Creating your MVP is the first step for you to enter the market with a tangible product that your potential user base will interact with.
To make the most out of your MVP, you have to make sure that every step of execution is flawless, and that you are reaching the audience with your best.
There are quite a lot of myths about MVP, but you only need to pay attention to facts that are backed up by research data and votes from professionals. You also need to focus on following the best MVP practices for startups that are currently trending in the market.
To make it easier for you, today we will be discussing the 15 best MVP practices for startups. These practices will help you ensure that you’re making the best first impression, along with making your startup idea a huge success.
1. Make Sure you Know Your Target Audience
Every product revolves around its users. When you’re creating your new product, you need to do the same. You’ll have to figure out the kind of people you are targeting with your digital product, and there are quite a few things to take into consideration:
- Who you are developing for
- The region you are targeting
- The demographic of the region
- The motivation of the people
- Values of the people
When you focus on every little detail about your target audience, you have a better idea of how to design your product to appeal to your user base the right way.
2. Always Put In The Market Research Before You Go Any Further
Market research can help you back up your product idea with actual data and statistics when planning your MVP. If you figure out the needs of the market, and how your product will suit the needs of your target audience, you can build an app that ensures maximum customer satisfaction.
To determine your target market, ask yourself:
- Who are your users?
- What problems are they facing at the moment?
- How are they solving their problems currently?
- How can you solve the problem with your product?
- Are you offering a better solution than the ones that already exist on the market?
- If you are, is the target market ready to pay for your solutions?
3. Set Clear Goals For Product Design
When designing your product, there will be many ideas that will cross your mind. But remember, you need to have your eyes set on the goal and have a clear roadmap of how you want to reach it. Otherwise, your product design and development are going nowhere.
A product design includes a lot of operations that you need to execute perfectly. Breaking them into smaller subtasks makes it both for your developer team and you to keep track of and perform.
All these goals should be oriented toward the market demand based on the research data you collected. When your product design is goal-oriented, it helps you avoid feature creep.
Feature creep/ scope creep happens when a product team is spending too much time and energy to implement a lot of features that don’t provide much value to the active users, missing the true objective of the MVP.
4. Determine Your Most Valuable Features
It’s not about the features you want to put in your app. It’s about what the users want from your app. And of course, you won’t know what features to implement for solving their problems if you don’t do market research.
An MVP may have more than one feature, but you still need to determine the one feature that is providing the most value to your users. You can determine your most important feature from MVP feedback, or by conducting user interviews and surveys.
Once you know the benefits and shortcomings of your features, double down on the most beneficial feature to continuously improve it for more user benefits.
5. Keep It Simple And Fast
A well-known product development approach is to “Build-Measure-Learn”. Without deploying different iterations, you cannot learn and improve. But despite the process being so important, you need to figure out how to do it faster and more efficiently.
When you’re stuck in the development phase for too long, you fall behind the competition. Also, an MVP is supposed to be minimal. So while it’s good to polish your product, it’s best to keep it as minimal as possible, while ensuring the key features are working right.
6. Make Sure You’re Following The Current Industry/ Market Trends
Every industry is rapidly changing every single day. Whether you are a software developer, software designer, or a startup owner, you will have to follow along and keep yourself up with these trends too.
The most change-heavy part of a product is the UX design. Interface design always goes through rapid changes to suit the conveniences of the users. When developing your product, you need to follow these trends and changes too.
Determine what the users find the most convenient, and make your design choice for the product in a way that suits it.
7. Keep Testing Cost To A Minimum
Tests are performed on a software product to figure out potential bugs that can stop the core features from functioning properly. Bug testing is an essential step of the development phase, but it’s not something you should devote too much time and resources to.
Trying to achieve perfection will get you stuck in an endless loop of the testing phase, which will ultimately delay the release of the MVP. Also, testing costs money. The more you test, the more you’re spending, causing the development budget to go higher.
Test your product, but don’t test it to the point it starts draining your capital resources.
8. Set A Clear Deadline For Publishing
If an MVP isn’t launched at the right time, or the time that you specify, it can reduce the credibility and value of your product. To ensure that doesn’t happen, set a clear deadline that considers your development plan, and leaves room for adjustments.
Let’s say you will need 3 months to develop your product. In that case, set a deadline for publishing the app after 3 months and 10 days. That way, you can work with a clear goal set in mind, your audience knows when to expect your product, and you have room for preparations for the release.
