MVP: what is it? Is it really needed? How to create it? Find all the answers here.

MVP: a must!

For your digital project, you may have used a professional company, and it may have advised you to create an MVP. But what is the MVP? Why use this strategy in the development of your application or product? 

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the version of a product that allows you to test its concept with as many users as possible and to retrieve feedback from first users and customer reviews with the least effort upstream.

It is, therefore, a project development strategy to quickly test the concept directly with consumers. More than the concept itself, it makes it possible to exploit potential while minimizing the risks as a whole. MVP development for startups is truly essential, as it helps to avoid mistakes in the future and save money.

What is the point of the Minimum Viable Product?

Lose your time, lose your money. These are two feared notions when you embark on a project. The MVP is there to limit these losses by offering a directly testable product that will allow for accurate and quick feedback.

By designing it, you will see your product’s impact on your target immediately. If your product pleases people, you can invest more time and money to improve its features based on customer feedback, criticism, and what they like or would like. And, thus, offer a design to accompany your product using agile development methods.

It is, therefore, necessary to think carefully about some key features that will stimulate the user and make him want to consume and demand more.

Developing only a few features does not mean doing the work. Make sure they work perfectly before presenting them. The MVP usually has all the major elements of a final product.

The Minimum Viable Product in agile project development does not mean launching a product with less investment or resources. Above all, it minimizes risks by focusing only on the user’s real needs. The goal is to collect as much immediate feedback as possible and improve your final product on this basis.

This product development strategy is used for rapid and quantitative marketing tests of a product or feature. This strategy is commonly used today to develop new business models and products, not only in startups.

What is the point for companies to using the MVP?

Let’s now take a look at some of the most obvious advantages and disadvantages of creating an MVP.

Advantages:

• It offers the possibility to test a product hypothesis with minimal resources.
• It makes it possible to meet the needs of users quickly.
• It avoids the biggest mistakes and the loss of time.
• It checks the real market trends.
• It reduces the time between the product launch on the market and its actual use.
• It helps to attract investors quickly.
• It promotes the development team’s continuous learning about targeted users.

Disadvantages:

• Technical mastery: for development in agile mode, you must master the development tools, which can be complicated without an experienced technical manager or associate developer.

Some consider that the minimum viable product makes it possible to launch the product with as few features as possible in order to be able to extract a maximum amount of learning, retain relevant information from this trial period and user interaction through a series of metrics, and then act on this data. 

The most famous MVPs

What if we told you that web giants started with an MVP? Here are some examples that any digital agency likes to tell because they are the perfect showcase of this development strategy and the resulting product success.

Amazon

Amazon is probably the most impressive example, as this e-commerce site crushes the competition. Yet when it was created in 1994, it focused on cheap books: it was a platform with simplistic features and design. This was enough to create demand and provoke the platform’s development and enrich it with new features and products over time. The rest belongs to history.

Airbnb

Airbnb’s goal is to eliminate any intermediary between owner and lessor to facilitate short-term rental.

To test the idea, two designers, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, took advantage of the organization of a major web design conference in San Francisco and the fact that the city’s hotels were full to offer one of the rooms in their apartment for rent with three beds and breakfast. They took some photos of their loft and created a simple web page.

Very quickly, three people were interested, thus validating their hypothesis with this MVP and officially launching their “Air bed and breakfast” concept (first name of Airbnb).

Groupon

Discount vouchers and discounts have existed since the first physical businesses tried to retain their customers. Based on this observation, the founders of Groupon hypothesized that sharing them online to make them more visible and accessible and bringing people together around it would be effective.

 But before embarking on developing their platform, they preferred to bring out the essentials of their concept. To build the minimum viable product, their site started with a simple WordPress and regular PDFs sent by email to the first subscribers.

The test was a success, and in the face of great success, the company decided to build its system of vouchers and databases. 

Netflix

Netflix, the world leader in the series, tests each of its productions with two levels:

• In post-production, a panel of viewers allows them to rework the editing according to the reactions.
• In pre-production of the next series, they use the data provided by Internet users on the previous series (when they dropped out, why, what did they like, etc.). They then determine the elements of success to reproduce for their next series.

As you can see, an MVP is an irreplaceable solution if you face the need to test a product. If you need it, we recommend contacting professionals: they will help you to make all the developmental stages smooth and unproblematic.