When to build your Minimum Viable Product
A lot of entrepreneurs skip the Minimum Viable Product and jump right into development. Don’t make their mistakes!
There are plenty of things entrepreneurs need to do before jumping into development — it all starts with a great Minimum Viable Product. A minimum viable product is key when creating a tech startup. Hundreds of entrepreneurs come to VentureStorm with an idea, claiming they need a software developer to bring it to life, but when my team and I ask about their product they freeze. New entrepreneurs get stuck in a loop of finding a pain point, generating an idea, and then attempting to build a product immediately. Our next few posts will discuss the need for an MVP and how to get started.
A minimal viable product, otherwise known as the MVP, is a term coined by Eric Riess, an American entrepreneur, blogger and author of The Lean Startup. Simply put, an MVP is a version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
There are a few key steps to take before development can and should begin. The first is creating an amazing MVP. Because software developers are in high demand, like capital, you need to convince them about your vision just as much as you would a venture capitalist.
Without an MVP you most likely have not talked to potential customers (or at least not enough), gotten validation for your idea, gained a clear market strategy, a business plan, evaluated revenue streams, or the thousand other pieces of information that goes into a business. The MVP allows you to take something (a video, prototype app, drawings, etc) and get it in front of potential customers right away to get valuable feedback. This feedback will become the backbone of your product as you use the learnings from the MVP to develop your product around your customers wants and needs.
The MVP will get you in the right mindset. Just thinking about creating one will get you thinking about target customers/users, how they will use your product, who will benefit from them using it, and who will eventually pay you for the value you create. An MVP shouldn’t be something you crawl into your basement only to emerge weeks or months later. It should take you at maximum a day or two and be easily testable with users.
