Five checkpoints to hit before building your MVP
In the startup community, MVP is the major buzzword, and can look like it’s the only and/or the most important goal post for building and launching your startup. Depending on what your product and market is like, there are five additional checkpoints you can choose to hit before making your way to the MVP. These can allow you to hit initial goals, get very detailed in what you’re building, and move forward with more traction you need with customers, stakeholders and investors.
Checkpoint 1: Paper Prototype
Paper prototypes are part of the product design process that is very often overlooked. This is the most cost efficient and creative way to start creating something tangible and get user feedback on it. Because it’s low-tech and low-fidelity designed, founders and customers can really focus on the workflow and your solution to the problem, instead of getting by all the bells and whistles that can come with a detailed user experience and high-fidelity designs.
For me, this is one of the easier ways to start conceptualizing an idea. With all the technology and tools out there, it can get overwhelming to start from scratch in a high tech tool. At least for me, I get too distracted by colors and font sizes and things that don’t matter to the first pass of the design.
Checkpoint 2: Proof of Concept
This is another way to get the workflow or process fleshed out in another low-cost manner. When I suggest proofs of concept to startup founders, it’s because their idea describes a workflow that could be tested using multiple tools put together. These already created tools are a great base to then be able to discover how the tool works for your needs and how it doesn’t. Then when you’re able to build your platform, you’ve got a pretty good idea on what additional features you need to build in. Plus with workflow automation tools like Zapier or IFTTT, you can also automate the process between the tools, eliminating a lot of the manual processes.
Checkpoint 3: Clickable Prototype
Prototyping is a perfect way to understand the details of user experience and validation. I’ve met quite a few founders who thought that prototypes had to be created from custom code in order to impress stakeholders and investors. The great thing about creating a prototype, is that the focus is on the design and user experience, which is better achieved using an interface-specific tool like Figma or Adobe XD. You create the customer facing screens and then piece them together by figuring out what part of the screen you want to click on to display your desired workflow or feature set. Clickable prototypes can give you the freedom to be very specific with what you want without involving engineers or a line of code.
Checkpoint 4: Alpha Release
An alpha release is a pre-launch of your MVP. It’s the very first step to getting your software product into the hands of customers. An alpha release is typically public, but has a small group of users who agree to test the app out and understand that your product is not perfect. These users can help you find bugs that you wouldn’t otherwise have caught in the development process. It’s a great way to iterate and get valuable constructive feedback from users while still working through the development.
Checkpoint 5: Beta Release
A beta release is the evolution of an alpha release. The beta form of your software product will be a considerable improvement, most of the bugs should be found and fixed and you’re ready to release to a larger set of users. The focus of this release is to make sure your product can hold the typical user pool, and can grow and scale without too many issues, indicating that the foundation of the product is ready to have more users make your platform a stable solution to their needs.
First Goal: Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
The definition of MVP has been changed and refined over time, but conceptually the MVP is like the mindset that your initial launch will be a minimal product your startup can put out to solve the problem for your users. This product has implemented the minimal number of features needed to make your product viable and a real contender against its competitors.
Jumping from idea validation to trying to create the MVP can be a daunting task. This is why hitting one or several of the checkpoints outlined above can help you take the necessary steps to gaining the momentum you need to gain resources and start the building of your MVP.
