In 2020 my startup failed because the service I wanted to promote turned out to be useless for my audience. Your startup might fail too if the people you target don’t need your product. But how to avoid making these huge mistakes? How to know if someone needs your service/product? And most importantly, how to stay flexible in ever-changing conditions and adjust your product to the market?
The solution is MVP which stands for Minimum Viable Product. But what does MVP mean, and how to effectively build it yourself? 🤔 Get ready for the most comprehensive guide on everything you need to know on MVP development!
What is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)?
MVP is is an abbreviation that stands for a technique of testing the idea of a product before it is built. The key is to make a small product and test the hypothesis behind it. You can alter the concept or cancel the whole product depending on the results of your testing. If the product is worth investment, usually it gets improved. Ideally, you want to create MVP fast, at a minimum price and resources (btw, you can do it with no-code). So let’s discuss it in detail and talk about :
Why Knowing What does MVP Mean is Actually a Great Idea?
Spoiler: if you don’t know what’s MVP and lean development, you would probably fail 💀
In 2019 I wanted to launch my own startup. I worked a couple of years abroad and had a pretty decent capital. My business idea was to open a coworking place for freelancers in my home city downtown. It would be a unique project for my area since I come from a small town, and there is only one coworking space available. I visited it and understood, it has little to offer. I would beat the competition with top location, modern office and friendly, flexible service.
The first thing I did was buy an office in a new building to eliminate future rent expenses. The office loft design had minimalistic furniture and a lot of natural light. I was excited.
Always Start Small
Almost everything was ready to welcome my first clients. But in 2020, the pandemic broke out, and home kitchens became coworking spaces for millions of people working remotely. My startup has turned out to be useless.
What could I do differently? Most probably, I would consider many factors that directly impact the success of my project. And for sure, I would turn to various techniques that can help measure a product’s value, like MVP. Yes, MVP of a coworking space exists as well :) I should not try to do a massive project at once before even testing the concepts and demand.
What is the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) Approach?
The Minimum Viable Product approach is a method of testing the idea of a product before it is built. It’s based on the lean methodology of product development.
It’s a methodology called the "lean start-up," and it favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional "big design up front" development. Although the methodology is just a few years old, its concepts—such as "minimum viable product" and "pivoting"—have quickly taken root in the start-up world, and business schools have already begun adapting their curricula to teach them. - by Steve Blank.
The Minimum Viable Product has as few features as possible, reducing all the "nice-have" and focusing only on the "must-have". This approach aims to test the idea for relevance and viability, not release a well-design product.
Thanks to MVP, a startup can release a product with limited functionality and receive feedback from consumers in a matter of weeks (building no-code MVP makes this process even faster). The advantage of this approach is the ability to get early users, spend much less money and time than in full-fledged production.
The Main Purpose of the Minimum Viable Product
The main purpose of Minumum Viable Product is to test your core assumptions, which boils down to answering these fundamental questions:
- Do people need your service?
- Do they need exactly this value proposition?
- Do they need exactly this design and functions?
- Have you found the right people for your offering? If not, why?
- How many people will actually use the minimum version for your offering?
- If not many people need your service, how can you improve it to get more customers?
- Did you find out that no one needs your product? The good news is you saved 90% of your capital.
All these questions are based on Business Model Canvas, which you check here (Miro Board):
The great explanation of MVP from ProductBoard actually nailed down all the questions above. It provides you with information like:
A minimum viable product, or MVP, is a product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea. It helps you quickly receive customer feedback to improve the product further.
Now let’s talk about the pros and cons of building your startup with MVP.
MVP Pros for Startups Founders
Minimum Viable Product has many advantages as one of the fundamental concepts of lean product development. The main benefits of building an MVP for your startup are:
- It saves your budget: MVP with no-code might cost you $4 000, while full-cycle development could be up to $40 000.
- Allows you to optimize and update the product: When you move small iterations, you would get a chance to update and fix things fast.
- Enables quicker product launches: if you build a product with no-code tools, you can put your product on Product Hunt as soon as it's showing some value.
- It saves time: no-code MVP is on average 1 month in development, compared to 4-6 months for feature-full products.
MVP Pros for Startups Founders
On the other hand, MVP is not the one answer to all product development problems:
- With MVP, it is difficult to select the minimal core features, and the scope of the product is too small.
- You might get a product that is made for learning purposes, not for earning.
- Mistakes in early assumptions might result in the wrong testing
So if you made initial assumptions wrong, your MVP testing would also give false results. And suppose you do not have enough early adopters to provide proper feedback. In that case, your testing can go in the wrong direction. Getting first users is always hard, especially for a scrappy MVP. To help you out, you can read our free ebook on getting first users:
What is a no-code MVP?
