Can you develop mvp

Bringing a new product to market is always a big risk. But to reduce the risk, you can first develop a minimum viable product MVP. Have you heard about Airbnb and how they got started? So they decided to transform their living room into a bedroom with air mattresses for three people. After they had earned some money renting out their living room, they built a simple website to offer their service on the internet.

Based on the story of Airbnb — and other startups that began the same way — we can define an MVP as a product that provides only the single most important service its core functionality.

After this product is launched, you can test it on real users, learn from them, and continue improving and developing your MVP. One day, this MVP will become a fully-fledged product. The first step of successful minimum viable product development is evaluating your business idea. But why would they use it? You need to find a problem you can solve for your target audience.

The best way to find a problem that needs a solution is to think about your personal challenges. Is there anything that you personally could do better if you only had the right tool?

And can you actually create this tool? If we, for example, look back at how Uber started, we can see that it was initially an app to request premium black cars in a few metropolitan areas. Its service was aimed at an underserved customer segment, e. In the same way, you can find your own problem within a particular segment of the market and offer a solution. Just imagine that you want to build an application that will help people save money.

Saving money is a pretty obvious goal for many people. Nearly everyone would like a little extra money in their pockets. To save money you might use coupons and look for discounts on food, shoes, gifts, and other goods or services. These coupons and discounts can be found on the websites of shops, delivery services, etc.

Therefore you might develop an app that helps people search for discounts and coupons in an easier way and, most importantly, helps them save money. The primary goal of this product, therefore, would be to allow users to search for discounts to save money easily. Competitor analysis is important no matter what. There are various tools available that can help you investigate your competitor's websites or apps and get some insights about their monthly traffic, sources of traffic, website or app rank globally and within a particular country , geographical location of users, and other helpful information.

Keep in mind that all of this data will be within a small margin of error. One of the most popular free service of this type is Similar Web. With Similar Web, all you need to do is copy-paste a link to a site or even just set up an extension in your browser. Zappos also started with an MVP. So, yes, you need to build a minimal product version. In terms of functionality, the MVP concept revolves around delivering only must-haves.

To get to market faster, you deliver only those features that represent core user flows and bring the most value to end-users. Why, you ask? MVP is a fully-functioning solution with key features of the app and it allows you to:. What features to include in the upcoming release? What to remove from the product backlog?

By giving users something they can play around with, you increase the chances of getting honest reviews. Check technical feasibility. This, in turn, will help you gradually build a stable, functioning product version that brings value right from the start.

Present the idea to investors in order to gain initial funds and support. Gradually add new features and make regular updates. The flexibility of Agile is the main advantage early-stage startups can rely on when competing with huge corporations for a piece of market share. The full cycle of launching an MVP app takes around months from an idea to the final release.

As a startuper, you can either develop it yourself, if you have enough technical skills, or outsource it to a team. We highly advise choosing the second option, because just delivering an MVP is not the end of the road. Plus, while they are working, you can dedicate this time to other operational tasks, such as deciding on marketing strategies and financial models.

At this stage, bright-eyed entrepreneurs come up with groundbreaking product ideas. Why not build the best closet organizing app? Or maybe develop a solution that helps to drink more water?

Deliver a product that prevents food waste? Well, yes, this is about determining the problem that needs to be solved and finding the best possible solution to it. Your app should be beneficial to customers and be in-demand. Try to define the benefits users will receive from your solution and fit it into sentences.

Here is an example from our experience. We worked on a sneakers store solution for our client. Their idea was to unite all new releases from different brands in one app with filters and a user-friendly menu.

Their app saves users time and helps them follow fresh arrivals without installing dozens of apps of other brands and subscribing to a newsletter. For the second step, define your target audience as precisely as you can. Imagine that you draw a portrait of a future customer in detail. Think about how old they are, where they live, what they are doing in their free time, etc… These answers will assist in choosing a marketing strategy and channels as well.

Make a list of the main players on the market that work with similar target audiences, break down their business models and define their pros and cons. Our advice is to be unbiased — there is no perfect company, as everyone has their own advantages and disadvantages.

If you decide to hire a professional team of developers, starting from this stage, they will assist you with the release. First, you need to think about every step a customer will undergo to accomplish their goal solve their problem from step 1 and map this path. Every following step should be logical and clear. Get anyone using your product.

You don't have to have a vision of how you get everyone using it, but just anyone interacting and seeing if they get value out of the product. You'd be surprised at how many founders' journeys end before a single user has actually interacted with a product they've created.

It's very, very common. So please get past this step. It's extremely important. The next one is, talk to your users, any of them, after you've launched this MVP, and get feedback. This is one that's also extremely common mistake, because most founders in their heads have a idea of what they wanna build. And so they kind of have this weird feeling that if I haven't built the full thing yet, getting feedback on the shitty initial thing is kind of useless.

