Chances are you are an entrepreneur who is planning to thrive in the market with a new concept that can resolve customer problems. If this is the case, then knowing a few facts will be helpful for you.
Launching a new product in the market is one of the high-stakes investments, and therefore, it is quite practical to reduce the maximum possible risk. One way of doing that is to analyze whether your product will be market feasible? Will it satisfy customers need? But how will you analyze these facts?
The answer to your question is an MVP. Hence, you must get acquainted with the MVP for all the right reasons, unless your product coach team advises you otherwise.
In this article, you will explore a step-by-step guide to create MVP, but first, let’s figure out what MVP is all about.
What Is an MVP?
MVP or minimum viable product is a basic version of a website or application. MVP is a process that allows developing a product with a specific set of features to test the users’ response. It also helps your development team to know how your target users will respond to the core functionalities of your product.
You can utilize the MVP approach for mobile app development. It will provide you with a basic model of your app and help you in fulfilling the primary goal you want to accomplish.
Why Should You Build an MVP?
Building an MVP will be a downright level-headed approach since, it will reduce the production cost and lead the way to understand your end-users, their needs, and your potential market.
MVP also test your assumptions plus, you can utilize an MVP as your business model to get stakeholders.
Business Benefits of MVP
1. Reduced Cost
MVP enables startups to test their core idea with minimum development cost. Since MVP has a limited set of features, therefore, it requires a minimal budget.
2. Testing at the Early Stage
MVP is a great approach since it helps businesses to test their whole concept in the initial phase before investing the entire budget into that.
3. Gathers Relevant Feedback
The MVP approach gathers all the relevant Feedback and figures out potential user’s views about how users want to see your final product in the future.
4. Accurate Market Analysis
MVP lets you discover if your app is appropriate as per the targeted market and whether your app is representing your brand correctly to the users. Also, MVP helps you showcasing how your brand is unique than other existing options.
Now you have completely understood what MVP is all about and how does it benefit your business idea. Let’s dive into the MVP development framework.
Steps to Building an MVP
The MVP model is all about testing and figuring out the possible results of a product launch. Now let’s get a glimpse at some essential steps you need to follow to build an MVP.
1. Start with Market Research
Market research is the primary and essential step before developing an MVP. Market research is necessary for a reason. It helps you understand the user’s needs before completely initiating an idea. The market research also enables you to understand your competitors’ offering and uniqueness through which you can also determine your specificity.
2. Express Your Idea
After conducting the primary market research, express your products idea, and to do this, you need to find answers to the following questions. What value does your product offer? Why should people buy your product? How will it benefit its users? Answering such questions will help you to express your product clearly.
Since MVP is all about introducing your product’s value to the users, therefore, be precise about your product value and its essential estimations. Outline product values and then develop your MVP based on those values.
3. The Design process and User flow
The design of your app must be user-friendly. Keeping end-user in mind is what that helps you bring the best app design because it enables you to design your app from a user’s perspective for everything from installing to the final process of making a purchase or delivery.
To ensure the maximum user satisfaction, don’t forget to define the app’s user flow. Defining your user flow is directly associated by setting the process stages. You are required to explain each step to accomplish the main objectives.
The focus should be more on basic tasks like buying the product, managing, and receiving orders. These are the primary objectives that your user want to attain by using your app.
Once you are done with defining all the process stages, then you may outline the feature of each stage.
4. List the project features
Before developing your MVP, make a list of each feature you want to integrate into your app and prioritize the features based on needs. To determine the need for features, ask yourself questions like what do the end-users want? What would be convenient for the users? Etc.
Now, you can categorize your features based on priority, such as high priority, medium priority, and low priority. Once you have a well-organized features list, now you can better outline the scope of your product’s first version and move forward to develop an MVP.
In addition, you can also create an MVP’s prototype, if you want to check how your product will look like in the future.
5. Build An MVP
As soon as you are confident enough that you have gathered all the market needs and have determined all of your core features, then you are ready to build your MVP.
You can go for MVP’s prototype, which is not less than a final product in quality and fulfills your customer’s needs. Therefore, your MVP prototype should be engaging and suitable for the users.
6. Build, Measure and Learn
Up to this step, you have determined the core features of your MVP, and now you are all prepared to execute those features. Since we are heading towards the final development of the MVP; therefore, you need to test your MVP to ensure the quality and other elements that need to be improved.
The two most popular techniques for testing a product’s performance are Alpha and beta testing. The Alpha and beta testing must be aligned and make changes only where needed to improve the overall user experience.
Remember that an MVP is designed to identify customers’ pain points and solve their major problems with an app. Therefore, to maximize your app’s value, you must have to develop your app in an upright way, and the best way to do that utilize a manual-based approach, with landing pages and email lists. You also need to have a clear understanding of how you want to design, develop, test, and advertise your product within a specific period.
Rameez Ramzan
Rameez Ramzan is an Assistant Manager - Digital Marketing at Cubix, a Washington based renowned software and product development company. He specializes in paid marketing, SEO and SMM and site audits to help sites perform better.