Is Your MVP Ready? How to Approach Validating Your Startup Idea

To achieve success with minimal risk and cost in an environment where 92% of launched startups close, each project should start with the launch of a minimum viable product.

MVP (minimum viable product) is the stage of development of a startup or IT product when it solves at least one very important problem of users (customers) and thus demonstrates its “viability”. At the MVP stage, the product has users who can praise or strongly criticize it, but still use it, thereby confirming the presence of a need that the product solves. And from the opposite: if at the MVP stage the product does not solve important user problems or solves them poorly, then the market does not need such a product and, therefore, is “unviable”. We will advise you on how to take the first path.

What is MVP in development?

In the development of an MVP product or application, this is a real-life project with real users performing real tasks.

Product MVP

The MVP of a product is a version of a product that completely solves at least one problem of a potential client.

The MVP of a product is working software, although very often this term is used to refer to something that is not it, for example:

• landing page with a contact collection form or presentation: this method of testing market interest is used in the lean approach, but it is not yet a viable version;
• An untested product just released by the development team, which cannot be used due to the abundance of bugs: this idea of ​​MVP is common in technical teams, but such a product will also not be viable;
• software, to start using which you need to go through a complex training course or perform complex integrations. Perhaps for very complex business niches, even such software can solve problems and be a successful MVP of the product, but for the mass market it is still necessary that everything be simple and clear, otherwise, you will not be accepted.

MVP application

An MVP application is created to test hypotheses on which the entire startup or IT product will be built in the future. Accordingly, such an application should be:

1. Thoughtful. It takes some time to analyze the personas, tasks, and pains of your users and formulate the hypothesis that you want to test.

2. Obvious. No need to force the user to guess what this software is for. Keep everything simple and accessible, even if you are solving complex problems.

3. Engaging. Successful products compete for the time the user spends in them, and not at all for their usefulness, as it might seem at first glance. Make the user refuse all other substitute products and solve their problems only with you.

4. Viral. In the modern world, buying contextual advertising to promote a software product is a losing strategy in advance. You need to make it so that users themselves are eager to tell their friends about your product.

Accordingly, the development of MVP boils down to creating such an application and making a few “childish” mistakes as possible at the start.

Is Your MVP Ready? 6 Questions to Ask Yourself

1. Does It Meet My Business Goals?

The first thing you need to determine is the alignment of your project goals with your business goals. If you think your MVP is ready for deployment, go back to those original goals and consider if they are successfully meeting them. You can release it to collect feedback and refine your idea, but just as importantly, successfully achieve the overall business goals that the product itself must achieve.

2. Does It fit My Minimum Requirements?

The idea of ​​such a product provides for a “minimum”, which means that the product must meet only critical requirements — those contained in the definition of the product itself — and not contain any bells and whistles.

Once you’ve proven that your idea is great and can be successful in actual market entry, you can easily work on plugging in features that aren’t critical but can make your product even better. In fact, the MVP will help you determine which features will actually allow your product to evolve.

3. Does It Solve a Problem?

When your idea was born in your head, you identified a goal — the problem that you wanted to solve by creating your product. Even though your MVP is the initial version of the product, it still needs to solve this problem and, in the end, solve this unresolved problem that your future customers are facing.

4. Have I Tested It Internally?

Rigorous testing is the initial version of the product, not a prototype for internal use. The MVP must be thoroughly reviewed by an internal team, including quality assurance (QA) testing. This way, you clean it of errors and defects and make sure that it functions as expected.

5. Have I Garnered a Trustworthy Audience?

Honest and meaningful feedback is the key to getting what you need out of your MVP deployment. It is important to gather real users and consumers who will give you honest and meaningful reviews. It’s a good idea to identify people who are truly interested in your product and can use it through market research tools like targeted advertising.

Once you have an audience that can provide meaningful feedback, find ways to get it. Be sure to find out how and why they will use the product and what improvements they can offer.

6. Do I Have a Roadmap for Improvements?

Don’t rush to roll out your MVP if your roadmap isn’t ready. Let’s say you have a clear methodology for defining the proposed features that you include, as well as a system for establishing hierarchy. You have also defined which channels the enhanced product will go through until the next release.

In other words, you don’t want useful feedback to be available to you without knowing how to handle it. Creating a roadmap before it is implemented will allow you to make meaningful changes quickly.

A successful MVP means you’ve found a problem/solution fit. To do this, you need to launch it, test it on users, collect positive feedback and move forward to do the world better.

Product-Market Fit

Product-to-market fit is the degree to which a product meets market demand. Finding product-market fit is essentially a search for a compelling value hypothesis: the functions your product should perform, the audience you need to grow, and the business model that will motivate you to buy your product. Startups usually go through many iterations before they find the right product-market fit.

How does this happen? After you release the MVP “to the world” and see that it is used by a certain number of consumers, you need to start looking for such a market positioning or such a set of product features that would provide rapid, ideally “explosive” growth.

Accordingly, you select a set of characteristics “what does your product do — who needs it”, which will give you more growth. At this stage, the “packaging” and functions of the product will change. This is a large-scale change to test another hypothesis about a product, business model, or growth mechanism.

You will need a reliable partner who can handle these twists and turns and provide you with prompt changes in design and functionality. We can and know how to do it.

The result of this stage will be that your product will cease to be MVP and will show the so-called organic (natural) growth when the recommendations of the product users give a greater influx of new users than paid promotion channels.

At this stage, Unit Space can ensure the scaling of the product development team and perform an ever-expanding range of tasks.

In general, we can support you at all stages of this process: starting from analytics, creating testing of a future IT product on prototypes and mock-ups, directly developing MVP, going through all stages in the life of the product, and further technical growth and scaling. Contact us — and let’s develop your idea together into a product that will conquer the world!