Everything You Should Know for the MVP Stage of Your Startup - 2024 Guide

All You Need to Know About the MVP Stage

MVP or 'minimum viable product' is the stage in product development where you create a version of your idea with the absolute essentials. This version gives users an idea of what the final product could be by giving them the bare minimum functionality necessary.

The MVP phase is an important stage in developing a successful software or product. It gives you an idea of whether your idea will work or not and if there’s anything you can change to improve it.

This article will give you an idea of what you should expect in the MVP stage of your app development. It will tell you about what an MVP is, its benefits, and how to go about developing a good MVP for your future million-dollar idea. Remember, every successful app you know today started with an MVP.

Understanding the MVP Stage

So What’s an MVP?

Every product starts with an idea, You could call an MVP an actualization of that idea. It's like a prototype that only has the core features needed to test the feasibility of a product idea. It helps you gather valuable information about your product that determines if your app will work or not or how you can improve it further.

The idea behind MVPs is to test your concept before you put too much money and effort into it. The basic idea is to build a product with enough features to test whether your idea about what customers want lines up with reality. An MVP isn’t like the final product, but it does give the user an idea of what the final product could look like.

By focusing on the core idea of your product and prioritizing features based on what users will use most frequently and why they’d use them in the first place, you can quickly gain valuable insight into how viable your idea might be. This process saves time and money not only at inception but also throughout development.

So Why Should You Make an MVP?

Making an MVP is important in the development of a new product for several reasons. An MVP lets you test your product idea in the real world with actual users. It helps validate whether there is a demand for your product.

By releasing a scaled-down version of your product, you can gather feedback, assess user engagement, and confirm if your product will work or not.

The main goal of an MVP is to learn from actual users. You want to understand their pain points, preferences, and behaviors. Collecting feedback and data helps you gain valuable insights into what works and what doesn't.

With insights gained from user interactions, you can make informed decisions about how to adapt and improve your product. This might involve adding new features, refining existing ones, or even changing the concept entirely.

How Should You Plan an MVP?

Finding Out the Core Features

Focus on including only the most important features in your MVP. This lets you launch your product faster, minimize development costs, and gather user feedback as soon as possible.

To narrow down the scope of your MVP, make a list of all potential features and functionalities and prioritize them based on their importance.

Here are some tips for finding your core features:

• Research the market to find gaps and opportunities that you can fill using your product. If there’s already a product available, find out what they do and what you can do to improve on it.
• Interviews and surveys are also a great way to gather information. Ask your potential users about their needs and expectations. Identify patterns and common pain points.
• Once you've gathered feedback, prioritize features based on their impact on solving the core problem and their feasibility. Focus on the "must-haves" that deliver the most value with the least development effort.

To give you an example, let’s imagine you're developing a social media platform. Your core features would include things like user profiles, friend requests, posting and sharing, comments, messaging, and notifications. Make sure to include features that are essential. Avoid adding novelty features like customized profile designs, real-time chat, and such. Advertising, monetization models, and in-depth data analytics can also be ignored.

Define Your Main Objectives

Setting clear goals and objectives is important in developing an MVP that does what it's being made to do. It helps in making sure you don’t waste any resources or time on things that aren’t important.

By outlining clear objectives, you use resources and guide your team’s efforts in a more focused manner.

With the objectives clearly defined, the team knows what they have to focus on. This leads to effective work in development and reduces the guessing work needed in development and testing. These goals also make it easy to keep track of progress and can be used for evaluation throughout the development process.

An MVP’s Scope and Timeline

The core value proposition is the unique selling point that sets your product apart from the rest and tells the users what it has to offer. Clearly defining your core value proposition is important for creating an MVP that resonates with your target audience.

To know what your core value proposition is, ask yourself these questions:

• What problem is my product trying to solve?
• How does it solve that problem?
• What separates it from the competition?
• What does my product offer?

By answering these questions, you’ll be able to pinpoint the unique aspects of your product that differentiate it from competitors.

When it comes to creating timelines and budgets, it’s important to take into account the complexity of the project. Take into account the skills and experience of the development team as well. Consider any external factors that may impact the project. Factors such as the availability of resources, the need for third-party services, and the need for additional testing or validation.

Break down your project into smaller tasks, and estimate the time required for each. Allocate some time for unforeseen challenges or problems that may arise. Similarly, when it comes to budgeting, consider the costs associated with development, design, marketing, and other aspects of your MVP.

So How Do You Make an MVP?

Designing and Developing Your MVP

Since we clearly defined the goals and objectives of your MVP, let’s design wireframes or low-fidelity prototypes to visualize the user interface and user experience. Your focus should be on simplicity and usability. Keep it minimalistic and simple. Ensure that the design aligns with your MVP's core objectives.

Developing a full-fledged product without iteration is risky. Since it's a big investment and takes a lot of time. An MVP, on the other hand, minimizes risk by focusing on essential features first. To save time, you can use a no-code tool like Momen.

You can learn and change features if necessary, reducing the potential for wasted resources. An MVP's primary purpose is to validate assumptions and address user needs.

