MVP to Startup Success

MVP stands for minimum viable product and making an MVP is the only real way a startup can succeed. Making it saves both time and money and let’s a startup find it’s path to a product that the market needs.

What is an MVP really?

An MVP is simply put a cut down basic version of a product that is designed to test the market and get feedback. As a concept it’s been around for a long time, with people trying on “0.1” or betas, but it was popularized as startup process, a survival strategy by Eric Ries and his superb book Lean Startup. Let me let the guy explain it to you himself in this video.

The MVP is based on the concept that early adopters can test and provide feedback to improve the product. Not only the feedback but also test the business viability of a product can also be tested before a founder invests too much on a product.

Here are some things to think about when you as the founder are thinking of making an MVP.

Build the Core Idea

An MVP focuses on one idea and one idea alone. It does not include any other features. The goal should be building a product with a minimal budget in the shortest possible time. So the focus needs to be on the main features that solve a single pain point of the target users. Nothing more. So leave out those export functions and those customizable reports that all products seem to have but very few people seem to use.

Test Early

Even within the small scope of the MVP, the testing early concept is very much needed. Have a plan to start testing from the first day of development. Don’t think that just because you are building a small scoped MVP you can wait until the developers say “it’s done” - that defeats the purpose of the MVP which is a purely experimentation and try things out way of doing things. You as the founder and your team should have the mindset that you are just testing the water as you are building out the MVP.

Have a User Group

The MVP offers the possibility to find out your potential users’ opinion, and how they want to see your final product. So although your own feelings matter and should be the first round of test on the MVP the main goal is to let real users try the product. It’s difficult to find that user group, so start working on creating a group of ideal users. You’ll need them soon enough!

Validate the Demand

An MVP helps you understand whether your app is right for your target market. It should present your brand well to the users, and show them how your project is unique as compared to others in its category. Test out the market viability. Ask users how much they are willing to pay for it, how much time they would spend on the app, would they refer it to their friends and family, etc.

Test the Marketing

Run small digital marketing campaigns, see what the click through rate. This will test how much traction you’ll get with the product. This is the time to test variations of the marketing message. Find out what message gets the best results. This will not only tell you what works for marketing but may also tell you what your users are really looking to buy.

Here’s an example of an ad campaign run for a project management tool, targeted at exactly same demographics both on social media and direct feedback. The one one left got much less traction than the one on the right. The difference is very unlikely to be the imagery or attention as the same graphics same fonts etc. was used. What can this tell the founder? One possibility is that people aren’t looking for project management they probably want team planning (although both were in the feature list). Maybe a little more testing will help, but if this proves to be true the MVP should focus more on the team planning aspects?

Test the Burn

MVP is also test for budgeting and the burn rate. Use the MVP to test how much it costs to do a feature, how much it costs when you pivot on features. A very close monitoring of costs both financial and time is absolutely necessary to give you a good data with which you can predict future costs.

Test the Team

Last but certainly not the least, the MVP is a great way to test the team and it’s collaboration. Whatever happens during the MVP will happen (and happen at a greater scale) during the real product development. So test the teams abilities, collaboration skills and communications. Find out what works and what doesn’t. Use this finding to plan fixes, figure out what you can do to improve the known issues. Try testing the improvements too if possible during the MVP.

That’s it for now! Have a great weekend!