Introduction

“The first impression is the last impression” the old monk proverb holds not just for humans, but also businesses. From the services to the user flow, all have a great deal of impact on our business models. But the major concern is how to create that everlasting first impression? Here is when the Concept of MVP comes into light.

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a development technique in which a new featured product is developed with a minimum number of features that will satisfy the target markets. The final, complete set of features is only designed and developed after considering feedback from the product’s initial users.

The Ultimate Guide to Understand MVP

The new startups and tech titans are inclining towards Minimum viable products for starting their journey towards a successful software application. The Minimum Viable Product must be valuable enough to gain the attention of early adopters and to grow their belief in the platform.

Before launching a newly founded business, you should be able to answer a certain set of questions:

• How an MVP affects business growth?
• What is the purpose of the MVP?
• How to create your web or mobile app as an MVP?

The sole reason for creating startups is growth and success. MVP helps you to achieve the same. Focusing on MVP will help your business to launch the product early, take control of your budget, and get valuable suggestions, ideas, user feedback, and analytical information.

The purpose of MVP is to develop a working product that provides immediate value while minimizing costs. MVP helps you to:

• Give useful insight into your riskiest assumption
• Give reliable feedback and reviews
• Attract early adopters.
• Prevents developers from designing features that will not benefit the users’ journey.
• To improve the product and gain stakeholder interest
• It allows seeing how web or mobile application gain popularity among users before even spending time and money adding extra features
• In case of failure, one can stop product development before wasting any more resources.

Expert Opinion on MVP

Eric Ries, co-founder/ CTO of IMVU and MVP proponent, defines an MVP “One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. Its power is matched only by the amount of confusion that it causes because it’s quite hard to do. It certainly took me many years to make sense of it.”

Marty Cagan: “One of the most important concepts in all of the software is the notion of the Minimum Viable Product (often referred to as “MVP”.) But if you’ve been around software products for a while, you know that term is used in many different ways, and while the term intuitively resonates with people, there’s often a lot of confusion about what this means in practice.”

Famous startups who then began with MVP

• Uber:  Originally it just connects their riders with drivers and accepts payments. Uber’s MVP was accepted across the globe by both customers and drivers. They found out a relevant and prevalent headache, which was booking cabs.
• Dropbox: Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston posted a three-minute video on Hacker News in April 2007, showing its correct target audience on how to use the app. The video succeeds to attract the large target audience and Dropbox got its green signal.
• LinkedIn:  The very first version of LinkedIn came in the market with limited features like user profiles, the ability to invite people to connect with you, the ability to search for users, and the ability to send email-like requests to users who were two or more degrees away. Security/spam was a big concern, so you could only invite a person to connect if you knew their email address.

MVP points at solving users’ difficulties with the app, by identifying the points and then focusing toward proposing viable solutions. The best way to build MVP is to use a manual-based approach, with landing pages, and email lists. All you need is planning, designing & developing, testing, and advertising, for the product within a specified period. This can help you in identifying your potential customers and maximizing your project value.

Did we miss out on something on’ The Ultimate Guide to Understand MVP’? We would love to know.

Need any help in building an MVP for your project, or need a consultation for app development? Reach out to Idea Usher at [email protected]