If you have identified your business idea and validated its viability, it is time to create an MVP – the minimum viable product. Simply put, this is a product or service developed with typically enough features that satisfy the requirements of your initial customers. This is a vital step in developing your business and products.
Well, despite being such crucial, some entrepreneurs avoid this step, hoping to get lucky along the way. However, if you are smart, opt for this lower risk of building an MVP before investing in the market. MVP’s are essential to help any investor invalidating their opportunity hypothesis and learn from the feedback generated from users. It is a way of launching products faster and understanding areas that need improvement.
That said, check out the following fundamental steps that all product owners should undergo before launching their MVP.
- Do a Comprehensive Research
The first step to creating an MVP for your product is finding insights into the possible problem and solution. To accomplish this, you can take advantage of the classic product/market fit pyramid. The pyramid consists of the target customer, underserved pressing needs, product value proposition, features, and user experience.
From this, you can answer several questions that most startups usually ponder on. For instance, you can unravel what your target market is, is it crowded? and much more. As for the value proposition, you should clearly understand what your product is meant to solve and how your target market will benefit by using it.
Conducting thorough competitor research will enable you to find out the loopholes in the market that can be leveraged. You will also learn of drawbacks your competitors are facing and possibly avoid them. Additionally, understanding your target market is important as most users have specific needs and requirements. This will enable you to make your products user-oriented as possible.
- Product Features Identification
Armed with your research data, you should then proceed to find features you would want to be implemented in your products. It is important that you create a product vision for long-term purposes and include features that are valuable and meet the needs of your target users.
You should then focus on prioritizing your features based on importance. You can use the MoSCoW framework to segment features into various categories – say must-haves, could-haves, should-haves and won’t-haves at that time. By doing this, you will easily identify top-priority features that will convey the core values of the product.
- Select an Appropriate MVP Approach
The whole idea of creating a minimum viable product is quite extensive and covers diverse types and approaches. Your choice of MVP approach should be based on your idea to be validated and resources available. Some of the approaches available include;
No-Product MVP
Also known as the no-code MVP, this approach involves validating an idea and obtaining feedback without coding. There are two ways this can be implemented. The first, idea visualization, involves testing hypotheses using various marketing campaigns. This doesn’t include the building blocks of your possible future product. It explains how the product will look and how it will benefit the users.
Idea visualization can be implemented through advertising campaigns, surveys, landing pages, explainer videos, blogs, and much more. This method is cost and time effective. The second method entails selling first and building afterward. The idea behind it involves starting a presale before building it. A practical option is by launching a crowdfunding campaign on relevant platforms such as Kickstarter.
If you succeed in this, you will not only get a clear proof that the idea is on-demand but also able to raise some seed investment from various contributors on the platform. The gist of this is to launch, campaign, and sell a product that doesn’t exist yet.
Product Mockup MVP
Using product mockups enables you to deliver parts of future product functionality. At this initial stage, complex automated features can be substituted with manual or easy-to-build solutions. Like the No-product approach, there are two options for conducting a product-mockup approach. They include the concierge and Wizard of OZ MVP.
Single Feature MVP
As the name suggests, this approach involves focusing on the core functionality of your products. Therefore, you will need to build your MVP with the view of getting your prospect’s job done to at least 80%.
- Identifying Success Criteria
As you create an MVP for your product, how will you know if it a success or a failure? Several metrics indicate if your MVP is either a success or a failure. They include;
- Feedback – Customer feedback is vital metrics that analyze the entire pipeline. You can find out your progress by interviewing several people.
- Activations – this is all about how good the first user experience is. If the rate of signups is skyrocketing, it is evidence that your MVP is doing great.
- Active users – the meaning of active users varies depending on the type of your product. For instance, if you are building an MVP website focusing on social communication, you will benefit from active daily users. Other ventures rely on monthly active users.
- Net promoter score – Net promoter score is a survey-based metric. Here, you will need to inquire directly from users how good your MVP is. The score scale should range from 0 to 10 with detractors being between 0 to 6 and promoters ranging from 6 to 10.
- Preparing a Story Map and MVP Launch
This is an essential step essential for further prioritization of product features. A story map should include the goals, activities, user or job stories, and tasks are undertaken. Goals are the vision of the product while activities are what can be done to achieve the goals. Activities require the implementation of tasks to be converted into user or job stories.
Conclusion
After creating your MVP and launching it, there are two case scenarios to it. Your MVP can either be successful or not successful. If your MVP is successful, metrics used to measure should reflect on a good performance of the product. In such a case, you should anticipate the gradual growth of customers and positive feedback on how to better the user experience. At that point, you could look into Twitter marketing automation to be able to focus on other areas of your growing business.
If your result is, on the contrary, evidenced by downbeat metrics, don’t take it as a loss. At times, businesses need to pivot and change in the course of the idea to succeed. This could be what you wanted.