How to Validate Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in 17 Different Ways

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How to Validate Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in 17 Different Ways how to validate mvp

MVP Validation is when you’re applying different methods to reach out to your target audience and check if continuing to develop your MVP is viable. Your MVP is validated for further improvement if the research outcome is successful.

Alright, folks! Let’s discuss how to test your MVP & the different steps you can take to test your MVP for validation.

Is Your Product Market Fit?

You can identify market fitness by asking yourself a few simple questions:

  1. Is my product solving a problem?
  2. Who is my product solving the problem for?
  3. Will the users love the product enough to recommend it?

A great way to determine this value is to set up a value hypothesis. When you act on a value hypothesis, it validates the market fitness of your actual product.

Set Target Audience For MVP Validation

Three types of target audiences can evaluate and validate your MVP

The Early Adopters

Early adopters do their best to get involved in any new software development cycle within their niche. They are always the first to provide user feedback on any new MVP that hits the relevant market.

The Evangelists

They are part of the early adopters, only far more experienced. These people have reviewed and provided feedback for 100s of MVPs over the years, and listening to their feedback can improve your MVP significantly.

Any positive reviews and encouragement can validate your MVP and attract the following audience.

The Investors

The investors, as the name suggests, are the ones who provide funding to MVP, which has a lot of potential moving forward. The investors come in 3 different forms:

  1. Individual investor
  2. Organization as an investor
  3. Crowdfunding

No matter the type of investors involved with your MVP development process, they should be your ultimate target audience for the MVP launch.

Why Should You Test Your MVP?

When you’re planning to launch a product, your first goal is to get your idea out there so that it will take a minimum amount of time and resources for you to complete. The best way to go is to build an MVP with minimum functionalities that resolve a core problem for your target audience.

More than building an MVP is needed; you should constantly test the product to ensure the app is fully functional in its current stage.

When you’ve completed testing the functionalities of the MVP, it’s time to test the market and the target demographic. If you find positive results from your hypothesis, you can invest more in your MVP development and launch.

Testing the waters before you launch your MVP can determine whether you’ll see grand financial success or fall behind your competitors.

17 Best Strategies To Test Your MVP

Here are the 17 best strategies to test your MVP for public validation.

1. Landing Pages

Start with a simple landing page and run a mock campaign to test how your idea resonates with your potential user base. Buffer started their journey with this idea, and this idea is becoming more feasible as more days pass.

This is excellent if you want to test the market on a relatively lower budget.

2. Explainer Videos

There is a proverb that a picture says a thousand words. Suppose that picture is moving and talking on its own. In that case, the expression only becomes more evident, driving the effectiveness of explainer videos very high.

Make your video presentation simple yet eye-catching. When presenting yourself and the product the right way, you can always pique the interest of anyone watching the video and keep them interested.

Another great thing about these videos is that they can be something other than high-end content. Please keep it simple yet highly informative to get the most appreciation and attention.

Make sure to attach a verbal CTA, along with links that you can either embed in the video or post on the video description/ comments.

3. Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is when you present your MVP idea to an audience and ask them to support your development process via financial assistance.

If you are familiar with Kickstarter or Indiegogo, you already know the crowdfunding idea.

4. Customer Interviews

This is the most fabulous idea because there is nothing better than involving your target audience in the development cycle by taking their detailed feedback.

The best way to do it is to list potential users interested in your MVP, and then offer them to try it out for a limited time. Once the period is over, ask them about their detailed experience to figure out your development roadmap.

5. Social Media Surveys

Social media surveys are effortless to arrange and participate in. You can design a short survey to the point with a few questions that can bring out the most information.

Adding the option to post someone’s opinion is also a great idea when conducting these surveys, as it helps people provide detailed and honest feedback.

Gathering public insights from social media surveys can validate your MVP and help you further down the line when coding for updates.

6. Pre-Order Page

Pre-order pages are a bit different compared to traditional landing pages. Pre-order pages can help you validate your MVP before you even create your MVP. But how?

A great example is the Oculus VR headset, now branded as Meta Quest. Oculus created their pre-order page for the Oculus Rift before the production of the Oculus Rift even began.

With the pre-order page, they convinced the potential user base that the product existed and secured funding from pre-booking purchases.

7. PPC Ad Campaigns

Social networks like Google and Facebook can be super effective in ad campaigns because the ads can be highly customizable to suit your target-reaching needs.

As a result, you can reach the exact audience you are looking for and gather interest and feedback much faster.

These campaigns can either get you the audience you thought you could gather or the campaign can produce an underwhelming number of potential users. It’s best to go into ad campaigns with the possibility that it might work out differently than you expect it to.

8. A/B Testing

A/B testing is when you’re offering your user base two different versions of the same thing and letting the masses choose the preferred version.

If you are still deciding on the version you wish to develop further, it’s best to go for public opinion. If you have a cloud-based app, you can randomly redirect your user base to either one version or the other of the MVP.