No code MVP is a minimal version of your product idea built based on the no-code technology with minimum time and resources involved. No Code MVP combined the benefits of lean methodology and no-code & low-code development, which became very popular in 2021 - 2022. MVP built with no-code will be as scalable, functional, and robust as if it would be done with traditional development.
Now let’s talk a bit about no-code. No-code is a method of creating landing pages, web applications, mobile apps, marketplaces, and other digital products without a single line of code. It's done by using no-code tools and platforms, which have visual drag and drop interfaces. If you want to learn more about no-code, these resources will be very useful:
- List of no-code tools
- No-Code App Development: All You Need to Know
- Frequently Asked Questions About Building with No-Code
- Startups Built with No Code: Real-life Examples
- More free no-code resources
When you marry MVP with no-code, you get super-fast hypothesis testing! Planning a startup development based on no-code MVP gives you much freedom to test and iterate, while also illuminating financial risks for you.
Besides, it lets you build falsifiable hypotheses to know how and when to move on with your product.
How can you make an MVP product without code?
Building any product without code can be divided into 7 steps, which is true for Minimum Viable Product as well:
1) Deep analysis of the customer’s problems you are planning to solve. This step also includes a comprehensive research of already existing solutions. Who are your competitors, and what can you do better than them? Also, define who is your audience, their needs, and preferences. You should always run user & market research before building a product with code or without.
2) Identify the features your product must include and prioritize them. What characteristics are going to be the most valuable for your future clients? Choose the core feature that will convey the product’s value as a whole. Your MVP could be also a one-feature product and it might be enough to show the value.
3) Select the best approach to test your hypothesis. It can be a landing page, email, chat, single-feature MPV, etc. All of these tools can be built with no code. The key here is not to create a ready product and see the audience’s reaction. The idea is to showcase what your product will look like and how it will solve existing problems.
4) Choose a no-code tool stack to build your MVP. You can use any of these awesome no-code tools to build MVP (Miro, Mural, InVision, Marvel App, Figma, Bubble) and 15 other no-code platforms that are great for fast product releases.
5) Start building! 🚀 Just do it.
6) Develop a product’s roadmap. It helps you identify your strong and weak points, underline the product’s pivotal vision, set the tasks needed to achieve better results, etc. Your MVP could meet only the initial part of your roadmap but it's very important to have the product vision in your mind.
7) Determine key success criteria and release. How will you know that your MVP is working? Take care of these metrics in advance. It can be user engagement rates, percentage of active users, net promoter score, number of downloads, etc. Whatever it would be, it will not happen without users. So, give your product to real people!
And if you want to learn more about the specifics of building no-code MVP, check our step-by-step guide which is focused purely on product development.
Typical Mistakes to Avoid When Building MVP without Code
Doing a startup is always risky, and you will get a lot of challenges on your way. Being informed will help you cope with problems faster and more effectively when building MVP. So try not to:
- Going for a perfect product. MVP, MAP, or MPE does not mean a complete ideal product. Learn more about Minimum Awesome Product (MAP) and Minimum Viable Experience (MVE) in this comprehensive guide. These approaches only help you introduce your startup to a wider audience. Don’t overload your product or service with fancy features. If your product fails, all you have put into it will go in vain. It includes time, money, and effort. That is why remember that MVP is not a ready-made solution but rather a viable product with a limited feature set.
- Ignoring customer feedback. It is absolutely essential to take into account customer feedback in this stage to move on with product development. If you ignore or misunderstand some points, you risk having a chance to improve your services or products. That is why stay focused and listen to what potential customers have to say.
- Building forever. Think, adjust, implement. Don’t waste your time figuring out how to fix something broken no one needs. Give an idea a try. After all the steps fail, stop, flip the page and move on with a new one.
- Choosing no-code tools longer than building the actual product. It is true. Sometimes it isn’t easy to decide which one to pick. Especially there are so many of them. That is why you should rely on something which meets your needs and budget.
- Looking for support rather than real feedback. Recently I have read a very nice book called You are about to make a horrible mistake! by a strategic thinking expert Olivier Sibony. In one interesting experiment, scientists concluded that many projects fail because their managers look for facts to prove their own prejudice and worries. Or another way around. Managers only consider those facts that confirm the product’s effectiveness and ignore those that demonstrate the opposite. That is why you must try to stay objective and face the truth. Even if it is an ugly truth, it is still better than a sweet lie.
