Are you a startup looking for handy advice on launching the product? This article considers key peculiarities and benefits of a minimum viable product that will help you enter the market more successfully.
Do you plan to create an outstanding product that will lead in the market? Then, you should definitely think of a minimum viable product. This approach will help you save money and time by creating a product that fits real user needs and evolves dynamically based on the community’s feedback. It’s also an excellent way to find a perfect product-market-fit and fill the market demand with what’s really relevant for your target audience.
A minimum viable product (MVP) is a basic, launchable version of the product that supports minimal yet basic and necessary features that define its value proposition. MVP is usually created with the purpose of a faster time to market, attract early adopters and engage investors. Once MVP is launched, product creators collect the initial user feedback based on which they iterate with a product to fix all bugs and improve user experience.
In mobile app development, MVP is a basic version of the application with core functionality needed to demonstrate the product’s essential value. In MVP, it’s important to develop minimum features, test them with a real audience and continually grow the product based on user feedback. It’s a version of the product that allows a team to gather the necessary information and knowledge about the users’ preferences, actual needs, and expectations. MVP helps in testing, designing, and delivering the full-fledged, final product. A good MVP can be characterized by 5 adjectives: usable, minimal, functional, reliable, and lovable.
Starting your development journey with a minimum viable product is a good idea since it benefits for a business. Below, we mention the most important of them.
1. Focus on building the core functionality
The MVP approach is based on the ideology of a lean startup, which means that the product should be built first with core features at a minimum budget in a given time. Since MVP is focused only on the core functionality, the development cost might be significantly lower.
2. The opportunity of early user testing
MVP allows creators to test the product idea at the early development stage and prove the concept. It is a great opportunity to find out whether the product resonates with a target audience and investigate the users’ response to it.
3. Development based on user feedback
What’s most valuable about MVP is that it allows gathering feedback and collecting opinions on what potential users want your product to be. It enables developers to constantly learn and research the community’s needs and grow the product step by step according to that feedback.
4. MVP enables market validation
Your MVP should represent your brand to the audience and showcase the product’s uniqueness and value. MVP can be the way to validate your product idea in the real market conditions, interacting with a real audience. It allows you to introduce the product to the market, create a buzz before an official launch and build a loyal community around your startup.
6. Faster time to market
MVP takes much less development time which means lower development costs and faster time to market. Once you launch MVP, you can collect user feedback and move forward in developing a full-fledged product ready for the market. All this speeds up the overall deployment of your product.
7. A budget-friendly solution
As mentioned above, you spend less on MVP development. However, we should also mention that it’s a cost-effective way of final product development. What does it mean? You simply don’t spend money on things that don’t work with a real audience since you have an opportunity to test everything with users quickly.
MVP development is an exciting journey that implies the close interaction between product creators and end-users. It’s a kind of co-creation since both parties, the brand, and the consumer, participate in product development. MVP development is a process of collaborating with users and building based on their feedback. As a result, many entrepreneurs around the world find its more efficient approach to product designing.