The Benefits of an MVP for Startups: Start Your Success Journey
What do successful mobile applications, like Instagram, Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Spotify, have in common? All of them have been built as MVPs first. In this article, Fireart Team will uncover how startups can benefit from building a minimum viable product.
Admittedly, there is no success story without a story of failures first. Before big brands have met a sky-rocket success, they have been forced to live on the verge of existing at the very beginning. Commonly, a product should overcome many challenges before it finds its perfect market fit.
“It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good.” -Paula Scher
When entering the market, a product usually passes through many phases of user experience research and continuous improvement. It is almost impossible to develop a perfect digital product from the first attempt. The concept of quick success is the fad.
However, an MVP can help companies speed up this process and minimize the cost spent on validating the product concept. Instead of investing in building a finished product with a full spectrum of features, you can start with creating a minimum viable product that has only minimum characteristics, which, however, are enough to make the right assumptions and see if people like your product idea.
Today, investing in full-pledged product development with insufficient knowledge of the market risks feels like walking on a sharp edge. That is why we commonly recommend our clients to get started with building an MVP .
What Is a Minimal Viable Product?
In 2011, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries changed the history of startups by introducing several innovative concepts to the world. The MVP (a minimum viable product) was one of them. The main idea of an MVP is to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
The MVP (a minimum viable product) is the first version of a product with basic features that allows gathering the users’ data, investigate their responses to a product, explore its disadvantages, and take timely improvements before a company invests in full-scale development.
Why It Is Worth Starting Your Journey With an MVP
The startups usually develop a minimum viable product to learn whether the initial concept will work for their target audience. An MVP is commonly simple but has all the core characteristics needed to deploy a full product concept. And, what is most important, it has a minimum set of features that allow spending less on development.
Your startup can benefit from it significantly since getting all the needed insights with an MVP is less expensive than blindly invest in building a full-fledged product that will be later exposed to plenty of risks.
Usually, experienced software developers recommend offering a product to the predefined target group that can be interested in it. Before launching an MVP in the market, companies often run marketing campaigns that help make the audience more loyal and ready to give feedback. They inform users that it is only the first version of a product and that a further product development scenario depends on their response.
Moreover, an MVP strategy allows you to start building relationships between a startup and its prospective customers. You show them an initial implementation of your concept, so they may appear to be interested to see a finished version. An MVP opens an opportunity to set the first interactions with the audience and motivate them to become the first customers when you launch the next version of a product.
An MVP helps minimize the cost spent on mobile app user testing since you are informed about many product infelicities at the very early development stage. It is a core artifact in an iterative process of finalizing an idea, prototyping, data collecting, learning, and improving.
The Benefits of an MVP for Startups
You can invest more intelligently
There is no need to invest in a full-fledged product with the high likability of being disliked by the audience. An MVP allows you to check if your future product will satisfy the user’s actual needs and requirements. If so, you can deploy a complete solution and smartly invest in a future-heavy mobile app with a full spectrum of features and new characteristics.
Test business concepts with little to no risks
Organizations can use a minimum viable product to investigate if their business concept resonates with those who they believe to be their target audience. If the market rejects a product idea, they can switch to another direction and develop a product that will correspond to the target audience’s demands. Moreover, they gain valuable insights by facing minimum risks and costs.
An MVP helps verify the market demand
You might think your product is what your audience exactly needs and wants. You hope that you think in the way your target users do. You hope… But you need more information about your users to clarify if it is true. The anticipations are not as substantial as factual data. An MVP allows a company to introduce the first version of a product to the audience and learn if it solves the user’s real problems or imaginative ones. In other words, a minimum viable product helps verify the market demand.
Conduct in-depth UX research and improve the usability
To engage users and motivate to start using an app is not an easy task to accomplish. Although, to not let users abandon an app after several months can appear to be even more difficult. The primary goal of UX is to generate returning users. With an MVP, you can provide continuous user testing and adapt your future product to the needed changes. So, you get more chances to make a finished product more successful.
Test a product monetization strategy
A successful product is based on the intention to simplify the consumers’ lives and offer them a pleasure. On the other hand, a successful product is the one that brings profit to its creator. In the case of mobile apps, a successful app monetization strategy can help make your product even more successful from this perspective.
There are many proven product monetization practices, however, to choose (or create) the best tactic can be challenging. An MVP allows you to test an app monetization strategy and select the one that fits your business best.
Go Up And Never Stop!
A successful product is not developed once. It should be evolving all the time to stay competitive on the market. The mature products are the result of the years of continual development. Most commonly, they are created by the dynamic improvement process and thousand of iterations that can lead to overcomplicated changes and increasing costs
An MVP helps to eliminate a huge number of bugs and errors at the early stages of a product journey. A minimum viable product can arm an entrepreneur with all the needed information about the market and target audience to be able to create a product with a perfect market-fit and make your startup step closer to the ever-dreamt success.
At Fireart Studio, we help startups to validate their emerging concepts by building prominent minimum viable products that are quickly loved by a target audience. Do you have an idea? Discuss it with our experts.
Originally published at https://fireart.studio on January 12, 2020.