The greatest inventions in history happened at the right time. If you have a business idea that could turn into a perfect product, make sure you know when to introduce it to the world. You can’t work on it for years. Today, competition is everywhere and almost every kind of service is available online. To avoid wasting your money and time on building a product that fails to work in the market, build an MVP first. The power of this minimum viable product (MVP) lies in obtaining valuable user feedback that can help you solidify your business model and product strategy.
We are keen to let you know that for any MVP development project that you may want, there are several considerations you must look into. So let us dive into the whats, hows, and whys.
What is an MVP?
MVP is a first step towards building a product at a very early stage. It will have the core set of features to introduce your product in the market, which initially is a small group of customers. Here at this stage, you get the first round of evaluation related to product functionality and user advantages. The primary goal of building an MVP is to get customer feedback.
MVP in Website Development
MVP for website development is to create a website or a web app in a shorter time and release it in the market. The goal here is to get the market response from the right target audience. On the first try, generally, it does not happen. However, your MVP can still have a chance after giving it more space to explore and evolve by changing directions, expanding your scope of target audience selection, and so on.
If you straight away build a traditional website and spend months or years making it perfect, you may fail. With the changing market trends and technologies, even business experts miss on predicting the real demands of products. To avoid the waste of huge amounts of money and precious time, nowadays, businesses have started building web products with minimum functionality first and finding out people’s reactions and how would they interact. This gives a larger space to change, evolve, and improve consistently.
Why is it Worth having an MVP Website Initially?
Fast Development
You can develop an MVP in a very short time. This benefits in receiving user feedback quickly as you can roll it out for checking your assumptions. Once you get quicker feedback, you can develop a product that can be used to solve a specific problem for a specific group of target audiences. With this process, you can surely achieve your business goals.
Easy to Pivot and Evolve
With an MVP, it becomes convenient to pivot and shift your focus to a different set of features. That is why businesses find it easier to change anything they want before investing more money into the project. If they invest more into the project initially, it would be difficult to change the technical as well as psychological factors. You cannot then easily get rid of it because of heavy investment. Also, from a technical aspect, it harms other elements of the website.
Saves Resources
If you want to change or remove the features of MVP, you can easily do it to save yourself from wasting resources. This phase is a learning experience where you start knowing about your target audience’s behavior, choices, and market response. Whatever mistakes you make at this stage can be resolved at lesser costs. The hard data you get from the actual users will outweigh your decisions based on stakeholders’ opinions. Therefore, we recommend always learning the easy way, do not waste resources unnecessarily, and feel free to make mistakes as they can be reversed.
Gets More Support
If you want to pitch your website to investors, MVP can easily drive them towards a conclusion. You already have a model ready in hand of what will your product look like. Hence, this will give you lots of opportunities and enhance the chances of funding.
Best Early Testing Tool
It is always good to try initially before coming to a decision. MVP website development promotes the initial testing of your idea. You will get feedback from the real environment. By practicing lean methodology and an agile mindset, you can still experiment until you find the best solution for your business. In this manner, you can also plan for a better future and craft strategies to expand your user base.
MVP Strategies for Website Development
Building an MVP website slightly differs from the usual website development process. While creating an MVP, your team will be more into experimentation and optimization. We have curated the best and most practical ways to build an MVP website.
Create Your Development Plan
Taking enough time to create a realistic plan will help you a lot till the end. Refrain from listening to those who think planning is a waste of time. Remember, haste makes waste. When the question is about the viability of your idea and when you are thinking of investing a huge amount of money to make it happen, Go Slow and Steady! When you start treating your MVP as a test, you must prepare and find out what kind of tests you exactly want it to go through. This will help you to get ready for the kind of changes that you may need to make in the future.
Ideally, the planning stage of your MVP development process includes:
- Conduct market research
- Competitor analysis
- Define business goals and objectives
- Research on your target audience
- Create technical documentation
- Develop user story
With a consistent and solid plan, you can amplify the entire development process and reach the documentation stage. Here at this point, you must always keep your entire team together.
Use off-the-shelf Software
To build a professional website with all the best features and functionalities, you need good-quality software and an experienced website development team. Off-the-shelf software lacks flexibility and can’t be customized. However, at the initial stage, such off-the-shelf software is the best choice for MVP development. Before spending thousands of dollars and time to build your infrastructure, try it first on off-the-shelf software. Through this process, you will come to know the level of interest your target audience has. For example, Wix is the best off-the-shelf website builder that can create simple websites and web pages.
