Building an MVP: Indiahikes
While diving deep into the domain of Product Management, it is inevitable to come across Minimum Viable Products and how companies have been successful (or have even failed) while launching the same in the past for their target audience.
But what do we actually mean by an MVP?
To explain in simpler terms, A Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is a product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the product development cycle.
Eric Ries in his uber-famous book The Lean Startup first conceptualized this term and defined the purpose of such launch for companies. When a company decides to launch an MVP in the market, they are essentially trying to:
a. Release a product to the market as quickly as possible
b. Test an idea with real users before committing a large budget to the product’s full development
c. Learn what resonates with the company’s target market and what doesn’t
A few months back, I had the opportunity to solve one of the Product case study challenges hosted by PM School, in which the Problem Statement revolved around designing an MVP and recommending monetization strategies for a company named Indiahikes.
A quick background about the company: Started in 2008, Indiahikes is one of the largest and safest trekking organization in India.
Before proceeding, I must mention, I am not affiliated with Indiahikes in any capacity, and the views for this article are strictly my own. Additionally, the MVP had been designed keeping in mind a non-Covid scenario.
User Personas & Addressable Market
Before moving ahead with launching an MVP, it is necessary to define 2 essential factors, viz. user personas and addressable market.
User personas are basically the profile of a typical customer of our product. It helps understand key traits, behaviours, goals, responsibilities, and needs of a specific type of user.
The user personas for Indiahikes have been demarcated within the age of 18–70 years old, with respect to their travelling habits.
Moreover, one of the top reason for a startup to fail is that there was no market need for the product, in the first place. For an MVP, if there is no market for the particular product offering, either we are too late in launching our product, or too early into the market and have identified an incorrect need of the customer that is not a priority to be met, at present.
Ergo, having an estimate of the market size is important, to understand whether there is even a need for the product in the market or not.
For Indiahikes, the market size comes out to be roughly 7.2 Crore which makes it viable for the company to launch an MVP for their audience.
In case of targeting the audience, our focus primarily should be on 2 persons — Young Trekking Enthusiasts & Mature Trekking Enthusiasts, since they seem to be aligning more with the product offerings of Indiahikes, currently.
Recommending Solutions for MVP
Wireframes are the backbone of the design, containing the functional elements of the final mobile or web product. In other words, it’s the draft version of the application. Imagine how a house is built. The contractor wouldn’t be able to start building before getting framing plans from the architect. The same needs to happen to build a mobile or web application. Engineers can not start building a website until they receive the wireframes, otherwise, they may miss an important product element.
Wireframes, may not provide the complete details of the product, but it does provide a solid representation of the final design so that important pieces aren’t missed. By creating a wireframe a path is being set for the whole project and for the people — developers, visual designers, project managers.
For the design of MVP, I used Balsamiq to create simple, basic wireframes to give an idea of how the MVP must look like, and what features must it include mandatorily for their users to give them a seamless experience.
Monetization Model
Coming up with a groundbreaking concept for the product and turning that vision into a reality is just the beginning. Figuring out how to make money from it is a critical part of planning, development, and future upkeep of the product.
The second part of the problem statement involved recommending a monetization model apart from the revenues that were flowing from trek bookings.
My suggestion was the following 2 monetization models:
Metrics
Metrics is a quantifiable measure that allows businesses to define and track the success of a product or a business activity. Metrics are used by stakeholders, marketers, and the product management team to detect problems, set goals, and make informed decisions.
Today, the biggest issue with metrics is not how to measure them — Google Analytics alone is a valuable tool for calculating and visualizing your success. It’s choosing a few key metrics to keep an eye on, spend less time tracking, and more time acting upon the found data.
Having an idea of what metrics to measure is imperative to understand the success of the MVP.
Any suggestions as to how to improve my approach and if I missed anything in the entire process, are most welcome.
