Before launching a product on the market, it is important to know if there are potential customers interested in buying it. Therefore, it is essential to know the needs of users and adapt your product to meet them. To understand this a little better, we see what viable or minimum product MVP is and what are the benefits for a business. If you are interested in topics like these, studying the higher degree in Marketing and Advertising you will be able to expand your knowledge to promote and advertise products and services in appropriate communication media and supports, among others.
What is the minimum viable product or MVP?
The minimum viable product or MVP is a prototype of a product that has the minimum functions to be able to present it to your clients and check if they are interested. The main goal of an MVP development company is to focus on the most important features of the product or service, prioritize them, and develop only the most important ones. The others can be added or improved once you know their acceptance by potential consumers.
What are the benefits of the MVP?
For a business, creating a minimum viable product will help:
- Launch a product or service that is really necessary.
- Create something that people are willing to pay for.
- Know the prospect’s vision.
- Launch the product on the market earlier.
- Build a user base whose opinions will indicate which features need to be added or removed.
- Decrease the risk factor.
- Provide immediate and fast value with minimal development costs.
- Create an interest in the product or service before its final version.
A fairly common mistake in developing an MVP is adding all the features before releasing the first version of the product. This implies, in addition to costs and effort, the risk that there is no niche in the market for him.
How to build an MVP
The main objective in the development process of a start-up is to minimize the decision cycle, which consists of Build – Measure – Learn through ideas, code and data, seeking to minimize the total time in each iteration. The process is repeated until the product that effectively meets the market need is obtained or until it is determined that the product is not viable
Some tactics that can be used at each stage of the process are:
- Build: Generate small batches and continuous production.
- Measure: Perform A / B tests to verify hypotheses.
- Learn: Build a minimum viable product, rely on root cause analysis.
Examples and techniques
Here are some techniques and practical examples of MVPs in action:
Just a landing page. This approach is what we could call “sell before building”, and consists of starting with only a landing page (landing page) describing the product to be developed with a link to request more information. Advertising on Google or other means is used to generate traffic to this page and offer the product. In this simple experiment it is possible to check how much interest there is in the product – for example, if 0% of the visitors click on the purchase offer, then there is no reason to develop the product, we already know that there is no interest in it. It’s best to use those resources to redefine the product and find what features the market actually wants.
Test specific functionality
Insert a link to a new functionality in a web application, which directs to a section with more information or requesting the user to register their interest. Links are logged and serve as a measure of how necessary that functionality is. For example, (a video sharing service) started offering a paid version in addition to its basic version by asking its customers if they wanted to be notified when the new product was ready. By doing this, they were able to measure user interest – if too few signed up, they knew that this was not what customers wanted without having to build the full product.
