A Brief Look at the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

There’s nothing worse than spending hundreds of hours building the perfect app only to discover on launch day that there was no market for your product. How do you manage the risk of launching a new product when you don’t really have the marketing muscle required to properly validate your idea?

Or what if you have the market research, but your idea is so new and novel there’s no existing market you can use to readily predict your product’s success?  

Enter the MVP, or minimum viable product: An early version of your product that contains the bare minimum of features required to satisfy early adopters who can provide feedback for further development.

Used correctly, an MVP can be a great tool to both manage the risk of developing a new product and guide product development as you scale. In this article we’ll take a brief look at some reasons why you might want an MVP, common mistakes you can avoid, and how to turn that MVP into your first marketable product.

Why do you want an MVP?

It may be hard to believe now, but the Instagrams, Twitters, and Airbnbs of the world didn’t just pop out of nowhere—they had to start small, just like everyone else, and the earliest versions of these apps would hardly be recognizable to the millions of users who use their products today.

“An MVP is an important step, which will help you to plan your startup wisely and scale your business properly.”

— Andrew Bondarenko, Tech Journalist

The key to finding success with any new product is managing risk as you scale. “7 Reasons Why You Need an MVP for Your Startup” goes in depth into how an MVP can help, with real case studies from companies like Airbnb and Foursquare as examples. Learn more by reading the full article…

Avoid common MVP mistakes

We all make mistakes, but with the advent of the internet, there’s no reason you can’t learn from the mistakes of others.

“8 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Developing Your Minimum Viable Product” discusses some of the reasons startups might fail on launch day, even if they went through the trouble of building an MVP.

What follows are a few of the common mistakes to avoid:

Using an inexperienced team: Just because you’re starting with an MVP, doesn’t mean you can cut corners when forming your team—feedback is useless if you don’t have the expertise to interpret it and respond with tangible product improvements. Your team should include real designers and engineers who are capable of bringing your final product to life.

Building an MVP the wrong way: Turns out there’s a right way and a wrong way to build an MVP. The “right way” places emphasis on the “viable” part of the MVP. Problems usually occur when startups only focus on the “minimum” part of the MVP.

Choosing the wrong development methodology: The MVP works best if feedback from consumers flows directly back into product development. This is also called test driven development (TDD), which happens to be a staple of Agile development. MVPs therefore synergize better with Agile development methodologies than the traditional Waterfall Approach.

Learn more by reading the full article…

Scale up your MVP to an MMP

At the end of the day, an MVP is only successful if it can scale into a full-fledged product. But at what point in the build-measure-learn cycle does an MVP become a final product? For some startups the answer to that question is the minimum marketable product (MMP).

“How to Go from a Minimum Viable Product to a Minimum Marketable Product” explains:

“Making an [MMP] simply means focusing on the core problem you are trying to solve and delivering a clear, concise solution. When building your [MMP], it’s important to constantly ask yourself: ‘What is the smallest or least complicated problem that the customer will pay us to solve?’”

Few products are really ever “final” in the digital world, but for some, the MMP can be considered an important milestone in that process: The first time people are willing to pay for your product. Learn more by reading the full article…

Eager to learn more about the MVP? Check out more articles about the MVP in the Hiring Headquarters >>

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