All of a sudden you find yourself in trouble and you don’t have chances but throwing away everything you’ve worked on in the previous months because, actually, you find out only in the end that the product/service you made wasn’t really desired by your customer.
How to avoid this situation?
With an MVP!
What’s an MVP?
Today we won’t talk about basketball, unfortunately. Our MVP is not the best player of a match but, anyways, it’s the best approach on which you could base the design of a new project.
The MVP, or minimum viable product, is a primitive version of the product we’d like to introduce in the market. The MVP is very useful when you want to understand if you’re doing good and, moreover, to gain some feedback from your potential future customers.
Throughout this article you’re gonna take a look at two main topics:
The main benefits of an MVP
Main methods to test an MVP
Let’s begin!
Main advantages of a Minimum Viable Product
First of all let’s examine which are the main advantages coming from the creation of an MVP before the launch on the actual market.
The feedbacks you gain will let you understand which are the features that your customers are really willing to pay for and, which ones, are better to avoid for the final product.
People will know that you are presenting them an early version of the final product/service, for this reason they will have less expectations and therefore they will accept some bugs or minor issues.
You will immediately enter in the market, even if only with a prototype, but this will help your product/service to be seen as the “original” one. Moreover you could be able to collect pre-orders and raise funds, as startups usually do on crowdfunding platforms.
An MVP hasn’t got all the feature that the final product/service would have, for this reason it would be more understandable by consumers.
Some ways to test your MVP
Before defining the process thanks to which creating your first MVP (in the next article), it’s now the time to understand which methods you could use to test how good your MVP is.
There are thousands of ways to do that, you just have to choose which one is the most suitable to your business.
Guerrilla Research: Visit squares, streets or fairs to interview as many people as possible. All the feedback you will gain will be very helpful to understand what people really need.
Landing pages: Thanks to landing pages, that’s to say the first page of your website in which people land, you could understand how many people are interested in your product/service. Try to create a simple form that has some space where people can insert their mail to keep updated for the future.
Crowdfunding: Crowdfunding platforms are virtual showcases. First of all you will need to explain and advertise your offering, and later people can ask for pre-ordering your product. A lot of successful companies began using this approach. Pebble, working in the smartwatch market, succeded in raising 20 mln$ using only a presentation video. In this case the video was Pebble’s MVP.
Explainer videos: Currently videos are rocking the marketing industry. Those are one of the most exploited media on the internet because of theirs entertaining element. Video creators hope their videos become trending, as it happened to Dropbox. The team Dropbox collected 75’000 mail addresses in less than 24h, people were thrilled for using this brand new platform. Here you can see the complete video of the Dropbox MVP.
If you would like to understand how to build your first MVP you will find the next article very useful.
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Understanding people means foresee the future.
Marco Carniel
What do you think about the topics in this article?
Let me know by commenting in the bottom section, I would be happy to talk with you.
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