Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
As an entrepreneur involved in creating web and mobile apps, it is important to understand what is an MVP and how it will affects your business and helps you test your ideas in your chosen market before you create the full product.
MVP term was first coined and defined by Frank Robinson in 2001. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to get feedback from them & according to that developer can do future product development. Taking insights from a MVP is often less expensive than developing a product with more features, which increase costs and risk & sometimes it also happens that customer won’t use all of the features also.
•Minimum Viable Product or MVP is a development technique in which a new product is introduced in the market with basic features, but enough to get the attention of the consumers. The final product is released in the market only after getting sufficient feedback from the product’s initial users.
• Collecting insights from an MVP is often less expensive than developing a product with more features, which increase costs and risk if the product fails.
• Minimum Viable Product or MVP is the most basic version of the product which the company wants to launch in the market.
• An MVP has three key characteristics:
# It has enough value that people are willing to use it or buy it initially.
# It demonstrates enough future benefit to retain early adopters.
# It provides a feedback loop to guide future development.
Description
A minimum viable product has just those core/main features sufficient to deploy the product. Developers typically deploy the product to a subset of possible customers — such as early adopters, for more likely to get feedback, and to grasp a product vision & improvement strategy from an early prototype or marketing information. “The minimum viable product is that version of a new product a team uses to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” The above mentioned definition is using words like maximum and minimum which means it is decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgement to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense.
An MVP can be part of a strategy and process directed toward making and selling a product to customers.It is an iterative process of idea generation, prototyping, saving cost and resources, presentation, data collection, analysis and learning. The process is iterated until a desirable product/market fit is obtained.
Purposes
- Be able to test a product hypothesis with minimal resources
- Enhance learning
- Reduce wasted man hours
- Deliver the product to early customer in less time
- Reference for other products
Steps to Launch an MVP Product
Step 1 : Create a artificial brand.
In the testing phase, give your MVP a artificial/virtual name which will be descriptive enough to resonate with customers. Name should be in this way such that it should generate and provoke interest. Once you select a brand name, attach a logo which should be resembling or meaningful to your brand name.
Step 2: Set up shop or website
After creating a brand name, a URL and a logo. It’s time to create your storefront or website. Plug in your domain URL and logo into your new site and set up your brand’s name, logo and everything else on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. I will also recommend that founder should have mentioned some description about its product in Linkedin too,it may attract corporate traffic.
Ask your friends and family to follow or like your social media pages, to seed them with a few people. When you start driving traffic to the site to test interest, it will bring some social media presence since it increases social proof and reduces risk among potential customers.
Step 3 : Stock the shelves
People don’t buy products they can’t see or services they don’t know about, either they need tangible effect or they want appearance of that product. So you have to be little creative since you don’t have real one. Images are most lucrative medium for attracting people, so buy some quality stock photos to put on your site and social media pages.
Don’t forget to put some creative description regarding the product in the site, it will help potential customers to see all the appeal of your service, including technical specs. You can take help from any tech geek, or can do by yourself.
Step 4 : Set up Analytics
Install Google Analytics before your site goes live to see how people found your site, how long they stayed and other behavioral details. By measuring or keeping a track of user behaviour during the MVP period , you can measure success or failure rate.
Step 5: Drive traffic to the homepage
Facebook ads should be your traffic source during the MVP phase. You’ll need to set up a Facebook brand page and an advertising account.Before you launch the ads, decide how you will measure success or failure of your MVP in a quantitative way. Will the number of visitors you get ,or the email addresses you receive or “sales” earned will define your success?
Step 6 : Decide the verdict
At this point, you will know whether your idea has a pulse or not. Is there enough interest to move forward? Are you just convincing yourself ? Always be brutal and unemotional about the results.
If you didn’t get the results you wanted, Go back to your analytics and see your shortfall, fix those issues and test some more ads.
Minimum Viable Product — Testing Approaches
Websites and Applications
You can test the demand for a product by creating a website for it and then by diverting traffic to that website. The website is not fully-featured but rather a mock up explaining what will be available and inviting customers to click a link for more information. The number of clicks is compared to visitor numbers to determine the amount of interest that people might be having in the product.
Services
For a service the easiest way to test it is not to build the service delivery product but rather to perform the service for someone and try and measure how much they would be willing to pay for that service. This can be done multiple times in order to get an accurate measure of this willingness.
New Features
Advertise the feature on an existing website before developing new features for an existing product. It will be better to provide a link for more information. The link explains that the feature is currently under development and can also ask people for feedback. Again a measure of clicks to visitors will deliver a reasonable understanding of the need for such a feature before development commences.
The Benefits of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
1.Test the product in real market conditions
Even with the internal testing for products, the real market involves different factors including competitiveness, trending technologies, and economy. The only way to experience these factors is to put the product in the market and evaluate its performance. The minimum viable product also aims to build an agile process where the product is released, tested, and improved in further development rounds.
2.Focusing on the key features in the product
To make production process mess, adding unnecessary features to the products is one of the common reason. The minimum viable product allows the team to focus on the core value of the product and the features that the consumer only needs. This helps the developing team to understand what is needed and what is not. So, instead of wasting resources in a feature, it is crucial to focus on the key features that contribute to the product success in the market.
3.Reduce the product cost and time
By focusing on the main features of the product during the production, this saves the company cost, time, and effort needed to launch the product. So, instead of spending a long time developing a product that may or may not achieve success in the market, the team speeds the process by pushing a minimized version of the product to the market. If the product achieved success, the return of investment will be rewarding and if there are issues in the product, then company has the decision to try to improve the product or kill it without any further loss in time and cost.
4.Switch to agile and iterative process
The product release helps the team to collect feedback from the consumers that can be used in improving the future version of the product. So, instead of the traditional process, the company release the product, let the consumers test it, and then collect feedback to fuel the iterative loop that is used to develop future versions of the product.
The Take Away
The MVP strategy is an ideal design approach for startup enterprises though it is also often employed within established corporations on designs that may be considered high-risk from investment or capital standpoints. It is designed to get a simple basic product to market in as short a time as possible and then to examine the feasibility of the product and to determine which features should be added in the next iteration. It is a user-focused design approach which gathers valuable feedback constantly to provide an improved product at each iteration.
Reference:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/286544
http://www.designorate.com/the-minimum-viable-product-important/
