Imagine, you have a wonderful idea and want to build a great new product. Do you have the costs calculation and ready to invest? Stop at this point! You are at one step before to lose your money.
A lot of entrepreneurs are making the same mistakes. They spend a lot of energy and funds for developing an ideal product, without proper testing it on the market. After the project launching, they understand it won’t be in demand. In this article, we will discuss one way how you can test your business idea with a minimal risk and investment. Also, we recommend you to read our article about TOP-4 client risks in WEB & Mobile Development and ways to reduce it.
What is MVP means?
You probably heard abbreviation MVP, that means Minimum Viable Product (that may be a website, mobile app etc.). The picture below nicely demonstrates the difference between the amount of necessary for development product functionality for MVP1 and the final Product that you want to get.
The most important is that having the first version of the product (MVP1) you can demo it to your potential clients and get preliminary feedback with recommendations on how they want to see the final product. Just this simple check may considerably reduce your business risks and improve the idea of the future product in time.
See below a few examples on how the product may considerably change during development, and reading this, imagine the situation if the owner of the product would decide to implement his initial idea without creating of MVP and testing of the market.
TOP-3 Examples of Successful Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Twitter, a widely popular social media platform, is a matter of completely different approach. After Apple released iTunes, a podcasting platform Odeo was going through tough times that forced them to organize hackathons in order to decide what to do next. During one of the hackathons, they came up with an idea to create an SMS-based messaging platform. It was initially called “twttr” and was supposed to be an internal-use-only product, but employees were spending hundreds of dollars on SMS to post to the platform. That showed to the founders of Odeo that the idea of “twttr” might be exactly what they were looking for.
UBER
You might be surprised, but if you didn’t follow Uber’s history since the very beginning, you might not know that back in 2010 Uber wasn’t what you’d expect it to be. Uber’s MVP did one simple thing: connected drivers with iPhone owners in San Francisco who weren’t scared to have credit card payments enabled in an unknown app. It was enough to fulfill their main goal: offer taxi services as cheap as possible. The Uber we know now is a result of a right approach to business scaling and a successful MVP test.
All Facebook’s (or Thefacebook as it was called when they launched) MVP did was connect students together via their college or class and let them post messages to their boards. The idea already existed in Friends Reunited and other social platforms, but the simplicity of Facebook’s approach and the traction it gained in the virulent world of college graduates proved unstoppable. This allowed almost all of the features that came after to build on that success.
Practically all the famous IT-companies started with an MVP. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Test your idea with a minimum investment of time and money.
Why is it better to start your Start-up with MVP?
So, finally, why do we recommend to start the development of your product from the creation of the very limited functionality with just the Most Valuable features? An MVP is a smart way to:
- Save development budgets
- Define the claimed and unnecessary functions
- Collect real feedback from the early users
- Correct the ways to monetize your project
- Make an accurate customer’s profile
- Release your product to market in the shortest time
- Reduce implementation costs
- Test the demand for your product – before releasing a full-fledged product
- Avoid failures and large capital losses
- Gain valuable insight on what works and what doesn’t work
- Work directly with your clients and analyze their behaviors and preferences
- Gather and enhance your user base
In the development process, you may find out more issues you can solve or use they for exclusive offerings and new ideas. Maybe you’ll understand that initial features set was wrong and you modernize it. Or something like that.
Start development your MVP with Us! We have talented developers, designers, and managers with over 10 years of experience. Our company created over 50 successful projects and most from them were started from MVPs. We are ready to share our experience with you. Contact us on office@syntech.software. Initial consultation and preliminary estimation of development costs will be free for you.
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