Startup development is a trendy area in the IT world. Their main advantage lies in the fact that you can create a convenient and helpful product with minimal financial and labor investments. You cannot do without the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) when creating a startup. It will allow you to understand how popular your product can be among users and what features in it will be the most valuable and essential.
What is MVP?
MVP is the minimal form of your product that has been tested in the market. It is a kind of free template for your future application or program, which allows you to understand whether it can perform its direct functions, how effective it is, and whether users might like it.
An MVP should serve three purposes:
• Solves customer problems with sufficient features;
• Fills a gap in the market through continuous development;
• Gather customer feedback and validate the idea.
Usually, when creating an MVP, developers do not spend a lot of time on a complex interface or beautiful graphics. It is crucial to understand how your product can be helpful to users in general and whether it will be in demand.
Most developers create an MVP to understand whether it is worth spending time and money on doing this project, how users will react to it, and calculate the project’s financial costs correctly.
Benefits of an MVP
MVP is the perfect way to evaluate the commercial aspects of a product and avoid business mistakes. Startups can save time and money by continuing to innovate. Here is a list of reasons why they should use MVP:
• Speeding up time-to-market;
• Evolution based on feedback;
• Obtaining seed funding;
• Cost optimization;
• Manage project risks and more.
MVP development from QArea will help you attract investors much more manageable. It will help to demonstrate the main features and benefits of your product and prove that they can be viable. Nobody wants to invest in a development that they don’t understand, which is unlikely to hit users.
In addition, even before the launch of the finished product, it is necessary to start an advertising campaign. MVP will allow you to demonstrate what the template version of the product looks like, make sure it works, and show how the improved ready-made and already paid version will look like.
As you can see, the benefits of MVP for each project are pretty significant. It allows developers, customers, and investors to understand how good your product will be.
MVP Planning Guide
To create an MVP software development team members must clearly understand what stages they need to go through. We offer simple step-by-step instructions that will be valid for almost all startups.
Step 1. Determine the needs of your market and business
First, you need to study the market and understand how busy your niche is. Quite often, inexperienced developers skip this point, which leads to a large number of approximately identical applications appearing on the market that no one needs.
If your niche is not crowded with similar offerings, you need to find your closest competitors, evaluate their products and understand the advantages and disadvantages.
Define your criteria for success. Find out how many users use your competitor’s eCommerce platforms or mobile apps daily, and you can build your success criteria based on this number.
Step 2. Map out user steps
For your product to appeal to potential customers, it must be straightforward. Build user steps from downloading the app to getting a specific result.
To better build user steps, you need to understand who will become your client and what actions they will perform. So, if you have a professional application to simplify the work of an accountant, then the user path here will be different than that of a social networking application.
Step 3. Understand the advantages and disadvantages of the product
A good solution would be to create a table where you find Pain And Gain for each action, positive and negative points. It will allow you to understand what is good in your product and what you can bet on and what still needs to be improved in it.
Conclusion
Only 1% of startups get colossal success and degenerate into large corporations. It is because not everyone can assess the market and assess the behavioral factors of customers. But by creating an MVP, you are one step closer to releasing a high-quality product that your users will love. It is also worth noting that MVP is relatively inexpensive, but the benefits of this can hardly be overestimated.
