How to get your MVP right — building your breakthrough startup

Published in

The Startup

10 min readDec 7, 2018

The human mind is incredible. We can think of anything and with a little bit of hard work, we can build it. The famous saying:

Imagination is the limit of possibilities

This is true in my opinion. Sure, some thoughts really are not possible to incorporate in our physical world (think of telekinesis), or they just take more time to implement — Elon Musk’s Neuralink is actually working on a brain interface system, which, paired with currently existing wireless technology, would make telekinesis a reality.

This mindset fuels a lot of today’s innovation and businesses, especially in the tech world. In tech hubs like Silicon Valley, London, Berlin or Shanghai, we see that smart people working closely together on a goal can produce tremendous innovation and great products. We have also seen a shift in how people view different professions. Nobody just wants to work 9–5 any more. Entrepreneurs are the new rockstars of the 21st century (besides social media moguls). Everybody has their own great ideas and wants to start a venture, build that one great startup, and become rich.

Going on that journey is a great decision and I think more people should try to turn their visions into reality. But where to start? MVP is a term that you’ve probably heard before. It stands for Minimum Viable Product. This means that you try to turn your idea into something tangible that is just barely more than nothing, but still represents the key aspects of your idea.

This is then used to publish your product to the world and get important feedback. If your initial implementation is successful, you continue. If it is not, you change (you probably want to change some aspects in either case) or stop the execution. After a while you will end up with a solid product and hopefully a team and scale your business venture.

80/20

I’m sure you’ve heard that before. Twenty percent of the work produces eighty percent of the outcome and vice versa. This is called the Pareto principle and can be applied to many other situations in life and business.

Now why is that important for your MVP? Starting a new business or developing a new project is most certainly attached to risk. You might risk money, time or your reputation to build the product. To minimize that risk, you want to keep your effort as low as possible, but not such that it damages your product. If you really think about your product and go through all of the features of your MVP, you can probably remove many of those features that aren’t critical or postpone them for later implementation. If you do that thoroughly, you will end up saving a lot of time (and meanwhile decreasing your risk), because most of these features will be in the 80%-work part that only contribute to the 20%-output part.

Time spent not on the market equals time wasted

Another reason for trying to slim down your MVP as much as possible is that you currently have only one opinion about your idea, maybe a few, in case you’re working together with other people. Your great idea might be great, but will people understand your idea through your product? Is the product even the best way to represent your idea or might another feature set be better to connect other people with your idea?

Having the feedback from the market is just invaluable. Maybe you did some early testing with prototypes in a closed test group. This will give you an estimation of what customers will respond, but the market still might react differently, in short: you are blind. So make sure that you make your product available to the public as soon as possible. Keep in mind that the product still needs to be viable, meaning that it should be usable and understandable.

With that said, I want to emphasize on this point sharing some of my experience. I once worked with a founder of a well funded startup. We were very excited to build the product and conquer the market with our product. After building the MVP for a while, the founder decided to change the direction of the product and re-evaluate some features. This happened 4 to 5 times and almost a year passed. After we finally went to market, our customers gave us feedback, saying that they would prefer a solution similar to those in earlier iterations. Going to market earlier will give you the right direction.

Perfection is the enemy

Perfection sounds like a desirable trait and it is very common amongst programmers and designers — designers obviously have to look out for any striking imperfections. In reality however, perfection is exactly what you don’t want, most notably because you will not reach it anyway. You will spend endless hours adjusting tiny things, going back and forth between iterations, trying out new implementations just to be endlessly unsatisfied. In the meantime a competitor might come along and launch a “worse” product than what you have in mind, but the market will adopt it, if the idea behind it is good and it relieves some pain or fulfills a need. Actually, customers — early adopters in particular — are incredibly forgiving when it comes to new products. Remember the Pareto principle from above, going from 95% to 100% will probably take you as much time as going from 0% to 95%.

What you need for a good (tech) MVP

I do not exactly know what you need to transform your idea into a product. This depends on your idea. Developing a treatment against Varroa mites for honey bees certainly has different requirements than building AI-supported cloud software. In terms of tech products (software) however, there are 3 different areas that you need to consider.

Design / UX / UI

This is not about making your product so beautiful that Johny Ive would voice over the advertisement video. No, this is necessary to define key features and interactions that are possible within your product. This part also helps you to set up a clear structure and saves you time in case you need to change something. Implementing changes in prototyping tools is definitely easier than doing that in a later stage.