By staying agile, you can quickly adjust your product based on real user experiences and preferences. Iterative development and agility are crucial for an MVP because they allow you to incorporate user feedback early and often.

Testing and Gathering Feedback

Now assuming you’ve designed and developed your MVP, you should now test your MVP with teammates, friends, family, and any users that you can find. This helps to make sure the user experience is as expected. This also helps you capture the necessary data to validate your ideas.

So how else do you collect feedback? There are many ways to collect feedback from your customers. Some of the most common feedback methods are surveys, interviews, user testing as we discussed, analytics, reviews, ratings, comments, or social media.

By gathering user feedback and analyzing how your MVP performs, you can identify areas where your product needs improvement or adjustments. This information can help you start refining your product, ultimately leading to a more successful final product.

You should choose the methods that are most relevant, reliable, and cost-effective for your MVP and feedback goals. You can also combine different methods to get a more comprehensive and balanced view of your customer feedback.

Creating an Iterative Feedback Loop

How does this work? Simple, you release an update, you gather feedback, you use that feedback to improve your idea, rinse and repeat.

Since by this step, you’ve tested your MVP and gathered feedback, you can improve and iterate on our product using the feedback we collected from the users. The feedback we gather tells us where we can improve or adjust our MVP. This information can help you start refining your product.

Collect and analyze feedback to identify patterns, trends, and areas of concern. Prioritize the feedback based on its impact on your MVP and the value it offers to users. For each iteration of the MVP, we gather new feedback, we make more changes, improvements, and adjustments, release it to the users, and do it all over again.

This continuous agile approach to improvement leads to the creation of a product that the users are happy to use. Slowly but surely, by staying responsive to user feedback and market demands, you can successfully build a product that delivers lasting value.

Airbnb, a Successful Startup's MVP

Airbnb, an MVP Case Study

Let’s talk about Airbnb. I’m sure we already know what Airbnb is but let's recap. Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique places around the world using the website or app.

Doesn’t matter if you’re looking for an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Airbnb connects people to unique travel experiences.

It’s also for people who want to put up their residential properties for rent. These rental properties are rented by users who are looking for affordable stay options, short-term or long-term.

The Story Goes…

In 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, who recently moved to San Francisco, needed help paying their rent. So what did they do? They saw an opportunity. In a city hosting frequent and highly attended conferences, it was difficult and expensive to find a hotel room. Conference attendees needed an affordable place to stay.

They thought that maybe they would be willing to pay to stay with a few strangers.

The question they needed the answer to was, would someone pay a stranger to find easy and affordable accommodation? In their MVP, there was no robust website or options to select multiple dates, locations, or prices.

They targeted one demographic: tech conference attendees at a single sold-out conference. They went there and asked around if people wanted a place to crash. They only needed to confirm that a sufficient number of people were willing to rent what they were offering. They ended up finding three, who each agreed to pay $80 per night.

They didn’t have to make something elaborate or complex to prove this simple assumption. They didn’t need to account for every use case.

They needed to demonstrate there was a market for paid room rentals in a personal setting. And that’s how they did it.

How’s Airbnb Doing Now?

Today, Airbnb has a logo and a brand identity. And they’ve expanded to mobile and improved their website. They will still need to adapt to user demand, and their relationships with the hotel industry, as well as local and state governments.

But by starting with a single idea, testing their assumptions quickly, and iterating based on data, Airbnb was able to become a major player in the sharing economy.

And to think they started with two guys letting strangers sleep on air mattresses in their living room. Airbnb no longer focuses specifically on conferences or events and is used by millions of hosts and guests worldwide. In 2014, Airbnb was valued at $10 billion. In 2018, they were valued at least $38 billion. Right now as of writing this article, Airbnb is valued at $85 billion

They have more than 150 million worldwide users that have booked over 1 billion stays. 6 guests check into an Airbnb listing every single second.

Conclusion

Navigating the MVP stage of a startup is an important step. It can greatly impact your path to success. Prioritizing a user-centric approach, iterative development, and adaptability are essential principles to keep in mind.

An MVP serves as the initial manifestation of your product idea, containing only the core features necessary for testing its feasibility. The primary goal is to find out if your idea works or not before spending a lot of resources. By focusing on core values and user needs, you gain valuable insight that saves you time and money.

Test your product with real users, validate demand, and gather feedback on pain points and preferences. Iterate on your product using the feedback you gather. Since that feedback serves as the foundation for iterative improvements, letting you improve your product.

From Airbnb’s case study, we see how an MVP can lead to remarkable success. By starting with a simple idea, targeting a specific demographic, and learning quickly from their assumptions.

In the ever-evolving startup landscape, embracing the principles of the MVP stage is what ultimately leads to the creation of a product that users love and lasting success in the market. Remember, every successful app today started with an MVP.

About Momen

Momen is a no-code web app builder, allows users to build fully customizable web apps, marketplaces, Social Networks, AI Apps, Enterprise SaaS, and much more. You can iterate and refine your projects in real-time, ensuring a seamless creation process. Meanwhile, Momen offers powerful API integration capabilities, allowing you to connect your projects to any service you need. With Momen, you can bring your ideas to life and build remarkable digital solutions and get your web app products to market faster than ever before.