The MVP is a minimal form of your product that is tested against market standards. It allows your team to validate product assumptions and helps understand how users react and experience.
Two very close friends in the city of San Francisco decided to increase their money by renting out their living room. They set up three air mattresses and showed them to the attendees at the design conference.
They already knew that all the hotels were full, and this is the right time to get the opportunity. The next day, they purchased the domain airbedandbreakfast.com. After six days, three guests arrived and paid $80 to spend a night in the room.
And its MVP was born.
At that time they began to receive positive feedback from their customers, they grew it over time and added new features and functionalities.
In the years from 2007 to 2020, airbedandbreakfast.com has not only transformed itself into a million-dollar company, Airbnb, but has also added several new features and targeted a broader audience around the world.
Simply put, an MVP is a minimal (very basic) form of your product that is tested against market standards. This development approach allows your team to validate (or invalidate) product assumptions. It will help you understand how your target users react to and experience the core functionality of your product.
MVP development follows a build-measure-learn process, allowing you to release a product that can be continually updated as you validate (or invalidate) assumptions. It makes it easier for businesses to understand what users demand and build future iterations of their application that better serve their target customers.
Are you confused about whether you should start with an MVP or launch the full product?
This article will tell you why Facebook, Groupon and other million dollar product companies launched their MVP first.
Before launching any product, it is crucial to know whether the product would work in the market or not. It is about checking the market demand to make sure that the MVP idea will be successful or not. Without knowing it, you cannot invest all your funds in the market.
Therefore, an MVP is the only solution that can help you test the same and continue with the idea. The MVP's performance can then be measured and pivoted by the findings.
Every MVP product developed has some early customers where the beta version of a product is tested. In a minimally viable product there should be no additional features.
You can delight your customers with an MVP that works. There are many reasons why startups need MVP development and treating their customers in the best way possible.
The unstoppable race of startups and product companies to deliver something faster than their competitors. With an MVP, you can reach your target audience in a short time and at a low cost. You can quickly deliver something to them before your competitors so they become more associated with your product. Releasing the product faster makes it easier to test sooner and get quick feedback.
Getting market validation is extremely important before launching your product. Your assumptions need to be verified for your product to perform well during the market research stage. The MVP helps you get the validation check right and gain real insights.
There are many risks associated with developing an MVP. You can't invest all your funds just in assumptions, it's riskier. With the MVP development process, you can invest a small amount and know that your product idea will work. It helps you mitigate risks and avoid major failures.
If you are a startup and your product is your main business model, it is very crucial to validate your model first. Faster MVP development helps you analyze your process beforehand and make improvements accordingly.
MVP is about testing your product idea in the market. It helps you figure out what exactly will work when targeting your customers and meeting their needs.
Below are the steps required to build a robust MVP:
It is often the case that ideas do not fit or satisfy the needs of the market. Before executing an idea, always make sure it meets the needs of your target users. Make sure you conduct surveys, because the more information about customer behavior you collect, the greater the chances of success. Keep an eye on what your competitors offer to the target audience and how you can make your idea unique to attract customers.
What does your product offer your customers? How can it benefit them? Why would they buy your product? These are some important questions to consider to help express your idea better.
You must also be very clear about the total estimate of your product. As the MVP clearly says, introducing value to people, you first have to outline it, and based on that develop your MVP.
Design the product in a way that is convenient for users. You have to see the product from the user's point of view. User flow is also an important aspect as it ensures that nothing is left out keeping in mind the future product and user satisfaction.
To define the user flow, it is necessary to define the stages of the process and, to do this, the steps necessary to achieve the main objective must be explained. You have to focus more on basic tasks than on features, such as searching for and purchasing the product, and managing and receiving orders.
Before you start building the MVP, you should make a list of all the features you want to incorporate into your product. Rank all product features based on their priority: high, medium and low. Now, define your scope for the first version of the product and build an MVP. If you want to see what your future product will be like, you can even create an MVP prototype.
After listing all the main features and understanding the market needs, start creating your MVP. Always keep in mind that a prototype is not of lower quality than a final product. Therefore, it must be easy to use, attractive and satisfy user requirements.
Once the final product is finished, you have to test it.
Review everything thoroughly after launching the MVP. Collect feedback from your target audience. You can easily determine if the product is acceptable in the market with customer feedback. Also, how does it compete with other products on the market?
We list some million-dollar companies that are enjoying the taste of success with MVP development in their early years.
During the launch of Facebook in its early years, an MVP was used only to connect students in schools and universities through messaging.
The idea was to simply connect friends through social media platforms and organize meetups. The Facebook application in its first days was launched to test it among users, and it collected many comments. Today, the application is extremely popular on the Internet, having more than 1.3 billion active users.
A very popular social media platform, Twitter, incorporates a unique approach. It was initially known as “twttr” and was used only for internal purposes. However, employees spent several dollars on SMS to post on the platform, to test it among users. Finally, Twitter was launched to the public in the year 2006. Then it was a success. Now Twitter has increased its user base and has become the most popular social network.
Amazon began selling books online, challenging the Barnes and Nobles of the world, which were largely stuck in the “bricks and mortar” era. Originally designed in 1994 to focus on low-priced books, with a simple web design based on the minimum viable product, that's all they needed to develop and establish their organization in the retail market.
Using the old concept and strategy of selling vouchers and discounts with the idea of sharing and socializing, Groupon has reached new heights and made huge profits. Initially, Groupon emerged using WordPress, where regular PDFs were emailed to users who were already subscribed. Therefore, Groupon built its voucher system and backend, and boosted its business.
Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston was already aware that there were tons of cloud storage startups out there. He then decided to build an effective MVP based on video. It explains to the public how to use the application. This video played a crucial role in quickly targeting the right audience. It also received a huge number of views and comments.
Dropbox received 70,000 email addresses from targeted users in a single day. This is the right time that gave them a green signal to launch the product in the market. You can see this video here
Developing an MVP represents the clear motive of solving problems, identifying the real pain points of companies and then focusing on delivering viable and optimized solutions.
One of the best ways to build an MVP is to go for a manual approach, with landing pages and email lists.
This requires brainstorming, planning, design and development, testing and advertising the product within a limited period.
