Since the beginning of the startup era, we have witnessed the rise and fall of many startups. In the end, we were left with the ones that consistently evolved as per the customer needs and feedback. Launching a new startup requires a lot of time, patience, and effort. Having said that, entrepreneurs can always look for some inspiration from the most successful startups that not only disrupted their respective industries but also made the right decisions to build sustainable business models. One lesson that every startup, planning to launch their product, can learn is launching a Minimum Viable Product first and then iterating it as per customer feedback and performance. Let’s understand how an MVP can help your startup to build a useful product that performs, sells, and most importantly sustains in the market.
What is a Minimum Viable Product?
No matter how unique your startup idea is or how well you have researched the market, there will always be inevitable surprises that might put your newly launched startup into jeopardy. This means you can never be sure if your startup will succeed or not but you still put everything at stake.
Isn’t that too much of a risk? I mean you are investing all your funds, time, and energy into something that might or might not work. While I am not denying the fact that running a business is about taking risks but what if there was a way to plan better and expand accordingly.
This better way of launching a product involves launching the minimum viable product (MVP) that allows businesses to test the performance of the product in the real market with real customers before building it completely. So, you can build your product that has the most essential features that you want your customers to use. This helps you to evaluate the product, how the customers are interacting with it, find out the improvement areas, optimize costs, and find out new possibilities. Moreover, you can also just introduce your product via a demo video, or a landing page and analyze the response of the target audience.
Stages In MVP Development
Product Prototype
The creation of your product’s prototype begins from the day you start sketching it out on a blank paper or maybe a coffee shop’s paper napkin or even your handkerchief. Those diagrams that define your vision of the product are transformed into blueprints using professional tools. The prototype serves as a referential flow of how your product will work, one step after the other. You can also call it a pre-MVP stage.
Minimum Viable Product
When your app development team starts to add functionality to the prototype so that it performs what it was designed for. That said, this is the decisive stage where you have to carefully look for the bare minimum functionality to be added to set the right user expectation from the start.
Proof of Concept
To make people realize that they need to have your product in their lives, it is essential to push your concept to them. Creating hype about the product grabs the attention of users and they stipulate towards the given call to action.
If your product resolves some previously complicated processes, then you already have a Proof of Concept. This implies that you have proof that your concept has enough market acceptance.
It could be the number of prototype downloads that your product gets on its first release or maybe enough amount of positive ratings that could be represented to the potential investors. Such driving factors would then prove to be the fundamental cause of your product’s future growth.
Why Choose MVP Development?
Rather than launching a complete product and failing at it, it is better to launch its initial version and learn from it. This not only minimizes the risk factor but also enables efficient business planning. While we do not guarantee that MVP would work for every startup, but it can prove to be your safest bet so that you can think wisely before it’s too late.
Verified Results
When you have measurable pointers that you can use to analyze if your product will be accepted or not, it becomes easier to plan the next step.
Better & Reliable User Base
With MVP, it is easier to market the idea to potential customers over various platforms which helps in creating a stronger and larger user base. Moreover, with their suggestions and feedback, businesses can easily create new versions of products that will be eagerly adopted by the audience that, now, feels a part of it.
Playing Safe & Bigger
Every entrepreneur who is now successful, once thought about failing, which is natural. That said, the consequences can be controlled with better planning, which in this case means MVP. There will be various critics that will not spare any business from pointing out the limitations. But, you will be lucky because you did not launch the full-fledged version of a startup fiasco. Additionally, you can improvise and modify the product features and launch it again, thus, making an impression of a business that values customers, critics, and their feedback.
Release Early, Release Often
Unlike conventional Software Development Lifecycles, MVP development is agile that follows Release Early Release Often (RERO) approach. In each update of your product, you can incorporate the feedback and then analyze it further for performance issues, thus enabling optimization of the engineering output.
Bottomline
From Uber to Airbnb to Snapchat to any other revolutionary startup name that you could think of, every single one of them adopted the MVP development and I do not need to tell you how big they have become and how far they have come.
Points to take away from this blog:
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MVP development can accelerate the development process which is not possible in the case of conventional SDLCs.
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Through MVPs, feedback loops are created that allow development teams to make the required changes to enhance the user experience.
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MVP development allows you to save a lot of time, money, resources, and energy, thus, reducing the losses in case of product failure.
There is always a better way of doing things, and in the case of software development, it has to be the MVP development. If you wish to learn more, get in touch with our industry experts who can offer free business consultation to you.
Stay tuned for the next dose to tech!
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