You can take the assistance of your web development team to create this MVP. They often use various page builders and content management systems like WordPress to assemble the website. However, to integrate those extra features, you will still need a developer who can customize, and create appealing themes or templates. All this will cost very little compared to building a website from scratch.
However, based on the kind of business, if you need a website with complex features, you can always use the Backend as a service solution and then focus on the front end.
Prioritize Your List of Features
Creating a simple product is sometimes difficult and needs precision. However, spending time in this phase is worth it. Analyzing the features of your future product and focusing on the most important ones is what matters. As an entrepreneur, you will never want to spoil the very first impression on your future users. Hence, releasing your MVP product without ringing bells can help you learn and understand the exact kind of market you need to approach. Your final product will then be able to solve the real problems of the market and this is what is considered as a success.
Craft interesting user stories initially to resonate with your customer’s journey. Their response will help you pick those features that are relevant to achieving the actual business goals. The real product optimization process will happen wherein you minimize the features to the core and present only those that are helpful to your users.
Do Not Compromise on Expertise
Every feature that you create for your MVP must be scalable, well-designed, and engaging. They must be viable and impactful enough to appeal to the users. We recommend you not compromise by being sloppy and indifferent towards finding the real solution your user needs for a problem. Cutting corners will always increase the work in the long run.
Also, seek adequate guidance and assistance from an expert web development team. This is because MVP will only be the best way to test your product. After all, it represents your brand. Avoid going overboard to add fancy functionalities and give something real and helpful.
Use Resourceful Tools for Collecting Data
Performing real analytics is very important at this stage. Doing experimentation without knowing the results is a waste of time. Hence, you must integrate various comprehensive analytics tools to track your software. There are various types of tools that are available for free to check the below aspects:
- Growth dynamics and user count
- User behavior and customer journey
- Technical performance
- Features explored the most and least
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
- Traffic sources
- Average time spent on your website
Of all the analytics tools, Google Analytics is the most popular tool for testing your website performance. You can check out the metrics that are most relevant to your business and keep track of them regularly. This will help you to conduct further experimentation and improve accordingly.
Conduct A/B Testing
Your web development team must know how and when to run all kinds of tests on your website. There are several tests like usability testing, penetration testing, security testing, performance testing, and load testing.
A/B testing is crucial, however is not related to quality assurance. It talks about the level of business goals you achieved and what can be the ways to improve the user experience of your website. The tests can be done for anything like buttons, colors, or features. The results of A/B testing must be documented so that you can track the changes in metrics from Google Analytics.
Potential Pitfalls During MVP Development
Hampers First Impression
This is considered a drawback in cases where businesses loosely understand the meaning of MVP. They would rather present the raw product called MVP which is underdeveloped. Instead of receiving valuable feedback and improvising on the features and functionalities, they hamper their market reputation. They ruin the very first impression by hastily launching the MVP and get awful experiences. In that case, your MVP should be of a very decent quality.
Mindset Shift
Stay out of the waterfall mindset. This is because while building an MVP, you are just experimenting with an agile mindset. Some businesses may not be open enough to invest in projects that need heavy iterations or remain a work in progress for a long time. Pitching an MVP to a boss who practices a waterfall development approach is always hard and impossible.
MVPs for web projects vs MVPs for mobile app
- The choice of technology stack differs
- MVP for web projects can be launched faster as compared to an MVP development for mobile apps
- Mobile apps are for platforms like Android and iOS
- The purpose of building a mobile app is larger and broader as compared to building a website.
- More tests are needed for the MVP mobile app as compared to the MVP website.
MVP vs Prototype
As compared to an MVP for a website that we understood so far, prototypes come with the following features:
- They show the basic functionality of the product
- They are made on a medium budget and take weeks
- Gives an outline of how the product can be made
- They are used for internal purpose
- Not fully functional but it can help in knowing the look and feel of the product
- Cannot enhance user experiences and cant create revenue
Optimize Your Website with our Trailblazing MVP Development Services
MVP website is the most viable option to test your product. Make sure you do not become unsystematic and continuously assess, organize, and check the usability and problem-solving ability of your product. Also, develop an MVP that gets sold to your target audience instead of focusing only on outward appearance. For a larger market, make it scalable. Unlike prototypes, consider MVP as a true foundation to create your best final version of a website that is perfect, secured, and future-proof. In times when startups struggle to obtain enough funding, a robust MVP can support your project and give life to your idea, giving a kickstart to develop a full website.
