Don’t Build Your Startup Without a Minimum Viable Product

What does it take to create a successful startup? Many founders think it starts with building the most fantastic product with all the bells and whistles. Or that it takes thousands of marketing dollars to reach as many customers as possible.

The truth? Fully understanding your ideal customer is the key to building a successful business. If you don’t understand your ideal customer’s problem, how can you convince them to spend money on your solution?

The lack of market need is one of the top reasons that more than 90 percent of startups fail within five years. So, understanding your customer is a great foundation to building your startup. But where do you start?

Three letters make all the difference: MVP — known as the minimum viable product.

What is a Minimum Viable Product?

If you’re not familiar with the definition of an MVP, here’s a quick breakdown:

• A working, bare-bones version of your product
• Tests your core hypothesis with real customers
• Helps you gather feedback on your product or service
• Can help you build traction in the form of signups or users
• Minimizes risks of elaborate product development, maximizes your chances for creating a long-term roadmap

Building a minimum viable product allows you to test if there’s a large enough market interested in what you’re selling. It also saves you a lot of time, effort, and money spent on building a final product with all the bells-and-whistles — only to find out that there no customers around.

Why Should Founders Care About MVPs?

Other benefits of an MVP include the ability to:

• Collect invaluable data directly from your prospective customers on your overall concept and the features they want
• Attract early adopters who will be evangelists for your product (and even submit pre-orders)
• Try out a specific feature for viability before committing large amounts of time and money

“[An MVP] is the version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least amount of effort.” — Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup.

How Do You Start Building Your MVP?

Again, it all starts with your customers. Instead of asking, “What features do my potential customers want?” try asking, “What particular problem of my potential customers am I trying to solve?”

Truly understanding the problem helps you better plan in three ways:

1) You shift your focus away from features and functionality to your customers’ jobs to be done

2) Solving the problem unlocks creative ways to address it, instead of creating a solution that doesn’t fit

3) Equipped with a job to be done and a solution to address it, you narrow down your focus to one or two key components to build your MVP

A basic MVP should include the minimum features needed to solve the core problems that your ideal customer experiences.

Then — even though it might be scary — each out to your prospective customers to get their direct feedback. If they are fantastically excited about your upcoming product launch after seeing your MVP, you might just have something worth building.

! Important Point ! An MVP, while “minimum,” shouldn’t be launched with poor functionality or bugs that can immediately drive away customers. An MVP needs to be properly functioning, even if it currently only revolves around a single feature. This is why “viable” is in the name.

What’s an Example of an MVP?

The beauty of a minimum viable product is that as long as it accomplishes your ability to test your hypothesis, it can take many forms. There is no real limit to how this concept can be utilized, as long as it gives you the necessary insights to understand your customers’ needs.

Consider using:

• A landing page to track pre-sign ups
• A survey that gauges your potential customer’s needs
• A Facebook ad campaign tied to purchases
• A mobile app with 1–2 key features

Some examples of some MVPs that scaled to successful enterprises:

Amazon: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos read a report that said online commerce was projected to grow exponentially. Bezos chose a product (books) to gauge whether if he could easily resell products to interested customers. Once Amazon was a successful online bookstore, it used that foundation to expand. You know the rest — now nearly anyone can buy and sell almost anything on Amazon’s marketplace, and it is among the most profitable companies on the planet.

Uber: Uber provides an excellent template for using the MVP process to create and test features for an app before expanding to a global audience. In the beginning, Uber was known as the web-based app UberCab that allowed people in the local San Francisco area to hire a car. The founders first promoted it through their personal network and expanded the service with the demand.

Remember, the vast majority of startups fail in their initial outings. It’s easy get too attached to a single idea and force it into the market.

The point of an MVP is to test whether there’s a market for your idea, not to take over your time and finances. Don’t forget, this is the minimum stage of a viable product that you are bringing to market. Think of your MVP as a research and learning initiative to gain traction and help inform your full product launch.