9. Market To The End Users, Along With New People
When marketing your MVP, your first goal should always be the end users within your target audience. But your goal should always include new users who are just getting introduced to your product.
Another thing to remember is the marketing trends. It’s good to focus on the current market, but you should also keep an eye on the long-term trends, so your marketing ideas aren’t rendered obsolete after a while.
The market will always evolve, and you have to come up with marketing strategies that will be viable in the long run.
10. Hold Onto The End User Details For Future Releases
When you’re constantly adjusting your product, you will have to let your users know when another major release is coming. Since people have a short attention span towards a single thing these days, you have to maintain the focus of the audience on your product by keeping them in the loop constantly.
The best way to do this is to hold onto the information that is shared by the end users, the most common information being their email addresses. That way, when you’re releasing another major version, you can let all your potential customers know via an email campaign.
When you constantly update your user base about the progress and development tidbits of your product, they feel involved and inclined to stick with your business plan.
11. Always Have A Backup Plan
Even with the best practices involved in the development cycle of your MVP, it can go to ruin fast. Never put your eggs in one basket, and keep backup plans at hand.
It’s good to have a secondary idea ready, in case the first idea doesn’t work out. There are a lot of instances when customers don’t want what you’re trying to deliver, even when your product operates flawlessly.
If you invest all your time and resources in just one idea or initial product, it can cause massive damage to the financial integrity of your business plan, so it’s always better to have a backup plan for future product development.
12. Communicate Accordingly So Everyone Knows Your Plan
Communication is very important. Not just in terms of development, but during other instances as well. If you communicate well with your users and customers, you will constantly be receiving user feedback that you can act upon.
If you are constantly communicating with your shareholders, you establish yourself as a credible organization, and the shareholders know exactly what you’re working on.
13. Stick To The Plan No Matter What
The development phase is a rocky road. There will be setbacks, errors, and many, many other problems. While some of them are just minor inconveniences, others can set you back a great deal. The trick here is to stick to the deadline and methodology no matter what.
Another thing you have to keep an eye on is staying on track. Different features can be lucrative, and trying to implement different features can sidetrack your product roadmap fast.
Only focus on what the customer needs, find a way to make it deliverable, and keep working on that.
14. Leverage Public Interactions
Every public interaction can bring benefits to your MVP. Whether it’s customer feedback, word-of-mouth marketing, or any other means of publicity.
Marketing your product is important, but the improvements that come from user input provided by real users can also matter a lot. A product may seem fine to the team, but only a different perspective will reveal the flaws in your software.
What’s a better way to get public eyes on your product than constantly going public about it?
15. Keep Monetization In Mind
The last question is what it all comes down to. Because no business can survive without recurring revenue. This is something you have to plan, even when your product is at its most basic version.
Even with the most minimal version of your product, you need to determine if you will be able to secure funding for further development or find potential customers.
To Wrap It All Up
Let’s review all the best practices for MVP startups one more time:
- Make Sure You Know Your Target Audience
- Always Put In The Market Research
- Set Clear Goals For Your Product
- Determine Your Most Valuable Feature
- Keep It Simple And Fast
- Make Sure You’re Following The Current Market Trends
- Keep Testing Cost To A Minimum
- Set A Clear Deadline For Publishing
- Market To The End Users, Along With New People
- Hold Onto The End User Details For Future Releases
- Always Have A Backup Plan
- Communicate Accordingly So Everyone Knows Your Plan
- Stick To The Plan No Matter What
- Leverage Public Interactions
- Keep Monetization In Mind
When you’re implementing all the market standard business practices into your product vision, there’s nothing that can stop you from creating a great functional product, along with having great post-launch success.
Our developers at Impala InTech can help you achieve all the milestones for creating an MVP with the best market and development practices in mind.
FAQs
Yes, it’s a good idea never to put all the eggs in one basket. So a startup founder/ developer should always have more than one backup product in case one of them fails.
Without proper marketing, early adopters will not get to know about your product. So you must perform marketing for your MVP through the appropriate channels.
While the goal of an MVP should always be to cut down development time, the development should still take time to test out the core features.
An MVP should always aim for minimal costs. While testing is good for the product to be bug-free, you have to ensure that the testing budget or time isn’t exceeding the minimum threshold.
Of course! You need to constantly remind people that your product exists and is being improved constantly to provide more services. The only way to do it is to market your product continuously.
