A Step-by-Step Guide to Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

What your business is offering and what users want are two different aspects. And, building MVP is the best approach to find the right balance between the two.

Several risks are associated while developing a digital product, such as poor marketing strategies, low budget, inadequate infrastructural facilities, lack of technical knowledge, and more. However, one of the significant risks that frighten every entrepreneur is validating whether your concept is feasible or not.

You can verify if your product will fulfill your customers’ needs and thrive in the market. And MVP is the approach that goes with it. Apart from validating your idea, MVP will regulate your product features according to your customers’ liking, driving you to your success.

Creating an MVP is an important phase of the web and mobile app development journey or any other software.

So, how does this MVP work? What things to consider while planning an MVP? This blog post provides you with a step-by-step guide on how to design a minimum viable product.

What is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)?

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a launchable version of the product that contains its fundamental features maintaining its core value, released in the market for testing. MVP allows your product development team to validate the product approach and identify its ability to solve a user problem.

MVP is an iterative process that determines how users react to your product after experiencing its core functionality and address their needs with proper functionality. This approach provides users’ insights that assist your developers in planning the next strategy or steps for the product development.

MVP model following a build-measure-learn (BML) process will help you test, build, and deliver the final product. And ultimately fulfill the primary goal you want to achieve in your business.

Top 5 Benefits of Developing Minimum Viable Product

An MVP is sufficient to validate the initial business idea. It can save you a lot of time and money. You do not have to invest heavily in a vast, complex platform to fail in the end.

The following are the benefits of designing an MVP for your digital product:

Test the Business Idea

An MVP is built around a centralized objective of the product. It excludes the redundant features and releases the product to gain the users’ insights. This approach is suitable to test the business idea before investing an extensive budget in the development.

Cost-Efficient

Another significant advantage of the MVP development service is that it is incredibly budget-friendly. You can test the business idea through the MVP development approach before releasing it in the market, avoiding unnecessary expenditure.

Gets you the Response First Set of Customers

An MVP provides the opinions of potential users and their requirements concerning the application. It identifies the possible outcomes of the product in the market and the necessary improvements.

Saves Your Time and Effort

Imagine you spend a lot of time designing software and building your business idea around it. After releasing it in the market, it turns out that the product failed to perform as per the expectations, collapsing the whole business idea.

MVP will provide you with the necessary feedback to refine the product and release it in the market.

Draw Investors Towards the Product

People need funds to develop and deliver their business idea into the market successfully, and for that, they need investors. An MVP is a great way to attract investors or shareholders to your product.

It helps to create a product foundation that meets the business requirements and market goals.

How to Build a Minimum Viable Product?

Lack of understanding or not following the proper steps of developing an MVP can lead to a failed MVP. Below are the steps to help you create an appropriate MVP with essential features and successfully establish it in the market.

Understand the Market

The primary measure that you need to develop an MVP is to be clear of the objective of your digital product. Next, you have to find out whether your business objective fits in the market or not.

For a successful MVP development, perform as much market research as you can. Furthermore, it is also necessary to do competitor analysis to ensure your business idea stands out in the market.

Identify What it Offers to the Users

Before embarking on the development process of MVP, ensure that your product fulfills your target users’ needs. A product that can benefit your users and add value to their regular life is what they will purchase and utilize.

So, map out your target users and their requirements and build your MVP around them.

Create the Design

Since MVP is the fundamental model of your app, designing is an imperative process in its development. You need to design your product as per the users’ perspective and convenience.

Also, the UI of your app should be easy so that users can seamlessly navigate through it and utilize the core features.

Discover the Essential Features to Deliver

Up to this point, you must have understood that MVP offers core features to the users. Thus, in this phase, you need to decide the necessary elements to include in your MVP design that can fulfill your product objective and users’ requirement simultaneously.

After categorizing the MVP features, it’s time to begin the development process.

Launch Your MVP

After you have learned the market needs and core features, you can create your MVP. Ensure that your MVP is not inferior to your final product in quality and contains all of the characteristics that fulfill the customer’s needs. Moreover, your MVP should be highly engaging and easy to use.

Collect Users’ Response

Everything in the process of MVP is connected. After launching the MVP, it’s time to collect the response of your users. Review their response thoroughly so that you can determine the acceptability and market validation of your product.

