Every day, hundreds of new software are being launched in the market all over the world. Among them, many fail to make a mark even when they are exceptionally built because of one reason – they don’t solve any real user problems. How does one determine if a solution has practical value in the market? Creating minimum viable products (MVP) is really useful to determine the marketability of a product.
MVPs are the basic version of a product, which contains only the essential features required to check the viability of that product. The goal of creating MVPs is to launch the product to market in a fast turnaround time and get valuable user feedback before its final release. This helps to check the need for the product in the market and get insights on how to improve it for better user satisfaction.
In this article, we discuss the five benefits of creating MVP for a software product.
1. Budget-friendly approach
Software development is a long process and it takes much investment in time, effort and money to create a matured product. As the MVP process is all about creating the minimum viable product with just the core set of features, it requires significantly less time, effort and budget for development. Since the MVPs are less complicated, they can be launched in a shorter amount of time with a minimum budget. And even if the product fails to meet market demand, the loss is comparatively lower and manageable.
2. Verify market demand
Oftentimes, companies launch products assuming that it meets a certain user need. But, the assumption doesn’t always hold true. While some tend to offer solutions which are already existing in the market, others are made for needs that don’t even exist. As such, it is important to conduct market research and determine the actual demand for a product before launching it.
By launching an MVP into the market, companies get an idea about the real market demand and how the users are treating the product. The essential goal of MVP is not to sell the product but to get a taste of the real market conditions. Depending on the market feedback, the MVP development may undergo several iterations to build a useful product.
3. Check usability issues
In today’s highly competitive digital product market, good user experience (UX) is the distinguishing factor that can make a product successful. Reports show that more than half of the downloaded apps are uninstalled within a week due to bad UX. When building MVP, focusing on UX design for MVP development helps to build products that are engaging, easy to use and valuable. Good user experience design makes a product seem more appealing and increases user attraction and satisfaction.
4. Validate app functionality
Imagine if a company launches a matured product with all the features into the market and finds out that its functionality is compromised. The results will be disastrous. Not only will they lose money and credibility, but the effort required to identify the bugs and fix them will also be significantly higher. If the company had decided to launch an MVP instead, troubleshooting the issues would be far easier for them. As MVPs are simple, detecting and fixing bugs would require less effort comparatively. Moreover, the cost incurred will also be manageable.
5. Attract investors or stakeholders
Attracting investors or stakeholders and receiving successful funding is a goal of many businesses, especially startups. Only by building confidence in the product and showing its potential can good funding be achieved. Here, MVPs play a big role as it gives the potential investors physical proof of the product and helps to showcase its usefulness in practice, rather than just words.
Moreover, investors have the huge benefit that since the product is already launched in the market, scaling can be done faster and they can start generating revenue from the product within a short time span.
The MVP process is an iterative approach and is rooted in the idea of continuous improvement. MVPs allow businesses to start small and build up the product gradually to its final, enhanced one. Since MVPs are characterized by a shorter time to market, it requires the complete collaboration of software development, UI UX design services, testing and quality assurance and marketing for achieving the best results.
