How to Become the Most Successful with the Least Investment? MVP will Give the Cue

Have you ever wondered why there are hundreds of startups that fail to succeed in achieving their goals? A recent research has discovered that 42% of these cases take place because of the lack of market demand. Almost half of the startups spend months or even years making their products, and the implication that there is no one willing to buy them comes too late.

The only way to avoid such a flop is to check the demand for your offer. If the market is interested in it, release the product to a potential customer as quickly as possible without neglecting the quality of course. The excellent solution for this is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This idea seemed very interesting to us, so we decided to cover it on our blog.

What does the MVP mean?

This term was coined by Frank Robinson, the CEO of SyncDev Inc., company focused on developing new products, markets and businesses through a lean product development process, and popularized by entrepreneurs Steve Blank and Eric Ries. It is a basic and stripped-down version of a product with the minimum features to satisfy early adopters and get the market validation. The MVP allows owners to get meaningful feedback from users, understand what they really need, and what necessary features they should implement in the future. For instance, over time you can boost the security of your application with our VPN Unlimited SDK.

“The minimum viable product is that version of a new product a team uses to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” – Eric Ries

The MVP method shows us how to manage a startup and how to direct it on a right course to develop a business at an amazing speed with the least amount of time, money, and efforts spent. It should be easier to grasp these words looking at the diagram below:

The definition of the term is clear enough but there are a lot of issues which often remain without an answer. Let’s move on to gain a deeper understanding of this approach.

5 key traits of the MVP

The following list describes the MVP concept to help you understand what moments should be emphasized. Let’s take a look at 5 essential principles typical for the most successful MVP’s.

1. You should both create a product and develop a strategy just for 1 person. Imagine your ideal customer and design the MVP for him. In the other case, when you try to take into account the needs of a broad audience, it’s very easy to lose concentration and head down the wrong track.
2. While developing the MVP, you should give ear to different people and their feedback to create a profile of a typical customer and his needs. This is an excellent way to get answers for your next moves.
3. The fundamental idea of the MVP is to develop a minimum amount of features which will be enough to present your product in the competitive market environment. It is a commonly held misconception that all features are important and we will need them sooner or later. Actually, you should remove all the unused and ‘not bad to have’ features from the plan and focus on the fundamental idea of your product for its quickly launch.
4. You should adhere the product development using minimum time and money. Don’t go in for earning thousands of dollars right off the bat. Try to collect valuable feedback which will be a base for creation of a big successful business in the future.   
5. You should understand the difference between launching the final product and launching the MVP. When your company has a product ready to hit the market, it’s high time to release it. However, creating the minimum viable product, there is only a big dream that people will buy it.

Please refer to this list of the worldwide famous companies that started their journey to success with the MVP’s and let these examples become a motivation for you:

Ready to try the MVP?

If you have a concept of creating a useful service or product that may solve some users’ problems, don’t hasten to heavily invest in the development of a full-featured product. Rather follow a reliable way, suggested by the MVP concept, to present a product with just enough features to gather important learning about the target audience, product itself, and its continued development. That way can be accurately paved with strategic planning software, such as Roadmap Planner. Drive live communication with your team and stakeholders to capture feedback, which is extremely important for the MVP, with the Collaboration feature. Or, for instance, demonstrate the key tasks and goals your team will tackle during the upcoming months, quarters, or years using the Milestones and Scopes. Yet, there are a lot more useful features that you should try.

We won’t extol the virtues of its usage. Only one click to download Roadmap Planner and see for yourself that working with the app is nothing but a pleasure.