It's not the full thing. So feedback on the little thing is useless. The reality is that, in some ways, the full thing is this really awesome idea in your head that you should keep in your head, but it should be very, very flexible, because it might turn out the full thing that you wanna build isn't what your customers want at all.

So, I have this saying: Hold the problem you're solving tightly, hold the customer tightly, hold the solution you're building loosely. And last and most important, iterate. And I like to kind of distinguish between iterating and pivoting. A lot of founders, once they've figured out how to build something, fall in love with it.

And so if it doesn't work for a certain set of users, they start thinking, "Well, I wonder what other problems this thing can solve? Well, you know, this screwdriver is not actually good at screwing in anything, but I wonder what other problems it could solve.

Maybe you can use it to clean. Like, that's the thing that's broken, right? The broken thing is not the mechanic, and it's not the fact that they need to screw something in. So, iterate. Continue improving on your solution until it actually solves the problem. In most cases, most people should be building a very lean MVP. So by that, we mean you should be able to build it fast, in weeks, not months. This can either involve software, or honestly, we see startups just start with a landing page and a spreadsheet.

But most startups can start very, very fast. The second, extremely limited functionality. You need to condense down what your user needs, what your initial user needs, to a very simple set of things. A lot of times, founders wanna address all of their users' problems and all of their potential users, when in reality, they should just focus on a small set of initial users and their highest-order problems, and then ignore the rest until later.

You should have a vision of everyone. You should have an MVP, very small. All this is is a base to iterate from. That's it. It's just a starting point. It's not special in any way. You just have to start. And so, please make sure you don't feel like your MVP is too special. Here is a classic example. This is one of Airbnb's first landing pages, in , I believe. One of the things that you might be interested in about in Airbnb's first product is that there were no payments.

When you found place to stay on Airbnb, you had to exchange money with the host in person. Needless to say, that was a pretty fucking big problem, but they started without payments. No map view. You know how when you search Airbnb, you can see where the house is in the city?

You don't have that. And, the person writing all the code, Nate, was working part time. So everyone tells these kind of magical stories about how everything was perfect from the beginning.

Airbnb, not perfect from the beginning. The next one, Twitch. This was what Twitch looked like day one. Not very familiar. Well, maybe a little familiar. There's some video there, and there's some chat there. Other than that, nothing else.

Twitch launched as Justin. There was only one channel, Justin. You had to follow his life. If you didn't like his life, you had to leave the website. That's all there was. The video was extremely low resolution. It was funny, a founder asked me back in the day, like, "Oh, like, wasn't it weird, you guys had video in your apartment.

Weren't there all these, like, secret documents and things that, like, people would be able to see? And most importantly, there were no video games. No video games, except if we decided to play video games in our apartment. Like, that was the only time video games ever appeared.

And so, say you can do that quickly. When you think about Twitch, it's much more complex now. Last, Stripe, which wasn't Stripe. Like, let's make a name that's really easy to remember. This was Stripe day one.

No bank deals. I won't tell you exactly how they process payments, but it was in a very startup-ey way. Almost no features, and even cooler, if you wanted to use Stripe, the Stripe founders would come to your office and integrate it for you. How nice is that? Half because they were just desperate to get anyone to use it, and half because it was a great way to find bugs before the users found bugs.

Integrate yourself. So these are just three examples of extremely simple, extremely fast-to-build MVPs. All of these are billion dollar companies, and they all started with something that most people would say is pretty shitty.

In very few cases, you have to build a heavy MVP. I just invented that term, heavy MVP, when I made this presentation two days ago. So, you know, maybe it becomes a thing.

If you're in an industry with significant regulation, like insurance or banking, sometimes drones, although sometimes not, it's hard to launch. It's harder to launch. You have to pass through a bunch of regulatory bodies first. If you're doing hard tech, if you are building rockets, it is hard to build a rocket in a couple weeks. Biotech, it is hard to invent a cancer drug in a couple weeks.

Well, fill in all the other blanks. It's hard to bore tunnels in the earth and have extremely fast vehicles that replace cars in a couple weeks.

So, if you're in that situation, please remember that your MVP can start with a simple, simple website that explains what you do. It's helpful, when you talk to people, interact with people that they can refer back to something. So, that can be your start, and you can build that simple website in days, not weeks.

Now, I wanna talk about launching for a second, because a lot of founders have this misconception about launching. They see big companies launch stuff, and they assume that's what startups do. In fact, they see companies they kind of think about like startups, Facebook's not really a startup anymore, but they see them getting a lot of press and getting a lot of buzz and yada yada yada, and they have in their head that that's what a successful company looks like when they launch.

Well, let me ask you this question. How many here remember the day that Google launched? How about Facebook? How about Twitter? So it turns out that launches aren't that special at all, okay?

So if you have this magical idea of your magical launch you wanna do, throw it away. It's not that special. The number one thing that's really important is to get some customers.