9 lessons learned building MVPs

We (Woost) have been building MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) for the last couple of years. We help start-ups and corporates with the development of new digital products. In those years we’ve learned a lot: refining and improving the way we approach these projects.

In this article we share the nine most important lessons we learned building MVPs.

1. Determine your product strategy

When we start a new project, everyone is excited and wants to start building right away. But before take-off, it’s important to get the whole team on the same page. We always start with answering these questions:

• Who is our target audience?
• What is their problem?
• How are we going to solve it?
• What do we want to validate with our MVP

Write those questions on a big sheet and tape them on the wall. Every time you have a discussion, you can use those questions to make a decision. It doesn’t matter if you refine them during development, but it keeps everyone aligned.

We facilitate workshops to get this done within a day.

2. Be rigorous about limiting scope

As an entrepreneur you have tons of ideas for your new product. But you’ll have to choose. Budget and time are limited, so you want to make the right decisions for your MVP. Keep in mind: the goal of the MVP is to validate the concept. You want to see if the product gets traction and which adjustments it needs. One obvious example of something you can omit is a fancy admin panel. Maybe you can just edit the content of your app directly in the database?

For the next section, we assume you have some basic knowledge about the Scrum software development principles.

To decide what needs to be in the MVP, we follow these steps in every project:

• Start with answering the following question: why does your customer want this product? This is the goal you will need to validate with the MVP.
• Make a product vision box: if your product was a physical product which is sold at the supermarket, what would the package look like?
• Create a backlog of all your ideas. Don’t limit yourself. If you think the idea is valuable: put it on the backlog.
• Add high level estimations to your ideas and prioritize the backlog.
• Decide which features are vital for your MVP. Without them, you are not able to validate the concept with your customers.
• Create wireframes for these vital features.
• Write user stories, but don’t go into too much detail. You’ll add this later during the building phase.

This might look overwhelming, but not to worry. Most of this can be done in a couple of days. We can help you with the process.

3. Limit time

When you are building the product, you get enthusiastic. You’ve worked towards this, it gets tangible, the team gets new ideas, you get new ideas, you want more!

We always set a time limit for the development of the first version. We determine the amount of time we need in advance. After building many new products, we found out that three to five weeks is in many cases a perfect time limit for an MVP. You’ll be amazed what you can do in one month! We’ve launched the first version of BoatNow, HomeMatching, Chums Referral and eBuddy.lock in less than one month.

When you start building, take into account the 80/20 rule. In 20% of the time you get 80% of the work done. The last 20% takes 80% of the time. This is a handy guideline when you need to make the tough decisions. We are there to help! While making those decisions, we always look at the goals we’ve set. It’s more important to get the things you include right than pushing as many features as possible in the MVP.

4. Not every great developer is capable of creating MVPs

It is essential that the team building the MVP has the right mindset. And often developers are the ones whom you need to be careful of.

There are many developers who thrive by structure, clear plans and predictability. And in many cases they are best for the job. But when you are creating a new product without an exact plan, your team needs to fill in the precise scope along the way. You will get new insights during the process: the plans change all the time. You need a different mindset for that. For digital products, developers are the ones actually creating the product. So it is essential that you can work together in a constructive and productive way.

You need developers who think along, speak up, don’t want to keep things according to plan simply because you agreed on it. You need developers who are really co-creating the product. Often they work on their own ideas themselves as well.

This doesn’t mean you can just change your mind every day. Because it will take time to revert decisions and spent all your time changing things.

5. Work in (very) small sprints

The plans will change all the time, but you also need enough focus. Otherwise nothing gets done. To make sure you have enough focus, we usually work in sprints of one week. For most MVPs we spend 3 to 5 sprints building the first version. By using sprints, you make sure you focus on a certain goal for at least for one week.

6. Get a good designer in the team

We always get a good designer in the team, so the first version actually looks good. This doesn’t mean your first version needs to be pixel-perfect, but it does need to be appealing. Your product will have quite some loose ends, but your clients must fall in love with your product.

7. You shouldn’t be too embarrassed by your first version

We don’t totally agree on Reid Hoffman’s (founder LinkedIn) famous quote “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” It is absolutely true that it’s more important to make pace than it is to release a final product. But you only have one chance for a first impression. When you spend a fair amount of money to reach your potential customers, it is really important the first impression your customers get is the impression of a product they want to use.

8. Marketing, marketing, marketing

It is great that you have an awesome idea. But to be frank, there are many people with great ideas. Less of them actually launch their ideas, but still, the web and the app stores are filled with great ideas no-one is using.

It always gets underestimated how difficult it is to reach your target audience. We won’t go into details in this article, but be aware that you are far from done when you’ve brought your idea to reality.

9. Take time to improve

When you have followed the MVP process, you will have taken some shortcuts. As soon as you have launched, you will find out your product is — indeed — not perfect. Yet. You will realize you had made some mistakes and you will get comments and feedback from your users. This feedback is actually really important: this is the whole goal of the MVP. But don’t start blindly implementing all the feedback you get. Take some time to structure your customer’s wishes and make a plan. Quite soon, you’ll need the time and resources to make improvements and implement new features. But when you get traction, there is nothing more fun and rewarding than this!

These steps always help us when we start a new MVP project. Hopefully it gives you some direction as well. We love to hear your stories about launching new products!