And Remember

• Always ask your target audience for feedback.
• Always listen to your target audience.

The basics of the MVP concept.

Next Steps

An MVP offers the ideal starting point for any aspiring entrepreneur. 

Here are three reasons to make an MVP your first move when launching a startup:

• Test assumptions with real users to gain invaluable early feedback, especially as a first-timer. Quickly validate if your vision truly resonates before going all in.
• Enable smart money management. Score proof-of-concept without overspending upfront. Pivoting based on an inexpensive MVP can steer you away from wasting precious capital.
• Simplicity and laser focus delight users. Solve one pressing problem extremely well. Complexity can come later once initial traction is achieved.

While an MVP sets you on the right trajectory, remember it’s only step one. 

Carefully plan budgets and milestones over time. Launching an MVP marks the start of the journey, not the destination.

Eager to start bringing your big ideas to life? 

Contact our team to explore how our MVP development and product discovery services can guide you in launching your breakthrough digital venture.