It's 2021, every entrepreneur aspirant has heard about MVP. Everyone is talking about building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). But is everyone doing it right?

MVP seems like a simple idea at first but many seem to have understood it wrong. In the name of building 'minimum viable', most of the time people are building minimum but not viable products. The philosophy that is supposed to help you cut down waste early often ends up producing another waste.

There are three questions one needs to ask about MVP: What, Why, and How. Today we will try to answer these questions in brief.

What exactly is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?

You have a new idea that you would like to bring to the market. MVP is the bare minimum version of your product idea.
Now comes the next question, what should be considered the bare minimum?

The bare minimum version should satisfy the following criteria:

1. The features it provides is enough for your customer to understand, what your end product is and decide if it is valuable to them.
2. In the best case it should provide enough value that they would be willing to buy it.
   

Why should I build an MVP?

A business without a customer is not a business.

Science is yet to reach a point where we will be able to tell what our customers want without interacting with them.
Meanwhile only way to know what customers want is by letting them use what you are building.

When you are building a product, you have certain assumptions that you think will be valuable for your users. Getting to verify these assumptions one step at a time can always help you cut down waste early often.

MVP helps you make these smaller iterations until the day you will have built a product your customers love to use.

How can I build an MVP?

There is no silver bullet for this. Every product idea will have its own problems and its own ways of fixing. But there are some common steps everyone can follow to build MVP.

1. Identify potential consumers
2. List down their problems
3. List down assumptions of your product idea
4. Match up customer problems with your assumptions and find out those assumptions which solve most of the problems
5. Find ways to solve these problems.

Now, whatever you are doing to solve the problems of your customers is your MVP.

Now, a question arises - who will build your MVP? You can either hire freelancers or a software company. You can build an MVP yourself if you have coding skills, otherwise, you can outsource your MVP development.

This post was first published on Truemark.