5 Easy, doable steps to build a Minimum Viable Product for your startup idea

What is a Minimum Viable Product?

Minimum Viable Product or MVP is a product with the basic necessary features that are strong enough to satisfy the users’ needs and enables necessary feedback before going for the final product. The idea behind developing MVP is to develop a product to get the user’s attention about the main idea and mold the final product into what users actually love to have.

Check out some real market benefits of Minimal Viable Product:

• Build the Core of Your Product 
• Enables Market Validation 
• Reduce Rework 
• Release Faster
• Validate Business Functions 

Now knowing what is MVP, the real issue here is to understand the significant steps involved in the MVP app development process. Here are the steps involved to build an MVP:

Start with market research

Before you begin with an idea and start the MVP development process, please ensure that it meets the end-users needs. And how do you get to know about the end users’ needs? It needs deep market research and understanding. The first step to development is to get all the customer feedback and sentiments before going into development.

Conduct market surveys, you need to explore the problem you are planning to solve because the more information you have, the more success you will get. You need to find out if your idea solves the problem in a way that engages the audience.

The survey conducted by CB Insights revealed that the prime reason for a startup failure with a 42 percent share is ‘’lack of market research’’. In a nutshell, if your product doesn’t solve the problem, consumers will not find it worth using or buying.

Ideate on your MVP value addition

Before getting down to the MVP development, there are many questions you must keep in your mind, this will assist to express your idea in a better way. These are questions are follow these:

• What exact value does your product follow and offer to its customers?
• How can it benefit them?
• Why do they buy your product?

You must have a clear estimation of your product. As MVP defines, introducing value to the people. So the first task is to define them and develop your whole MVP on that.

Map out user flow 

The user flow is one of the most significant factors as it assures you don’t miss out on a single element while developing the product and its user comfort. Now the question here is how you can establish your user flow? So to establish user flow, it is important to define the process in some steps. And for that, you need to define the steps required to reach the prime objective. 

Your focus must be on the basic responsibilities rather than features such as discovering and purchasing the product, handling and taking orders. These are actual features that your end users have while they use your product. When all these steps are well planned and designed, now it is high time to define the features of each step.

Prioritize MVP Features

Your MVP must have all the absolute minimum features and deliver a complete user experience to the customers. To achieve it, first, make a list of all the features you want to incorporate in your product for every stage. Once the MVP programming or development process is completed, please cross-check with the list of features that current stage features are included or not.

You need to prioritize the features of your product for every particular stage. To achieve it, please answer these questions yourself. What do your users want? Is your product sufficient to please them? More.

After that, classify all the remaining features as their priority: High Priority, Medium Priority, and Low Priority. When you organize all the features, you are set for the first release of the product and develop an MVP. If you want to have a clear vision of your future MVP development, you can create a prototype of it.

Launch MVP in the market

Once you are done with the finalization of all the significant features and market research, you are set to develop an MVP. Be aware that MVP software development is not something of lower quality than a final product, so always focus on its quality 

A Road to Conclusion  

Taking your start-up from the ideation phase to launch is a very complex process. While it is very natural to commit mistakes in this process, if your focus is on quality and customer experience, you will always emerge a better version of yourself. Your MVP product is the best bet you can play to succeed in this quest.