How to build MVP [step by step guide]

What is an MVP?

MVP stands for a minimum valuable product. In software development, it is a basic version of the product with the least amount of features. The main purpose of MVP is to test your idea and receive feedback from your target audience.

MVP helps to make sure you are building a valuable product at the beginning when the least amount of money is invested. If at the stage of MVP you will understand that your audience doesn’t need the product you where going to build, you will save a lot of money and time.

But it’s also important to build the right MVP, that’s why you need to understand the process, types of MVP and tools to build it.

Benefits of an MVP for your Business

Focus on the core

MVP is a part of the lean startup ideology and is built in a short amount of time with a small budget to test the idea. This approach helps to focus on the main features only, the core functionality users need.

Opportunity to test early

It is crucial to find out as soon as possible if your idea is worth investing money and prevent your company from huge fail.

Gather users’ feedback

An MVP gives an opportunity to hear your future customers, to understand their needs and desires. This will help to build the product they exactly want, so you don’t have to guess.

Target audience validation

An MVP allows understanding whether your product is interesting for the target audience you have defined. And learn how to correctly present it to your audience.

Save time and budget

As we have mentioned before, MVP helps to save time by gathering the feedback from the market on the early stage. And in addition, understanding if your product is desired on the market will save you money, as you will not invest the whole sum into something that won’t work.

Steps to Building an MVP

The MVP is all about testing and validation of your idea. If everything goes well, you can finalize your product and widely distribute it. Below you will find the steps that will help you build your MVP right:

1. Market Research

Before building anything, you have to understand who you will be selling it for and what your target audience desires. Moreover, look at what your competitors are offering to understand how your product is unique.

You can do market research with these approaches:

Customer interview

A customer interview is just an unscripted honest talk with your potential customer. The main idea is to understand what the customer wants, not to pitch your product. Ask about his pains, how he would like them to be relieved, how much is he willing to pay for that, etc. In the end, you may tell about your idea and listed the feedback.

Surveys

If you want to know something, just ask! Surveys are a good way to better understand your target audience. But keep them short for more people to leave a reply.

Blogs

Blogs are easy to set up and a great way of communicating with your future users. Moreover, a blog can become a great marketing channel. Just share your story, ideas, and updates and listen to the feedback.

Forums

Forums are a great place to identify the customers’ pains. Browse niche forums to understand what your potential customers are talking about, what problems do they have and are there any solutions. In addition, you can interact with people to gain more information.

2. Express Your Idea

What value does your product provide to users? Why should customers buy your product? How does it differentiate from competitors? What are the main features? These questions are crucial to answering to better express your idea.

3. Consider the Design Process & User Flow

Before building anything you have to have a scratch or blueprint of it. The same applies to MVP. Think about your application or website from the perspective of the user. From the opening the app to the final stage like purchase or anything like that.

It is necessary to define the process stages to map the user flow. Start from big parts of application like whole pages and move deeper into details like search or order functionality, messaging, etc.

Here are some tips to better map the user journey:

• You need to identify the user. It is possible that your app will have more than one type of user. For example, on a freelance platform, there are a freelancer and a business that have different journeys, goals, and features.
• Define the end goal of the user.
• Then identify the steps, the user should follow to achieve this goal.
• Map user stories by the template: As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>. For example, as a freelancer, I want to find a job according to my skills, so that I can make money by doing what I love.

All of that will give you a clear vision of how your application should look like and what features to contain.

6. Build your MVP

After you have your vision of the product and the target market defined, you can build an MVP. Remember, that the prototype can just show the concept of your product, for users to understand how does it work and what value will they receive. Below we will talk about what can stand for an MVP, to spark some insights in your head.

MVP types

Landing Page

A landing page is the simplest way to test your value proposition. Yes, it’s not even a prototype of the product. You can explain all the features of your product as well as plans and pricing there. You also would like to have a registration button which will lead to the page where you will tell that you are on the development stage and ask the user to leave details to be notified about updates. This will help to track how much people are interested in your proposition, before building an actual product.

Explainer Video

An explainer video is another easy way to pitch your product by covering its features in a video way (just use some animations and imagination). The well-known Dropbox started exactly like that. They have recorded the video explaining the features and asked people if they are interested. After gathering the feedback, they went straight to the investors.

Digital Prototypes

These are typically wireframes, mock-ups, and prototypes. Digital prototypes save time and money by avoiding the development part. They can be interactive and clearly show how the application will work. At the end of this article, you will find some tools that will help you easily create one.

3D Models

If you are building a product that will be manufactured, you should consider this approach to show how your future product will look like.

The “Concierge” MVP

Use human resources instead of automation. At the beginning when you don’t have a huge amount of users, you (or your employees) can do some features that application supposes to do. For example, Wealthfront manually created and delivered investment plans, before becoming an automated investment service.

This approach will save you development costs and allow to test an idea.

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding allows you not only to validate an idea but also to receive payments before the product is built.

There are a lot of success stories on the Kickstarter platform, where users can pre-order cool products. It works well for physical items as well as for digital products.

Crowdfunding can help you to build a product without spending a cent if your idea is valuable to people.

Software Prototype

Software prototype is a working product with limited features. Think of it as a draft that is publically accessible. A prototype is a good MVP choice if you have proven your idea viability and made target market research.

Software prototype will not only allow you to gather feedback from users but also to test the workflow of your development team and decide whether you want to build the final product with them or not.

Build, Measure, and Learn

After building an MVP you end up in a continuous process of lean startup approach. After showing something to the world, you then should measure success and learn from users feedback.

Once you collect the feedback from the users, improve your product, then test it, release, measure, gather feedback and repeat this process again and again until a stable version of the product.

Measuring Success

After building an MVP you should measure its performance. We have written down top approaches to measure MVP success and understand whether the product has a chance to live or not.

Word of mouth

Talk to your customers and ask if they have liked your product. If not, what problems have they faced and what do they want to be improved.

Sign-ups

How many sign-ups have you received from the traffic? Is the conversion rate high enough? Are you satisfied with the results? Sign-ups show how interesting your idea is, which is crucial when you don’t have a product ready yet.

Percentage of active users

You can measure it if you have a beta version of your product. Active users mean that your application is useful to them.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

You must know how much does it cost for you to get a paying customer to understand if your business model can be profitable. CAC = amount spent on advertising/number of attracted users.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

This number shows how much a user spends on your application, during using it. For example, if your application costs $15/month and user have used it for 3 months, LTV is $45.

Churn

Churn shows how many users have stopped using your application.

Tools for building MVP

Startup Stash

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Startup Stash is a great collection of tools selected especially for startups. You can find resources and tools from marketing to MVP developing there.

Proto.io

Proto.io is a web-based application for building interactive mockups that feel like a real app. Moreover, it has ready-made templates of mobile and web applications to get you started fast.

Marvel App

A great tool for building wireframes that has a free version. It is easy to start working with, plus it has ready-made blocks like headers, footers, etc.

Biteable

Easy to use online tool for creating videos. You can add audio, video, photo, everything you need to present your product.

Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark is another video-making tool. Adobe is a leader among multimedia tools, so this product is definitely worth trying, especially when it’s free to use.

Wix

Wix is a great website builder that will help you build a landing page or another type of website with easy and without coding.

Conclusion

MVP is used for testing an idea, gathering feedback from users and deciding whether the product is worth developing or not before it’s too late, which saves time and money. MVP can be a working prototype of the product as well as a video or web page explaining it. The goal is to gather feedback from users and understand if your idea is interesting to them. Good luck with getting those first clients!

If you need help with building an MVP or an actual product, we will be glad to help you, just send us a message.