Understanding What A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Is

The most popular start-up launch strategy certainly involves using a minimum viable product (MVP) to evaluate the business idea. But what does this concept entail and what exactly is its purpose? In this article, we discuss everything you need to know about MVPs – from their purpose to what you can stand to gain from them.

What is an MVP?

Before we delve deeper, it is crucial that we first understand what an MVP is. In essence, the term “minimum viable product”, or “MVP”, refers to a product with only enough functionality to draw in early adopters and verify a product concept. In sectors like software, the MVP may assist the product team in gathering customer input as soon as possible so that they can iterate and enhance the product. Simply put, it is a prototype that is created to garner feedback before an improved version of the software is developed.

The purpose of an MVP

Eric Ries, an American entrepreneur and author of “The Lean Start-up”, popularised the concept of MVPs in his book. According to Ries, the main objective of an MVP is to reduce the effort and time wasted by testing how the market reacts to a business idea before the completion of the actual product. A business could decide to create and market an MVP because of the following objectives of its product team:

• Release a product as soon as feasible to the market.

• Testing a concept with actual users before investing a sizable sum of money in the entire creation of a product.

• Find out what appeals to and what repels the target market for the firm.

Examples of MVPs

The following are a few examples of popular MVPs from established tech companies.

1. Dropbox

One of the co-founders of Dropbox, Drew Houston, decided to make a short, three-minute video showcasing the technology rather than developing a comprehensive solution that would have required surmounting extremely difficult technical challenges and months of development. Overnight, 75,000 individuals began to wait for a beta invite because of the video. Dropbox’s current estimated value is above $10 billion.

2. Groupon

Groupon is an excellent example to showcase how MVPs can be adapted to meet the market’s needs. Initially, the app served as a forum for users to organise events such as crowdfunding campaigns or retail boycotts. However, people began aiding one another by sharing local deals and discount coupons. That is where this global e-commerce marketplace came to be!

3. Facebook

It is hard to imagine that one of the biggest social media platforms today started out with an MVP. Thefacebook (Facebook’s MVP) was introduced as a simple platform for university students from the same classes to post messages on shared boards. Mark Zuckerberg was able to validate his concept to propel the adoption of the social media network by exposing Facebook to a very small part of the market.

What can you stand to gain from an MVP?

With an MVP, you can gain a competitive advantage, especially if there are multiple other companies contemplating entering the same market you are focusing on. By testing out whether their proposed solution is needed and gauging the response to it, young start-ups would be able to tweak their product wherever necessary to ensure that when they launch the actual product, it is the best that it can be. Moreover, with an MVP created by a web application development company in Singapore, you would be able to launch your product to the market faster, which will help to increase sales revenue much quicker than if you develop a fully featured final product for the launch.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you have gained a deeper understanding of what a minimum viable product (MVP) is and its benefits. MVPs are employed within various businesses, and they are especially ideal for start-up enterprises. It is intended to get a basic product to the market as quickly as possible to evaluate the product’s viability and decide which features should be included in the following version.

With our no-code technology and advice from our specialists, PROTEUS-DT makes it easy to create your ideal application from beginning to end. We provide rapid application development for MVPs and prototypes. Once you’ve developed your app concept, we can assist you in scaling it up to production-level quality. We are also a leading UI UX agency in Singapore that can assist you in UX research and design with our consulting services, so your business can unlock its fullest potential.

So, what are you waiting for? Contact us today and let us help you kickstart your innovations.