How To Build A Minimum Viable Product For Your Startup
Minimum Viable Product is one of the most used terms in technology at present. The term has existed for some time now but it only started attracting attention after Eric Ries’ book, The Lean Startup .
But what exactly is Minimum Viable Product?
In this post we will learn how to build a minimum viable product and use our knowledge to start a new startup. One way or another, you always can approach an MVP development company to build your startup from scratch to accelerate the development process.
What Is A Minimum Viable Product?
A Minimum Viable Product is the smallest thing you can build that lets people see if your idea works. It’s not a prototype, because prototypes are expensive to make and get in the way of learning from actual customers. With a MVP you can test your assumptions about users before you need to spend lots of resources on building something they don’t want.
The Lean Startup
Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup is a must read for all entrepreneurs. It provides you with the mindset, knowledge and tools to launch a new startup product. You can download the best pitch deck templates to grow your startup. If you want to find out more on how to launch your new product then this is the first book that you should buy !
If you haven’t already bought it then go ahead and do so now ( here ). You will not regret it! Learning About Customers And Product Development By Testing Our Idea With A Minimum Viable Product. Let’s assume we’re building an app that will help people discover their dream job by learning about what skills they have. We call our idea DreamJobber . What if we could start getting some real-world feedback on our idea before we write a single line of code? What if that feedback came less than two weeks after starting to build our minimum viable product (MVP)? That’s what entrepreneur Dan Martell did . With limited time and resources, he spent just $240 building the first version of his new app.
Here’s how he did it in the following steps:
Step #1: Gathering A List Of Potential Customers Dan put up a landing page where he asked visitors for their email address in exchange for receiving early access to his new app. This allowed him to collect contact details from people who were interested in using the DreamJobber service as soon as it launches. To increase interest in his launch list, Dan also created custom referral incentives for those who shared their unique referral link with their friends and followers on social media. This is a smart move because not only does it reward people for helping him promote his launch list, it also makes them feel more committed to the idea . It’s an example of reciprocity at work, which is one of the most powerful psychological triggers in marketing.
Step #2: Getting The App Built Since Dan was short on time and money, he outsourced app development to India using Odesk . With help from some online tutorials on how to use outsourcing websites like elance , odesk or guru , he picked out several developers who offered quality code for less than $4 per hour. He had the developers build DreamJobr’s MVP based on his own detailed specs .
Step #3: Finding Your First Users
After the app was built, Dan started promoting his idea through Facebook and Reddit. He used a simple landing page (for free) to collect users’ emails and then emailed them when the app launched.
Dan’s traffic acquisition strategy for DreamJobber is interesting because he chose to build hype around his launch list using social media in order to get initial signups:
He didn’t start by tweeting or posting about his product, but rather collected email addresses and sent out announcements at launch time. This allowed him to control the rate of new subscribers; otherwise it would have been overwhelming if he’d added everyone on Twitter to his list all at once.
Step #4: Picking Up Subscribers Once Dan had collected over 1,000 people on his launch list, he used Facebook ads to accelerate signups for his email list. You can create awesome facebook ads for your upcoming marketing campaign using Visme.
You can see an example of one of Dan’s Facebook ads below:
This was a great way to get lots of subscribers quickly, but Dan wasn’t satisfied with just getting the emails into Mailchimp or Aweber – he wanted each subscriber to download the app as well. So that’s what Step #5 was all about.
Step #5: Directing Users To Download The App Dan made sure to let everyone know up front that they’d have to use an iPhone 4S or newer or an Android device running Ice Cream Sandwich or newer in order to fully experience Dream Job.
A Minimum Viable Product requires that you ignore the haters who will say “You can’t do that” and just do it. Minimum Viable Product is – it’s a first version of a product that allows users to experience its core value as quickly as possible. In other words, the goal isn’t to have thousands of users lining up for your app before you’ve even launched, but rather just getting enough downloads so that those who are interested in what your app does can actually experience it .
