There’s never been a more interesting phase in the history of entrepreneurship.
On one hand, funding is just a stone’s throw away if you have an idea that’s captivating enough.
On the other hand, more startups are failing than ever before.
With cut-throat competition and a dog-eat-dog market that refuses to look gently at failure, startups must be prepared with a blueprint that reveals the potential, scalability and value proposition of their ideas to investors and VCs.
One of the easiest ways to avoid the rookie mistake that most startups make is to validate your idea before you jump head first into solution-land.
The MVP
The MVP or Minimum Viable Product allows you to dip your toes or test the waters by building a ‘barely-there’ but functional prototype of your product that tests the market, analyzes the response and irons out the crevices.
Validation helps you understand whether there really is ‘a problem’ that you are offering a solution to and whether you can build a scalable and sustainable business around that solution.
If you are reading this, we assume that you have already validated your market and your idea before you reach the third stage, which is the MVP.
Using the MVP for validation
1. The problem: You vs. the customer: As a creator, you can often be too much in love with your own ideas. A series of unabridged potential customer interviews that pits your perception of the problems against their views of it, can be an eye opener. Not only does it help you spot the flaws, but it also gives you hands-on access to actionable data.
2. Landing Pages: An MVP doesn’t always have to be a prototype. A landing page is the simplest form of an MVP that offers unparalleled insight into customer expectations about pricing and services. Any analytics tool will give you comprehensive visitor data that can be used to gauge the value proposition and the conversion rate.
3. Explainer Videos: Once again, this is an incredibly effective way to demonstrate the problem and the solution that your product offers. For the uninitiated, Dropbox first created an explainer video that helped them validate the product with signups before the product was even created.
4. Fundraising: Any crowdfunding website is an MVP testing ground in disguise. Put your MVP out there to get an insight about the market’s response to it. There are more perks to it than validated learning. You also get access to multiple interested early stakeholders!
5. Manual MVP: What’s better than a fully-functional product? The illusion of it! Rather than spending hours and dollars coding and creating the framework, just create the front end or the illusion and do the work manually. This allows you to test almost every assumption that you might have had about the product before you scale it. The effort needed for a manual MVP will be a lot more than what other models require. But it can be totally worth it.
6. Single features: Consider time as the most crucial resource and you’d realize that the end goal should be to get the product to the market in the fastest possible time. Many successful MVPs have achieved this by focusing on a single but most important feature of the product. There’s less chances of the customer being distracted by unimportant features. Here at Ideaction.io, we build MVP’s with 3 core features maximum, ship it to the market as soon as possible, gather user feedback and iterate based on that until you find product-market fit.
As a startup, your goal should be to make a product that people want. Something that makes them swipe their credit cards in exchange for a solution that they want desperately. The MVP is your ticket to the answers that you need before you invest time, money and effort in that million-dollar idea.
