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How to build a minimum viable product

Case study -Ketaki

Introduction

Many companies invest a lot of time and money to build a perfect product filled with features they believe users will need when they come up with a new product idea for the market.

But in most cases, the users aren’t interested in their products. This can hurt the companies. An alternative to this problem is to build a minimum viable product (MVP). The cost to build an MVP is relatively low and the time required to build the MVP is also less.

Building an MVP for startups allows you to quickly discover what users want and what they don’t want by introducing a basic product. Early feedback lets you rapidly and affordably scrap it totally or make the necessary changes to create a useful and appealing product or service.

Who introduced the term MVP?

The term “minimum viable product,” or MVP, was first introduced by Eric Riles’ in his book The Lean Startup Framework. But before the introduction of the term, many other organizations and companies had already used this method to research, understand target audiences, and launch with a single core feature that had also worked for them and helped them build a minimum viable product successfully.

What is Minimum Viable Product?

The smallest version of a product which helps to test a business idea is called a minimal viable product (MVP). Building an MVP for startups is a great idea as its main responsibility is to create a product with the fewest resources feasible while yet meeting your customers expectations, fixing any genuine issues they may be experiencing, and which can also help you in attracting potential investors.

Benefits of building an MVP

Creating a fully-featured product may take a longer time and a huge budget, based on the complexity of the products, but to build a minimum viable product is less time-consuming and the cost required is also low, which helps you identify and evaluate your product’s market.

Keep in mind the following points while defining what is a minimum viable product

Creating a user-centric product
Understand the true potential of market needs.
Increasing the possibility of gaining potential investors.
Saves time and money.

Getting potential investors

Building a minimum viable product helps you attract potential investors and showcase your business benefits and potential customer base. It makes it easy to attract investors who are ready to invest in a solid business idea.

User-Centered Development

Building a minimum viable product (MVP) usually involves starting with the bare minimum of features, considering users and their needs, and eliminating less crucial features in the initial phases. This creates a strong foundation for product development because MVPs concentrate on creating products that they Users need.

Target audience research

To build a minimum viable product requires knowledge of research, understanding your target audience, and building products based on user and market needs, which benefits you in the MVP development stage and product design.

Feedback and refinement

By doing minimum viable product development, you can understand your users more deeply, and it allows you to gather data. From the feedback you receive, you may then improve your product to meet those requirements.

Scalability

As I mentioned earlier, once you gain feedback from the users, you will have a clear idea of what features can be included in the future and what else needs to be refined and improved. This kind of approach reduces the rework and can also help with the minimum viable product development cost.

Minimal Viable Product Approach

Identifying the core problem

Building a successful business is more likely to depend on how you build Minimum viable product. The initial step of developing minimum viable product successfully is to understand the problem in the minds of the users.

What problem are you going to solve?
How will it be useful for the users?
Why should they use your product?

While answering these questions from the user’s perspective, you will get to know whether that product is useful or a waste of time.

Understanding the target audience

The second step in building a minimum viable product process is to understand more deeply about your target audience and know more details about their buying behavior. There are a few things that can influence buying behavior: geometric factors, location, culture, and social factors.

You can also learn more deeply about your target audience with the help of user research, surveys, user personas, empathy mapping, and user journey mapping.

Competitors Analysis

minimum viable product approach can be challenging, as there is a chance for competitors in a similar field. Make sure that your product is unique from the competitors. Your competitors may also have similar ideas that you have in mind, so doing a competitor analysis helps you to understand more deeply about your competitors.

The common step to do competitor analysis is to do a SWOT analysis.

Understanding the strengths of the competitors
Understanding the weaknesses of the competitors
Understanding the available opportunity helps you differentiate your product from your competitors.
Finding the major threats from your competitors.

Setting Up Budgets

The main reason for the failure of startups was not planning their budgets properly in the initial stages. You can find your budget for product design and development services as you have predefined a set of features. Start by determining the approximate cost of developing the product, designing it, marketing it, and promoting it. It can be normal if there are budget constraints; many companies have also faced the same challenges. It’s essential to determine your budget in advance. In case you doubt about the cost of building an MVP, you may also connect with the product design and development services-providing agency, and you can start building your dream MVP with them at a minimal cost and faster.

Prototyping

Testing the product with a specific target group of people with the prototyped version helps make sure it is functioning as intended. Prototyping primarily aims to find defects before creating a final product; it also lowers costs because issues are found early on and fixed.

Developing & Launching

The last stage after finishing the prototype is developing an MVP and launching it. you must gather customer feedback once the product launches to continuously improve its features and offerings which aid in the app’s ability to remain viable.

Conclusion

minimum viable product approach is one of the best practices for any new business. It allows you to bring your idea into reality as quickly as possible. You are also able to develop an MVP by following the method mentioned in the blog, or you can also hire a product design agency, which will help you build your ideas into reality as soon as possible, as they will do all the work for your MVP from research, design, and development with a team of professionals.