It all starts with an idea! Some ideas help businesses grow through sales and conversions, while others can cause investments to plummet. Regardless, all ideas need to be tested before they can be developed into fully functional solutions.
It's tragic to imagine how many software products and applications fail simply because of developers or owners losing sight of application goals, expensive bug fixes, and pitfalls, or unexpected delays in releases.
Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) help both the client and developer sides resolve these challenges while simultaneously providing validations that can improve the usability and robustness of your ideas.
But before we go into the nitty-gritty details, let's quickly understand what an MVP is and how it functions.
What is an MVP?
Contrary to some opinions, an MVP is not a simple wireframe nor an initial proof of concept. It's coined more as a release with minimal functionalities to meet the core requirements of your ideas.
This development technique has gained traction among early adopters in the industry. This is because an MVP helps companies test and provide immediate feedback to enhance the product further.
While the functionalities are minimal, MVP development still requires multiple iterations to reach a conclusive stage. The entire concept of building MVPs is to practice the build-measure-learn methodology and build your product's viability as it evolves.
Here’s a quick recap of what a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is:
- The term stands for "Minimum Viable Product" and came to inception in the year 2001 by Eric Ries.
- In reality, this implies launching a product with its basic features to get it to the marketplace as soon as possible.
- The goal of an MVP is to provide feedback with little cost and respond to changes that can enhance core functionalities.
- This scientific development approach helps investors validate ideas, their feasibility, and overall robustness in the market.
The Benefits of Building an MVP
Developing an idea requires sequential steps and activities that involve a range of questions like the user's needs and wants. How will the product work? What types of marketing strategies must be used? And most importantly, how will the product make money? You may have answers to all of these questions, but each one of these assumptions requires validation through an MVP. MVP allows companies to test out these risks with minimal costs and iterations that can enhance the product's longevity.
1. Improving Stakeholder Trust
Winning stakeholders is not just about investments; it is about trust and making them believe in your products. Businesses rely on this trust to expand and grow with more opportunities. MVP development helps you pinpoint and identify the market viability of your product, increasing your confidence for more buy-ins and investments. Effective MVP helps establish a compelling business case and allows investors to visualize a hefty return on their investments.
2. Validating Business Ideas
Undeniably, MVP is also used as an initial proof of concept, as businesses test their concepts and ideas with the real market environment and customers. Instead of launching feature-rich and heavy applications, MVP allows you to launch a minimal product and evaluate its performance. Feedback generated from these MVPs helps modulate and rectify critical errors that impact the product's core functionality- all together testing your idea and its impacts.
3. Evaluating customer and market demands
An MVP is mostly about experimenting and determining what succeeds and also what somehow doesn't. In certain respects, an MVP is much more about gaining knowledge of market needs than about selling or acquiring clients. Organizations frequently believe that their design meets a specific user demand; however, this may not be true if the need does not exist or if alternatives on the market address existing customer issues/pain points.
To pull the curtain on an MVP is simply astounding, effective, and relatively cheap compared to full-blown applications. They help you evaluate the viability of your idea, core functionalities, and if they solve existing market issues and challenges.
At Conovo Technologies, we help both individuals and start-ups validate their ideas through bespoke MVP development services. We design and develop your ideas so they can obtain early customer feedback, work on a fast iteration cycle, and provide your desired functionalities.