Let me introduce you to a friend of mine, who had an app idea that he thought would be very impressive, and thought it would make him rich if he implemented it.
He worked on this idea for several months, hired several professionals, and ended up paying thousands of dollars and finally finished the app.
He was overjoyed when his app was ready, and after he rolled it out and paid more for advertising and marketing campaigns, the unexpected happened.
My friend didn't even make a cent of the profits he expected, and in fact this great app - just in his mind - did not impress the users at all and did not encourage them in any way to pay any money in it.
Scary and bad scenario, isn't it? You definitely don't want to face the same fate, so you'll have to figure out how to create an MVP.
In this article, we will provide you with everything you need to know about creating a minimalist product for your project; From the definition of the MVP to its purpose, benefits and practical steps to create it.
You will find all this and more in this article, so prepare your cup of coffee, grab a paper and a pen, and keep reading.
What is a minimum product?
MVP or Minimum Viable Product, and may also be called: Prototype, Minimum Viable Product, Minimum Product, Smallest Valuable Product, and other names with the same meaning; It is the product that contains the least number of features or functions that you can present to the audience.
Where instead of building your entire product, application, or website to start launching it in the market and knowing what customers think of it and how they will receive it. You can build this prototype from it and spend less money, time and effort on it and see through it the demand of customers for it and whether they like it and interact with it or not.
The biggest and most important goal of creating a minimal product lies in testing the market and determining whether the product will succeed or not, in order to be left and move to another project in the event that it is a losing card for its owners and developers.
Creating a minimal product is very popular, as many of the major companies like: Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Airbnb and others started out as MVP.
But the minimal product that is created must be of sufficient utility and value for customers to use and attractive enough to early adopters and investors, as well as include within it a mechanism for evaluation and giving feedback and reviews by its users.
Benefits of creating a minimalist product
There are a lot of benefits that you will gain by creating a minimal product MVP, on top of them:
- You will enter the market in no time and you will know whether you will succeed in advance or not.
- If this is a new market you will gain a competitive advantage, which is that you are the first and the Market Maker.
- It will allow you to do some experimentation and see what customers like and dislike.
- You will not need to spend as much money as you would with the complete product, but you will pay a small portion of the expected cost.
- You will be able to solve the various problems that you will encounter beforehand.
- You will be able to get a lot of customers in the beginning before you launch your complete product.
- It will provide you with a lot of reviews and comments from customers, which will help you evaluate your ideas, correct your mistakes and develop your product.
And while we're talking about this point, I should definitely mention that you can increase those benefits by using one of the companies that specialize in creating a minimal product.
For example, there are a lot of benefits of using ScienceSoft to create a minimalist product, which is a professional American company and has helped a lot of companies in the Middle East and around the world.
For example, this company does all the process of creating the MVP for you, and this is by a full team of specialists that includes - at least - 3 programmers in various technical fields, a project manager, a UI designer, a UX designer, a quality control engineer and a business analyst.
These expert companies, such as ScienceSoft, have decades of experience in the field and have created thousands of corporate minimum products.
In general and in short, creating an MVP will help you test the market you will enter, know what customers think of your product, and identify a lot of problems early.
This will help you avoid the tragic fate of the 90% of startups that fail, of which 20% fail in their first year, according to Failory.
Minimum product creation steps
If you want to create your own minimal product yourself, we will provide all the steps that you may need, namely:
Step one: do a full search
The first and undoubtedly the most important step is to do market research in order to understand it, its needs and its nature.
You will have to understand the different products in your niche, define your target audience and have a good understanding of their most important pain points and what they are looking for.
You should also do research on competitors in order to understand them and know their strengths and weaknesses, in order to overcome them later.
This step will help you identify the main features or characteristics that you should include in your minimum product.
This step will also help you not to fall into the most dangerous mistake that fails companies and products, which, according to CB Insights, is the lack of need for them in the market.
Step 2: Determine the characteristics of your minimalist product
At this point or step you will have to define the basic idea of ​​your minimalist product and settle on it.
Mostly, it will depend on the features you set for the product and prioritization that you learned about in the first step.
