Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or why we went lightweight

It’s like you want to build a car, you start with a steering wheel but end up with an airplane. Helen Starr

Have you ever experienced a feeling that what you do is not enough? There is always a space for more functionality, more features, more pages, more blog posts, more ads, more meetings with prospects and mentors. But unfortunately, our time and money are quite limited. Therefore, we have to prioritize.

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and to provide feedback for future product development. Wikipedia.

The idea of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for startups has been quite a while on a market and it helped numerous ventures to grow into large successful companies.

We decided to make Pixboost the most lightweight and easy to setup solution on the market. Pixboost team.

Let’s take a look at the concept and a Use Case of how it was used for a startup.

Reasons to start small

Testing. Startup always starts with a guess. The major issue with this is that it’s impossible to tell will the idea be of any interest to the customers or not. To go to a customer you have to have something to show. Even if it’s just a presentation of an idea. But most people would be interested in a product itself, at least a part of it. Therefore, startup owners have to make a hypothesis and then go and test it with the real customers. Feedback is crucially important at this stage of startup development.

Learning. There is no other way to gain the necessary knowledge than learning by doing. All business venues are so different. There is no one ideal strategy for all. Usually, in a startup, everything is done from scratch. So, with as little resources as possible founders start building a solution, do marketing and advertising, sell, research, analyze statistics, make decisions, work longer hours, and do dozens of other tasks they have never done before. Therefore, smaller you start, more time you have to adjust and learn. I came with quite a few ideas how to make startup building faster and easier and Lighter Agile For a Startup is one of then.

Stability of a solution. To attract customers you have to have a good product. End of discussion. It has to be stable, reliable, robust, and cute for customers to like and share. If they would come across errors, mistakes or faults they won’t like your solution and never come back.

Cost. It’s all about money as you know. If a venture is not profitable yet it is so hard to develop, support and deliver a product. You have to pay bills and buy morning coffee. Larger your solution more money you require to keep it going.

Risks. Minimum Viable Product is a key to your success because it helps minimize all your risks when building something new. The idea can be proven with fewer investments of money and effort. And shorter phase of learning what customers think of it. Much easier to adjust to what they would like to see. The main thing is that MVP helps you build your product without experiencing a failure if no one likes it.

Spread a word. Earlier you start more customers you attract by just being a new venture. People like Cinderella stories. They will be willing to follow you along and watch you grow and succeed. They will be your first supporters and admirers. An only concern is a design. You have to have a quality graphic design and to provide good user experience, which is much easier and cheaper to do with a smaller product.

Use Case

The focus was on making our solution lightweight, rock-solid and approachable. MVP was the only way we could do it. We focused on quality, not on quantity using lighter agile methodology we came up with. Easier to support and maintain something that has just a handful of endpoints.

As you can see, our architectural solution is quite simple. This helps us adjust to market needs really well. More you can read in our documentation here.

Pixboost supports only four transformation operations fit, resize, optimize and asis for users convenience and quick-start. We made sure we don’t make the usage of Pixboost over complicated with dozens of features no one is using.

It is easy to start using as there are just few easy steps:
1. Sign up
2. Add your project domain
3. Choose your transformation type
4. Setup your URL

The MVP mindset also made us think how to improve our billing as other solutions were harder on that. Therefore we came up with an easy and transparent billing. Users have to pay only for the usage of a service, we charge the amount of traffic used and nothing else.

After we were done with MVP, we went live and listened carefully to what our first users say. I find it much easier to focus on improvement of the whole process of development and not only on the coding features itself.

In conclusion

I would like to suggest to go even smaller than us if you can. Do as much testing as possible, comparing to coding and building the solution because you have to know what to build first.

Good luck with your venue.

Clap clap, please.