5 easy steps to build a minimum viable product for your start-up idea.
In 2011 Eric Ries published a book titled “The Lean Start-up”, which assisted future entrepreneurs to grasp the fundamentals of starting a new business with minimal effort.
Within the book the phrase minimum viable product or MVP was positioned.
This theory helps start-ups and growing businesses to successfully start new projects with greatly reduced overheads or expenses.
What is an MVP and why should you consider this approach?
MVP
A minimum viable product can be defined as a basic form of a product (basic prototype), which includes the minimum facets needed to validate your idea. Alongside, this it also enables early adopters/users to use it and provide feedback.
The specific purpose of an MVP is to support and endorse your start-up idea with the least effort and provide customers with a totally operational product that can assist them to survey it and give feedback.
A great example of an MVP could be Amazon’s introductory website, which was primarily launched to collect inputs about Jeff Bezos’ eCommerce idea.
Amazon, which is now the world’s biggest eCommerce website, started in order to sell one product, books. Once the sustainability of online sales was established via books, Amazon started to sell other products. The concept was refined and founded on the feedback given by those early adopters and the rest is history.
What is the main purpose of an MVP?
The main reason for an MVP is to confirm a start-up idea with minimum effort.
The MVP helps to answer three vital questions
- Do customers need this?
- Can you generate repeat clients of your product?
- Are customers willing to pay for the product?
With a cleverly well thought out MVP prototype, you will be able to obtain these answers. Based upon the answers, you can determine whether to scale up your idea and invest in it more.
An MVP eliminates all the excess baggage associated with the product idea and assists in creating a primary base for your start-up.
5 Easy steps to build your MVP
To develop, build and launch your MVP for your start-up idea you will need to do the following:
Step 1
Find out the problems you will solve for your target market.
Firstly, ponder over the set of problems that your MVP will solve for your target audience.
Step 2
Evaluate and analyse your competition thoroughly.
It is important ascertain how large your market is, and how quick it is expanding. Has any venture capital funding been achieved in the market? Who are the main competitors?
If you discover numerous competitors, who have near enough an identical business model, try not to lose hope. The more competitors, the larger the market is, and there is hope for you to shatter the status quo. Tools like Crunchbase and FS6 can be utilised to gauge the competition and to decide how large your potential market is.
Step 3
Create a bare minimum, but functional user experience.
At this point the core of the MVP has to be developed, and that refers to deliberating and developing a user journey, user flow and a basic user experience that is completely functional.
To give an example, if your start-up idea concerns itself with booking flights, then an MVP should enable the early users to choose an airline, book a date, enter the destination, and make payment. To create a user flow diagram and a prototype for finalising the user journey you can incorporate tools such as, Figma, UXpin and Miro.
Step 4
Develop core features for early users.
When you have designed your user flow and user journey, you will have more insight into the minimum requirements.
The previous example of an airline booking portal would need a basic list of contents inclusive of, account setup, ticket price comparison, the ability to search for tickets as well as book, pay, cancel and edit bookings.
It can be very confusing and at times overwhelming when finalising the list of components for your MVP. A perfect way to make it easy is to view and think as if you are a user and establish how the features will assist in solving their largest problems.
Step 5
Measure validate and repeat.
Once the MVP has been developed, you can offer it to early users and adopters. Those who are your core target market.
Gather as much data as possible, inclusive of opinions, insights, feedback and more.
This information can be used to refine, iterate and re-launch a more valuable version of the MVP. This will help you launch a version of your product that is not only market ready but is also commercially viable.
If you would like help developing your minimum viable product, get in touch with us today!
Call us at 0203 150 0565 or drop us an email at info@thealtitudeagency.com.
