Every great product or service on the market today started somewhere. Often, the first version of a product is far from its final form. That first version is known as a Minimum Viable Product or MVP.
Product owners, startups, and entrepreneurs use this concept to validate their ideas before investing too much time, money, and effort into developing a full-fledged product. And if you have plans to build a product of your own, creating an MVP should undoubtedly be your first step.
In this article, we’ll explore the meaning of an MVP, its importance, and how you can build one for your business.
What is an MVP?
If we are to put it in simple terms, an MVP is a skeletal version of your product. This version allows you to test your hypothesis in the market with minimum investment.
Frank Robinson, who co-founded and is the president of SyncDev, coined the term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in 2001. He said that an MVP is when product and customer development happen simultaneously, a method he calls “synchronous development.”
But what sets MVP apart from a demo or prototype?
A demo is mainly for showcasing ideas, while an MVP includes enough features for market release and feedback. This allows you to gain valuable insights early in the product development lifecycle.
Purpose of an MVP
Why should you opt for an MVP instead of going all out and developing a complete product from the get-go?
Here are the main reasons:
- Test your idea: Products begin with an assumption or hypothesis about market need. Assumptions can be inaccurate, and an MVP lets you test your idea without heavy investment.
- Hear from your target audience: An MVP is a direct channel where your customers can provide feedback and help shape the final product. This ensures that your product meets their needs and preferences.
- Fail fast and pivot: If your MVP fails to gain traction, it’s better to know sooner. This lets you make changes or pivot before investing too much.
For example, you want to build a fitness app. An MVP for this could be a simple version of your app that allows users to track their daily steps and water intake. This will give you enough data to understand if your target audience is interested. And when they are, you can continue adding features such as workout plans or nutrition guides.
Otherwise, you can pivot your idea and create a different health-related product based on the feedback received.
Types of MVP
There are two main types of minimum viable products:
- Low-fidelity MVP: It is easier to develop with less effort than a high-fidelity MVP; it gathers customer insight about a problem and checks the solution’s value.
- High-fidelity MVP: More complex than a low-fidelity MVP, it provides an actual solution beyond gauging interest and assesses its value based on customer willingness to pay.
Why is an MVP important?
Sure, your product development process can be completed without creating an MVP first. So, why invest time and resources into one?
You want to deliver your product fast. That’s right, but the MVP has to be an embodiment of your long-term product vision.
Developing a minimum viable product helps prioritize workflows and deliver solutions quickly. It offers an early chance to gather qualitative and quantitative data about user experience instead of waiting for perfection.
For instance, you might prioritize the water intake feature of your fitness app, but releasing your MVP shows that users love the daily motivation quote feature you considered minor. Knowing this before investing in the wrong features helps build products people want.
Relying on customer data instead of guesswork boosts confidence in launching new features and updates, which is crucial for agile product development that thrives on quick movement and continuous feedback.
Benefits of Creating an MVP
If you’re still unconvinced about developing your minimum viable product, here are some benefits to consider:
Validate product hypotheses with actual user feedback
Customer feedback is incredibly valuable, and many product developers want to get their hands on a ton of it. Why? Because you can learn a lot from your users about what they like, dislike, and need.
An MVP is the way to get that. By releasing a basic version of your product, you can gather customer feedback instead of relying solely on your own ideas.
Save your time and money
A product team can spend months to years developing a product that might or might not work. But you can cut all of your spending and deliver a product people want quicker when you start with an MVP.
With this, you can allocate your budget and development time more efficiently, focusing on all the features that customers care about. You can use the resources saved to improve or promote your product launch.
Lean development
The idea of “lean” or minimal development is fundamental to developing an MVP. It helps you develop and test the core features of your product with just enough resources instead of trying to create a perfect, feature-heavy product from the beginning.
Essentially, you get to focus on what matters most and iterate accordingly based on user feedback.
Identify and fix early-stage issues
“Synchronous development” methodology, as Robinson calls it, opens opportunities to identify and fix issues early on. These just aren’t bugs but also critical design flaws and user experience problems.
Fixing these early saves you from spending extra resources on rework, which is often the case when working on a fully developed product.
Set up for success
Lastly, a minimum viable product gives you the foundation for a successful product launch. With an MVP, you get to collect valuable data and build a product that resonates with your target audience.
What’s more, you have a built-in user base that’s given insights and feedback all along. This boosts its chances of succeeding in the market!
Examples of Minimum Viable Products
Here’s how MVPs work in practice, with examples from successful tech companies:
Dropbox
Drew Houston, co-founder of Dropbox, launched a simple three-minute video to demonstrate the platform, targeting high-tech adopters. The video, acting as a minimum viable product, led to 75,000 beta invite requests overnight, validating the demand for easy-to-use file-sharing software.