Choose the characteristics that have the highest priority that will help your product, and will have the greatest impact on the audience you are targeting.
You can use one of the models used for prioritizing, such as the Moscow model MoSCoW.
So that you can divide the characteristics into:
1- Must-haves features that you should keep in mind while creating your minimalist product.
2- Should-haves features that are important but don't necessarily go into creating your bottom line product.
3- Properties that could be in your product Could-haves, these are properties that you can put in your final product and not your bottom line product.
4- Features that your product won't have, and those you shouldn't pay attention to.
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Third Step: Select the type of minimum product you will create
There are many types of MVP, among which you have to choose the one that best suits you depending on the nature of your product, the nature of the audience you are going to target, and your larger goal of creating your own minimum product.
Among the most popular and widely used types are:
1. Landing page MVP:
Using landing pages in order to find out how much customers are interested in your product, using an actual product as opposed to The Fake Door, which is one of the most used in the world of entrepreneurship.
2. Single Feature MVP:
Through it, you can test your customers' response to this single feature that you focused on in your product.
3. Wizard of Oz MVP:
You do the work for the product completely manually with the customer feeling that the whole process is automated and automated.
4. E-Mail Campaign MVP:
By having an email list of some customers, through which you can know the extent of El-Dahour's interest in your product or the new feature that you offer.
5. Concierge MVP:
You implement what you are supposed to do through the product, but you do it humanly before the product is fully developed, such as: you manually write lists for it, and it is used to measure the extent of customer interest in the product.
6. Pre-order MVP:
Helps you attract subscription funds and investments early.
7. Marketing Campaign MVP:
Helps you discover who the ideal customer segment for your product is and how you can market and target them.
8. The Fake Door:
Through it, you can discover the extent of customers' interest in your product or new features without any actual application of it.
Step Four: Launch Your Minimum Product
At this point you will actually launch your MVP, which despite being a prototype should either fill a need or rid the client of something that was causing them Pain Point.
Before you launch the MVP you should also define its KPIs, so that you can judge whether it failed or succeeded.
These performance indicators differ according to each product and the other, and according to the desired goals and expected to be measured.
The most popular KPIs that are used are:
- Email Sign-Ups number of times.
- Engagement.
- Percentage of Active User Percentage.
- Subscriptions.
- CAC customer acquisition cost.
- Clients Appraisals.
- Customer lifetime value CLV.
By following these performance standards, you will be able to judge whether your bottom line product has failed or succeeded.
Step 5: Create your bottom line product, measure its performance, and learn
Now it's your turn to actually create your bottom line product, launch it to market, measure and track the KPIs you've defined, and judge its performance.
Instead of creating it yourself, you can commission a company that specializes in building it and have it delivered to you ready-made.
This stage or step is one of the most difficult stages you will go through, as you will see the extent of customer interest and response to your product.
Determine the appropriate time period for your product - for example, two or three months - and evaluate the performance of this product, and based on this performance, make your appropriate decision as we will explain in the next step.
Step Six: Evaluate your product and make the right decision about it
The final step in creating a minimum viable product is to make an overall assessment of your product and whether it is a success or failure, and accordingly you will decide whether to keep this MVP and develop it into a full product or you will Pivot and focus on another problem faced by users and try solve it.
Whether the outcome is positive or negative at this point is an outcome that you should be proud of, as it will guide you on the right path.
Even if your product fails, this will save you from losing a lot of time and money on it, developing it completely, and then failing, a worse case scenario, right?
This is the most important reason to create a minimal product for your project, in order to practically test whether it is a success or a failure.
Conclusion
Creating a minimal product is inevitable, it is difficult to predict whether or not your product will survive and succeed in today's competitive market.
An MVP will allow you to get a feel for the market, help you see if customers are interested in your product or not, and generally tell you whether your product will succeed or fail.
That is why it is essential that you create a minimal product for your idea and project, launch it into the market and see the results it will achieve.
At the end of our conversation, we hope that you liked the article, and we encourage you to write to us in the comments below your opinions and inquiries and we will respond to them as soon as possible.