Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Successfully Convert Your Idea into Reality

Minimum Viable Product

Startups begin with their product idea but are not sure about the success or failure of the product. They spend several months developing the product but eventually, the product failed as it didn’t satisfy the customer’s needs.

Time and Money invested in developing a product gets wasted and they are left with no clue of what went wrong. In order to avoid such a situation, How can entrepreneurs know whether their concept is feasible or not; is it really going to help customers?

One of the solutions that startups can think of is the concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)!

What is Minimum Viable Product All About?

A minimum Viable Product is developing a product with sufficient features to gain critical feedback in the early stage of product development. Developing a product by considering the Minimum Viable Product concept means balancing between what your brand is offering to the users and what users actually need.

Let’s see what are steps needed to develop a successful MVP….

#1. Do the Market Research and Represent Your Idea

Before developing an app, you must test out the probability of your idea. Although your idea may be great, there are chances that it may just not fit the need of the users. So, you need to make sure that your target audience will be interested in your idea or not. For that, you need to research on,

  • What value your app will offer?
  • How would it benefit them?
  • What can be the USP of your product?
  • What features in the product would encourage them to buy?

Doing the basic groundwork and surveying will lead you to more information and result in a high chance of success. To know the potentiality of your idea, you can talk with them; check out for a similar product or the competitor’s products. Outline your ideas and introduce their value to the people.

#2. List all the Features that Make Your App Unique

After surveying, you may have reached a conclusion about the features that you can add to your app. Draft out the features that you always wanted to include in your app. Once again filter out the features that you feel are really important, prioritize each of them, and ask yourself why your user needs these features. Would it be advantageous to them?

  • Include the features of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented reality, image processing algorithms, and much more which can enhance your app. It should be better than what the current market app is offering
  • If you are implementing some common features, it is important to provide a new experience as per specific market trends with some tweaks to the existing one.

Ultimately your app will be unique if you are offering unique features. When you have enlisted and organized all the features, you can define the scope of phase 1 and start developing the Minimum Viable Product prototype.

#3. Start Executing MVP

Having identified the key features and target audience, you can now execute your MVP experiment. When you start developing a Mobile app, make sure to include the basic features to get feedback from the users. To increase app downloads, it is equally important to choose the right technologies and development partners who are well-versed in the technology and have relevant experience. Moreover, ask yourself these questions…

  • Is this feature solving the problem of the user?
  • How much time will it take to develop this feature?

Always focus on the needs of the customers and take their feedback to check if they are satisfied or not.

#4. Test Your App and Put Your MVP into the User’s Hand

After developing an app with the basic required features, you can let your product get tested by the quality assurance team to resolve the bugs. Launch your Minimum Viable Product for a limited number of users and quickly capture their feedback and talk to them to know if they are satisfied with the product or looking for more features.

If in-case they are not satisfied, repeat the process and put efforts towards the enhancement of your product. Brainstorm ways to improve the app functionality and work on what’s right and not right in the previous version and then incorporate improved features in the upcoming development sprint.

Example to follow

Drew Houston – the CEO of Dropbox came up with an idea in 2007, but to validate his idea he released a simple video explaining what the product is about, and how it benefits the user. He released a video on Digg and targeted the audiences that were early adopters of the technology.

For a casual developer, the video looked like a normal product demonstration but fortunately, he received 5000 to 75000 sign-up forms overnight. Drew was yet to deliver an actual product but he was confident because file storage and secure file sharing was a difficult task and he was actually addressing that. After coming up with the final version, Dropbox catered to 1 million users in less than 10 months.

Wrapping it Up

Opting for the Minimum Viable Product is one of the best decisions when you have a scalable project and wish to release it early in the market. If you are planning to develop a mobile app, it is necessary that your idea is validated by your target audience.

Delivering a Minimum Viable Product doesn’t means, delivering a product without brainstorming ideas but it means delivering features that solve customers’ problems using the best practices while also allowing you to adapt the changes based on user feedback.

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