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What is it and what’s the purpose of MVP

An MVP (Minimum viable product) is a basic, launcable version of the product that supports minimal must-have features (with most value proposition). An MVP is created with an intent to enable faster time to market, attract early adopters, and achieve product-market fit from early on.

A good MVP allows for:

• Making an early market entry which leads to a competitive advantage
• Enabling early testing of the idea with actual users to check whether the product can solve their problems. (if you're going to be successful with your solution)
• Working effectively towards developing a fully-fledged product that fits real client needs.

Frank Robinson, co-founder and president of SyncDev, introduced the term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in 2001. An MVP is the result of product development and customer development executed in parallel, what he calls “synchronous development.”

MVP helps in testing, designing, and delivering the final product. MVP Development plays an important role in web development and designing. After MVP is launched, a Business waits for feedback to then reiterate to fix the bugs or introduce new features that those early adopters suggest. The purpose of building an MVP is to launch a product quickly, based on an idea, with a small budget.

Eric Ries defines it like this:

Minimum Viable Product is that version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

Recommended viewing for MVP Planning with YCombinator. https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6f-how-to-plan-an-mvp

The evolution of Bicycles can help out with understanding the MVP approach. First Bicycle fulfilled its primary function but there was always something to refine and correct.

What’s there for Your Business

1. You don’t waste budget and time on building a product that seems right but might come out wrong after verification with users.
2. You validate your idea early.
3. Use User’s Feedback and Intelligence to build your product, and then use their ideas to refine it a lot more to fit their needs.
   
   

The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. – Eric Ries

Why you should use the MVP approach in a Startup

• In 2019, the failure rate of startups was around 90%. The research concludes 21.5% of startups fail in the first year, 30% in the second year, 50% in the fifth year, and 70% in their 10th year.
• According to business owners, reasons for failure include money running out, being in the wrong market, a lack of research, bad partnerships, ineffective marketing, and not being an expert in the industry.

Most important mistakes that you can avoid using MVP approach to building your product:

Wrong Market. Too many people try to start a business targeting everyone as their demographic. This does not work well. The more narrowly defined your niche is, the easier it will be to market to the right audience. You can achieve that with a constant user’s feedback loop and agile iterations.

Lack of Research. You have to know what your customers want. Too many would-be entrepreneurs go into the market thinking they have a great service or product to offer, but they fail to realize that nobody wants that service or product.

How to work with the MVP approach?

Do your Market Research

Market research allows a Business to discover the target market and get opinions and other feedback from consumers about their interest in the product or service. Check for current companies offering similar products or services and how they are doing. Gather feedback from friends and family or users.

Prepare Value Proposition

Why will a customer buy your product? Why will he be using your service? What's unique about it? How will it stand out from the competition on the market?

As for MVP, the product in its most basic state has to introduce value to the people. Begin by outlining the users and build the MVP based on their needs.

Map out User Stories

Design is a very important stage of preparing your MVP. It should be designed with the best possible user experience in mind. User flow needs to be laid out and discussed, so it won’t leave any needed or valuable aspects of the user journey. The main purpose is to prepare the best and quickest way to the final process like making a purchase or delivery.

Usually, UX Designer is preparing stages and then steps for users to take to reach the main objective of a product. It should be focused on most basic aspects like buying, managing, receiving orders and not features, all of them should answer the core product/service goal.

Add priorities to your MVP Product’s features.

At this stage, layout all the MVP features that your product will have and add priorities - high, medium and low. The next step is to prepare a Product Backlog, where all the user stories and features need to be written down and segregated by priorities.

Build and then Lunch MVP

Once everything is prepared and reviewed, the project can be kicked off and an MVP can be built. MVP must fulfil the customer’s needs, and it can’t be a bad version of your final product. It needs to be engaging, appealing and ready to use for the users.

Use BML Process

Use BML for constant growth and evolution of the product. Build-measure-learn (BML) is a process of building a product, measuring consumer metrics and learning from them to better respond to customer needs and improve the product for the ultimate sustainability of your business.

Summary

It’s just a glimpse of what’s needed to achieve the perfect market fit for your new idea or a product. This process usually takes months of research, validation and development, but sometimes it can last a couple of years. Many companies started with totally different products that they are offering right now, for example, Netflix with their VHS rentals at the start of their journey.

atEnbi specializes in it and we even segment MVP approaches to different types of the lifecycle of your business.

Startups we focus on Discovery Phase to help you understand 3 states of your idea: desired state, current state and gap between your idea and successful product. Workshop to refine your MVP idea with our Co-Founder, Senior UI/UX Designer and Senior Developer. It’s backed by a Full UI/UX Design and Development process and helps with bringing your product to the market.

SME we focus on: Growing and adding more functions to your system.

Rediscovery and revival of your business.

I’d be happy to answer all extra questions or go through your brief to give you free feedback. Contact us at hello@atenbi.com

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