Are you interested in creating and launching a new product or business? Well, in that case, you might need to develop a minimum viable product.
Nowadays, you don’t need to be perfect to start. Take Airbnb, they started as an MVP, and now look where they are. An MVP is a carefully tailored and highly specialized product that is not beefed up to the brim with unnecessary features.
In this article, we will cover how you can start to develop your minimum viable product, so be attentive.
If you’d like to start and get results soon, you better keep reading.
The Audience, The Problem, The Solution
The first and most important thing you need to do when building a minimum viable product is to elaborate upon your business idea. You need to ask yourself what the problem you are trying to solve is. As well as who is the audience and how you can deliver the solution to them.
By doing so, you will save money and get what you need for your services. You will also become part of the market, allowing users to get acquainted and find your services when needed.
Find the audience, learn about their problems, and create a solution to their problems. It’s that simple, that’s the basis of all business.
Competitors Exist, Don’t Be Wary, Be Aware
You might think that your idea is unique, but that’s rarely ever the case. You might have a great idea, but if you do some research, you will easily find similar competitors. You just have not heard about them.
There are tons of new software and apps on the market. It’s important to research your product for similar solutions. You can try to build startups that have failed, you can reach out to the founders and ask them why they had to shut down.
Most founders are open to speaking, there were many social networks before Facebook and many search engines before Google.
It’s worth knowing that competition does not have to be direct. If you ask you about the substitution of your solution, it probably exists. If you can an indirect competitor, such as Netflix to Youtube, you need to know that.
There are many tools you can use for competitor analysis, such as Alexa, Ahrefs, SimilarWeb, etc. You can get a variety of KPI and learn more about their audience and how they are operating on their website.
Path the Road
When you first start designing your product, you need to consider the primary goal. If your goal is to sell clothes, the main goal is to let your users buy clothes.
This is the user flow, and it’s your job to make it as comfortable as possible. This is actually quite easy on paper. All you need to do is elaborate upon the major steps that are required to achieve the goal.
You should be concentrate on basic tasks, such as find clothes, purchase clothes, receive orders, manage orders, etc. These are the activities that end-users will have to perform to achieve the primary goal.
As soon all of this is done, you can define the features needed.
Feature Me
As soon as you have developed a user flow, you need to determine the particulate features that will be needed for each step of the flow. You should highlight the features you think are potentially useful, but not required.
Ask yourself about the most important action you want others to accomplish. Ask yourself what features you would like to provide. Categorize all of the remaining features under must-have, not needed, and potentially useful.
You have to explain why you’ve put each feature in each category, as that’s the only way to clarity. Without explaining why you are simply putting words on paper. That’s not how this works, a minimum viable product is a working mechanism so it requires moving parts.
Learn, Examine, Build Minimum Viable Product
Now that you have discovered the features for your minimum viable product, it’s time for you to place all of the above into practice. In the development stage, you need to build and test the product and continuously improve upon its quality.
Alpha testing is provided to limited groups of people, in most cases relatives or friends. You can conduct alpha testing and then move to beta. If you like, you can skip alpha testing altogether. For development, you can use Flutter. If you don’t know what it is, learn why you should use Flutter.
When we speak of beta testing, we mean that you finally take your product and put it in front of the world. This phase provides you with honest feedback, allowing you to consider new changes for the following version. Keep in mind that only important changes must be made on the spot.
Testing is invaluable so do not disregard it.
Your Minimum Viable Product An MVP
Now that you know the process behind the development of a minimum viable product, you can finally begin to start with step one. In any case, a minimum viable product is a great way to bring something from the crevice of your mind and into the real world.
It’s a form of transmutation, from thought to existence. Thoughts come and go, minimum viable products do so as well. But the difference between a thought and an MVP is that you can do your best to make it remain.
Your effort, your consideration, and your passion will determine how successful your MVP is. If you’d like to learn more about tech or business, check out the advised articles on the sidebar.