Your MVP development company can work to improve the quality of the MVP based on the users’ feedback, even if the final product is not released.

Things to Consider While Building an MVP

MVP can render the business potential and buy in investors. A successfully created MVP definitely strengthens your position in the market. Although to establish your product, it is essential to complete the MVP development accurately.

Consider the following things while building an MVP.

Understand the Problem Properly

Before spending your time and effort towards developing an MVP, ensure that the product is worth creating. Understand properly what its objective is and the problems it resolves.

Select the Target Audience

Once you analyze your project endeavor, it’s time to determine who you are building this product for. Make sure that your MVP reaches the right set of audiences.

Make Sure to Review the Feedback

Realize that you are building this product for your users, and they should be the ones to tell where your product is lacking. Analyze the collected feedback properly and improve your product accordingly.

Designing Prototype and Development MVP

Building a prototype is a necessary process for developing a perfect MVP. To create a full-fledged product extends these steps: business idea, prototypes, an MVP, and the final product.

A prototype development company will assist you in visualizing your vision and creating a functional MVP.

When to Move From Minimum Viable Product to Full-Scale Product

Developing an MVP is not as simple as it seems. Yes, the process may seem redundant:

• Getting an idea.
• Choosing the essential features.
• Designing a prototype.
• Developing an MVP.
• Launching the final product when everything seems right.

Then, why does business fail?

A substantial effort goes after launching an MVP, which some organizations tend to avoid. After developing MVP extends a crucial step of collecting the feedback and testing your MVP strategy. Testing and reviewing MVP in-depth is necessary to avoid wasting time and effort in building a full-fledged product.

According to Peppers & Rogers Group, Customer Experience Maturity Monitor, the companies having the competence and capability to deliver excellent customer experience, all 81% of them outperform their competition.

There are many things to consider while releasing a product in the market, such as feedback, business scaling, flexibility, pricing setup, marketing, etc.

Measuring the users’ behavior and learning from them is critical for business growth. Tracking these business metrics can help to decide which features to improve, add, or delete.

Standout Examples of MVPs that Became Successful Products

An MVP can be anything you want to validate from your audience. There is no need to have a specific version as long as it showcases the objective of your product.

Here’s the practical side of MVP with some famous examples:

Twitter

Twitter is known as a widely popular social media platform. What if we tell you that it is developed from a radically different approach than it is now. The founders of Odeo got the idea to build an SMS-based messaging platform in one of their hackathons. Initially, it was supposed to be for internal use only. It was named “twttr,” and eventually, they made the platform public, which grew into a hugely successful social media platform.

Buffer

Buffer is a popular platform that allows its users to schedule posts on different social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. The CEO of Buffer, Joel Gascoigne, had a broad audience on his Twitter account. After facing difficulty in keeping up the pace on Twitter, Joel Gascoigne got the idea to develop an app that can schedule posts. He presented the concept of “Buffer” to his audience and gained feedback. Next, he added the pricing page to see how many users were interested in buying the platform. Later, this approach helped him to build a market-oriented platform.

Uber

Uber was initially called UberCab, which connected drivers with iPhone owners in San Francisco that accepted card payments. It offered the goal of providing taxi booking services via SMS. Later, Uber developed their first client base, enabling them to grow locally and globally. The Uber app is a perfect example of a successful MVP.

How Can We Help?

MVP is like a support system for the appropriate foundation of your product. Partnering up with the right MVP development company gives wings to your business idea and assists in establishing it in the market. Sparx IT Solutions offers cutting-edge MVP services to businesses of all sizes, and industry leaders most prefer our custom solutions. We thoroughly analyze your product ideas and shape them into viable outcomes.

Contact us to explore your business idea, find out the target audience, plan a business hypothesis with minimum development cost.

Conclusion

An MVP is one of the best go-to solutions to achieve business success. Specifically, the startups that lack funds for large-scale development can use this approach in the initial stage of their digital product development.

Till now, you must have understood the MVP development process, and it should not be frightening anymore. You do not have to spend valuable time and funds developing a minimal viable product, and it does not have to be flawless.

Even the craziest idea may end up being successful! Therefore, use the MVP approach to discover the power your business acquires.