While the users are using both versions, use the analytics of both versions to track the more successful performance.

Once you’ve reached a definitive conclusion, continue to build on the people’s chosen version.

9. Emailing

Emailing is still a great way of campaigning since most working population still uses emails as a viable communication method within their workspace.

When you run an email marketing campaign, make sure to keep track of different metrics, mainly:

  1. Click rate
  2. Open rate
  3. Redirect rate
  4. Bounce rate

If keeping track of all the metrics becomes overwhelming, you can always use different email marketing tools or analytics tool plugins.

10. Competitive Product Analysis

In this day and age, coming up with a unique startup idea can be a rare occurrence. If you have a product idea, chances are another product is already serving the same purpose. These products can be considered competitive products.

When you analyze competitor products, you can have a detailed insight into the functions of their apps and the functionality gap between their app and yours.

Once you have enough information, you can quickly determine what you can implement to be considered unique for your app and help your MVP stand out.

11. Wizard Of Oz MVP/ Manual-First MVP

Wizard of Oz MVP is where the backend process of an MVP is done manually by human beings. Still, the target customer doesn’t know about it.

The most outstanding example of Wizard of Oz MVP will always be the earliest version of Amazon, known back then as Amazon Books. Back then, the founders would have to buy the books manually from different distributors to supply the customers.

12. Concierge MVPs

Concierge MVP is an MVP that’s entirely run manually. Wizard of Oz MVP can also be considered an improved version of Concierge MVPs.

Sometimes, an individual may need more budget to automate background processing in their business model. If they decide to do it all manually instead, the MVP can be considered as a concierge MVP.

A great example of concierge MVP is the early version of Airbnb. After receiving orders through the website, the founders had to manually visit locations and book the rooms.

13. Piecemeal MVPs

Piecemeal MVPs can be considered a hybrid of Concierge and Wizard of Oz. Instead of spending time and money on a development cycle to get everything done from scratch, you build your product with pre-existing tools and resources.

Doing so saves time, money, and other resources, and your MVP can be considered a Piecemeal MVP.

When using pre-existing tools, most of which are free to use, you can reduce your development costs to a range that will surprise you. Sometimes these MVPs even become complete products over time.

14. Digital Prototyping

Digital prototyping is when you create mock versions or a dummy MVP application to demonstrate how the digital product will perform in different or real-life scenarios.

When you show your effectiveness to your potential users, you increase the credibility of your development, along with receiving validation with customer feedback.

Digital prototyping doesn’t always have to be a demo product with limited functionality that can be considered the pre-MVP stage. It can just be a couple of screenshots or diagrams and dummy sketches.

The goal is to get your point across through visual media to the customers.

15. Paper Prototyping

If digital prototypes are too expensive for you (which they can be in most cases), paper prototyping can be inexpensive while being tangible. It’s like your drawing board in a portable form, presented in front of the masses for reviews.

Paper prototypes work best with physical products since your customers and the development team can understand the basic functionalities and provide feedback or work on them accordingly.

16. Single-Feature MVPs

An MVP can contain multiple basic features. But sometimes, the best idea is to focus on one element in an MVP to maximize functionality.

When you focus your MVP on only one function without trying to overwhelm your users, the users can provide more accurate feedback.

It’s much easier to develop and implement better functionality with single-feature MVPs due to their minimized nature of development.

17. Hallway Testing

The hallway testing method can sound a bit unorthodox. Still, it is an excellent idea if you want an unbiased and honest opinion on your MVP.

Hallway testing is when you approach random people who are not prospects and don’t know anything about the product and ask them to test your MVP.

When someone with no prior idea about your product is asked to review it, they will use their intellect to test the app’s features and review the product accordingly.

To Wrap It All Up

The benefits of testing an MVP for validation can be endless. The feedback and data collected from different validation methods can be more than enough to sustain your development process till your MVP becomes a full-fledged product.

The testing techniques mentioned above are some of the best ideas for testing an MVP for market validation. You can either implement one or combine multiple for your desired result. Best of luck!

FAQs

What Is MVP Validation and Why Is It Important?

MVP validation is the idea of ensuring that your MVP is serving its intended purpose.

How Do I Determine if an MVP Is Validated?

If the MVP is receiving the expected positive response and attracting more users for usage, it means the MVP is valid for solving core pain points.

How Can I Use A/B Testing to Validate an MVP?

You can use A/B testing to let the users try multiple versions so they can choose a preferable version. You can then continue to improve the version that was chosen by the majority.

What Is the Significance of a Low Bounce Rate in MVP Validation?

A low bounce rate indicates that more people are choosing to stick with the application and are looking forward to further development. That way, you have retaining users who are validating your MVP.

How Can You Use Surveys to Validate Your MVP?

User surveys can help you gather feedback. If you are gathering a lot of positive feedback then it’s safe to say that your MVP has been validated.

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