How to launch a minimally viable product

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What does the launch of a successful startup and the launch of an existing company’s product on the market have in common? The motivation of the team, the desire to benefit people, the availability of money at the startup? Absolutely, but today we will talk about the most important thing – the product approach.

To launch your own successful product on the market, we suggest to get acquainted with the basic principles of Minimal Viable Product. The path is thorny, but no less interesting. Usually, in order to become an expert, you need to cope with more than a dozen bumps and spend a lot of resources, time and money.

We have prepared a detailed guide to bring you closer to the moment when you say, “I’m ready to launch a product. After reading this article you will be able to start creating MVPs and will know what mistakes you do not need to make.

What is MVP?
An MVP or Minimal Viable Product is a minimally viable product for testing market demand without a large investment.

Essentially, it’s a way to get a product to market quickly. The product team identifies a problem, analyzes the target audience, market and competitors, develops critical functionality, and gets the first feedback from users.

But hypothesis testing and feedback from the audience is not the only benefit. In some cases, the MVP concept is aimed at reducing costs and making profits on later versions of the product solution. Such resource independence is attractive to investors.

In what situations MVP concept is used
Minimally viable products are not only used in startups. This concept can be used in existing businesses as well.

For example, launching an online store is a sure step from offline to online business. With MVP you can reach a new audience, test the demand, test the viability of the idea.

Why MVP is so important
If we take into consideration the statistics, only every 10th startup turns into a successful product. The reasons are different: there is no demand on the market, the solution has no value, an ineffective team works, the product is not simple, but “raw”. And this is just a small part of all the different scenarios.

In order to keep the entrepreneurs from guessing by coffee grounds, the author of the concept Eric Rice defined MVP as the version of the product which allows the team to gather the maximum amount of verified customer knowledge with the least amount of effort. In other words, in the initial stages of business development, it is possible to establish whether the product meets the customer’s expectations. And based on that draw conclusions about the future fate of MVP: to start the next iterations of development or refuse the idea completely.

Not to be confused with PoC, PoC with CustDev
PoC or Proof of Concept is a proof of concept or a test of the feasibility of an idea. Through the reaction of the target audience to certain marketing and analytical impulses of the team – announcements, research, pre-orders, advertising, interviews – it is determined whether the business idea is worth the effort.

It’s important to separate: PoC is not a workable product, as in the case of MVPs. At most, it is a prototype, but it is not a “draft” with handwritten pencil notes. The concepts are closely related and may complement each other, but they are not equivalent.

The goals and objectives are different:

MVP, testing product relevance, developing key features to address audience need, presenting a fully working product to users and investors;
PoC, prove or disprove the feasibility of a technical feature, prepare a prototype or described scenario, present the finished research to investors and experts.
But the world wouldn’t be such a beautiful place if it weren’t for the possibility of choice. There is also a third tool that product teams use – CustDev. Customer Development is a methodology used to test ideas on a target audience.

The basic idea behind CustDev is to segment potential users, ask the right questions, and interview them. The team identifies the need of the target audience without the cost of MVP development.

CustDev. Before you can develop a full-fledged product, you need to test its relevance and solicit feedback from your potential audience.