Facebook started as a simple platform called Thefacebook (its MVP), designed to connect Harvard students by allowing them to post on shared boards. By targeting this narrow market, Zuckerberg validated the idea and gained critical mass, leading to the widespread adoption of the social media network.
Uber
Uber started in 2009 as UberCab, initially available only on iPhones or via SMS in San Francisco. The MVP proved the market for affordable ride-sharing, which, through validated learning and data, helped Uber scale rapidly. Today, valued at around $154.37 billion, Uber operates in more than 70 countries worldwide.
5 Steps to Define Your MVP
Getting to your MVP can be one of the trickiest parts of your business strategy, but it’s one of the most important.
Here are the essential steps to define your MVP:
1. Identify user problems and pain points
The first step in building an MVP is identifying a problem. This could be from an existing product or service that is not satisfying a particular user need, or it could be something entirely new.
Startups and product managers benefit from market research by gathering enough data to support the proposed solution. Remember that qualitative data helps confirm the market gap.
To start a minimum marketable product, consider the following:
- Pain points. Step into your potential users’ shoes. What are they trying to accomplish, and what issues are they facing?
- How your solution solves a problem. You’re helping tackle a problem from a new perspective. What does your solution offer that they’re missing? Process? Technology? Both?
- The before and after. How does your customer’s day improve after using your product? If it’s “much better,” you have a compelling vision to share.
When it comes to methodology, market research can be done using firmographic or demographic info, competitive analysis, opportunity, and SWOT analysis, and fun methods like surveys, interviews, and focus groups.
2. Define your business objectives and align them with your MVP
Before deciding on features to build, ensure your MVP aligns with your team’s or company’s strategic goals. These questions might determine if now is the right time to develop a new MVP:
- Are you aiming for a revenue target in six months?
- Do you have limited resources?
- Do you want to hire an offshore team?
For example, if your goal is to attract new users in an adjacent market to your existing products, this MVP plan may be strategically viable.
But if your priority is focusing on core markets, it might be better to shelve this idea and focus on an MVP that offers new functionality for existing customers.
3. Determine features and functionality
All products come with features, but with an MVP, you’re crafting the core component of that product. So, what features are essential to build your MVP so that it has enough value for your users?
This part requires deep consideration as it can be challenging to determine the features that are crucial for your MVP. To help you get started, here are some questions to answer:
- Which features will reduce the users’ time to value and enable them to reach critical moments faster? Essentially, how can you eliminate the friction points that hinder users from understanding your product’s value?
- What features should be included in the onboarding process to ensure its success? These are the must-haves versus what can be added later as polish (the nice-to-haves).
- Which critical action should your MVP focus on getting users to take?
For example, if you’re building a social network, should your MVP focus on getting users to follow at least five other users?
4. Translate your MVP functionality into a development action plan.
Once you’ve decided on the limited functionality for your MVP, translate this into a development action plan.
Remember, the product must be viable, allowing customers to complete tasks or projects and offering a quality user experience. An MVP can’t be a user interface with incomplete tools and features; it must be a working product your company can sell.
So, what should your action plan entail?
- Team roles: Who will be responsible for executing the MVP?
- Timeframe: What’s the launch date?
- Platforms and tools: Where and how will you execute your plan? Will it be through the web or mobile platforms? Which development tools, frameworks, languages, and libraries will you use to build your MVP?
- Budget: How much will it cost to develop this MVP?
Having a clear action plan helps ensure that your MVP development stays on track and meets the necessary objectives. It also helps you make informed decisions about features and functionality, as well as prioritize tasks and resources effectively.
5. Test and Validate the MVP
The most crucial part of the MVP process is validation, but you don’t always need a functioning product for valuable user feedback. Ways to validate an MVP include:
- Creating a landing page
- Emailing subscribers
- A/B testing changes to your website or app
- Interviewing customers
- Analyzing user behavior data
The methods for validating an MVP depend on your product’s viability at launch. Simple options, like a landing page or manual order fulfillment, allow for validation with just a product concept. More established teams with infrastructure can go deeper by analyzing actual in-product behavioral data.
Regardless of the method, the goal is to set up a reliable feedback loop to gather user input.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Development with Startechup
A Minimum Viable Product gives you maximum impact with minimal investment. As long as you make it with a great product team, your MVP is the best way to test market demand and start gaining valuable customer feedback.
As a trusted software development company in the Philippines, Startechup has extensive experience creating MVPs for startups and established companies. Whether it’s a web or mobile app, our team of skilled developers and designers can help you build a functional MVP that meets your business needs!
Contact us today to learn more about our MVP development services and how we can help you launch your product successfully!
