Developing the Minimum Viable Product for your Startup

The Dreams

There is nothing better than dreaming but making your dreams come true is the best feeling one can ever have. Most of the times it is difficult to make others understand your dream later seeing their faces is the ease.

The Start Up

With every startup a scenario comes where you are confident of the idea but not sure how to sail it through. You go out convincing the investors about your product idea seeking some capital investment but you are not prepared enough to strike the right chord. Numbers on the project viability are useless until backed by the user feedback on product.

Minimum Viable Product

We have been working a lot for startups – providing them the needed support in form of capital investment, technological support and mentoring them to nurture themselves. This has made us realise the common mistakes committed by most startups. An idea which comes out as the solution to a problem is good but its feasibility can only be attained when it is launched in the market and the best way for this is getting an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) rather the complete solution that we are proposing.

Even when you are making an MVP you have to be very precise with things around importantly the cost. Majority of projects shelve just because their approach to MVP is not right.

Here are 3 things to keep in check when getting on with MVP:

1. The Right Team

While many have that conviction to buy the equity formula to join the team, some are not the risk takers as they need regular income jobs. Most among these are the technical partners of the project and with the right set of technical people on board, your success rate just soars.

Technical Team isn’t about a coder and a UI/UX designer but a whole set of Coder, Developer, UI/UX designer, front-ender, back-ender, QA and project manager. It gets difficult to find so much of right human resources at your terms initially, that is why it is preferable to hire the external agency if you don’t have people with right skills set.

2. The Prototype

MVP is all about the product with only top features in it. The features that distinguishes it from the other products. First, don’t try to imitate the competitors or implement their top features into your MVP.

Your MVP should constitute the best of your product, making it look decent enough as a good UX with every possible attribute that will benefit the end user. So don’t add everything in the MVP leave something for future updates. It is best to avoid :

• Heavy UI based and tagged social media features
• Unnecessary features lifted from other products
• Adding every feature that comes to your mind, have faith in users’ feedback.

3. Development Method

Before you undertake any journey it is important to choose the path. Developing an MVP is about taking the right path to reach the goal of launch the full-fledged product. While it is always debatable to select Waterfall Method or Agile Method, it certainly depends on the relationship with the developing team.

The payment structure and skills are key to the relationship with the developers, be they internal equity holders or some external contractors. One should always keep in mind following tips while preferring one method over the other:

• Having clarity of being updated with the progress and the outcome of the work.
• Allowing some resilience to adapt different things for the betterment of project.
• The momentum of work to maintained with parallel working on different aspects.

Don’t forget that MVP is just the first milestone of the long journey which will lead to success. Doing proper planning and implementing the MVP in a strategic manner surely improves your chance to succeed.

Always remember, the purpose of MVP is just to test the water, get users feedback, analyse it, work on shortfalls and come back again with a better product. Losing hope is not an option.

Still have some questions on the topic or want to discuss some business with us, feel free to send us a message here.  We will get back to you shortly.