Programming

Code is everywhere and runs everything. Even if you launch a hardware based product, you will need code to either run your product, gather data or supply an accompanying application. Try to keep the codebase as slim as possible. One good way to cut time and effort is to use existing services instead of building everything from scratch. You can use Stripe for payment processing and invoicing. You can choose from AWS’ broad range of services for all kinds of use cases, for example AWS Rekognition for text recognition in images. You can use Heroku with its incredibly simple setup instead of highly scalable, but more time consuming solutions from AWS or Google Cloud Platform. You can use Sendgrid for E-Mail automation. Please let me know in the comments if you want me to provide a more in-depth list of resources I frequently use.

Business

This is not necessarily connected to your product, but you have to make sure what strategy you want to follow to gain traction for your product and that the product is legally conforming — see below for more information.

Planning will save you time

You will lie in bed four nights in a row without sleeping much, thinking about that idea that just came to your mind. Then you will talk to your friends to get reassurance on how great the idea is and how crazy it is that nobody has ever done something like that — or in that way you picture it. Finally, you decide to take the leap and bring your idea to life, to build your MVP.

You will want to immediately start building. But wait. Wait? You don’t want to wait, you want to start building! But you have to wait and plan what you will be building. This is a very important step to not lose track on the way of what your original plan was and to define what is important and what not. If you have a plan, stick to it until you launched your MVP.

Minimum Viable Business

I am not sure if this term exists or not, but I guess the term MVP did not exist either at some point in the past, therefore I am going to use it. This is what you need to launch your product and actually make a business out of it. Some people decide to build something and provide it without charging for it, which is perfectly fine. Most people however do want to live the dream of the entrepreneur-rockstar-lifestyle and put “startup founder” in their Instagram profile. Here are some considerations that will help you on your way.

Do the work yourself

Depending on your expertise, try to do as much as possible by yourself. If you are a great marketer and know your way around Sketch, try to build the UI yourself. Don’t try to learn coding for 1 1/2 years and build your MVP afterwards, the market and your mindset will most likely have changed by then. If you have trouble with doing enough work by your own because of lack of expertise, get a partner for your project who will complement you. Doing the work yourself will drastically reduce the risk for you and maintains your freedom. You will save expenses, your business venture will stay alive longer and, most importantly, you will learn more, which will set you up for the time when your business takes off.

Legal structure

Set up the legal structure as lean as possible. For my first bigger project, an art marketplace, I did most of the work by myself. I just paid a lawyer, an accountant and the authorities to set up my business. I had to choose between starting the business as a person (also personally liable) or to found a legal entity. I chose the latter, which involved a lot of expenses, appointments with a notary, more legal regulations and the necessity for tons of research, because I had no clue about any of those things. Instead, I should have chosen to stay lean, launch the MVP as a person and later transfer the business into a corporation, if successful. Until today, I am dealing with dissolving the company.

Finances

There are different opinions about this topic out there. Some people say you should never invest your own money. I think this is only true if you already succeeded in business and you want to start yet another business. In my opinion, you should always try to finance your business out of your private funds first. This will prevent you from having to share decision making with investors and it also keeps you from having the pressure from owing somebody money, in case you went fund-raising amongst your friends and family members.

In addition to funding, you should do the cashflow planning yourself, no matter what. It is vital for your success to know where the money goes and how long you can last financially. Even if you succeed with your business, you will always need that skill later.

Legal setting

Do not (accidentally) do illegal business. It is necessary to perform some research about competitors, laws and possible legal pitfalls. I once started an e-commerce business with my brother, which went well, but only lasted about 6 months. We had to stop because of trademark infringement. If necessary, consult a lawyer about your situation, the money here is well spent.

We kickstart your MVP / MVB

As I wrote before, it is better to build everything yourself — if you can. Unfortunately, a lot of people have great ideas but lack the expertise to bring them to life. We can help you build your MVP or your MVB in an incredibly short amount of time. Our core expertise is in app (web / mobile / desktop) development, but we also know how to do online marketing, developing social media and PPC-campaigns, build user interfaces or help develop the strategy. Simply send us an e-mail to hello@dube.io or visit us at dube.io, we are very happy to hear about your idea.

About the Author: Lukas Gisder-Dubé co-founded and led a startup as CTO for 1 1/2 years, building the tech team and architecture. After leaving the startup, he taught coding as Lead Instructor at Ironhack and is now building a Startup Agency & Consultancy in Berlin. Check out dube.io to learn more.