What is an MVP?
Let’s start with a brief introduction. MVP stands for a Minimum Viable Product meaning something that brings the minimum yet important value to its users. No extras, no over-delivery. Just the bare minimum. Usually, it’s based on one basic functionality with maybe a couple of features. It’s a very popular way to validate your business ideas.
You make it quick and low-budget. The aim here is to get your ideas tested and check if your customers will be eager to pay for the value delivered. Start-ups often use MVPs to impress investors and source capital from the market. No matter why you want to deliver business value in the shortest time possible, which makes Agile is the perfect approach for MVP creation.
Can a Minimum Viable Product be a marketable product itself?
Assuming that you’ll constantly develop your product or service, your MVP might become your actual product. Or rather, everlasting MVP. Such products are extremely vulnerable, though. When you keep on as ving your budget for too long, the quality is affected.
How to market MVP? What do you need to move from a Minimum Viable Product to a marketable product?
After you give your MVP to the world, you should keep an eye on any customer feedback and track users’ interactions with your product. Evaluate their user experience, and once you know what works and what doesn’t, you can plan further actions. What to add, what to delete, and what to change. As for MVP, your aim was the quick and cheap delivery of basic value, now you want to polish your jewel.
Most of the time, you’re going to need experienced software architects who know how to transform all the new ideas into a reliable and sellable product. There are more technology challenges ahead, like code review and application refactoring, that will improve both the code clarity and your application performance.
Furthermore, prepare to scale up. It isn’t only about your company, but also about the cod and all the infrastructure you need to run your product or service (we speak here about more or less traditional products, but also all SaaS and XaaS solutions). One of the best solutions may be to develop agile deployment procedures like Zero Downtime.
Yet another challenge is to organize Customer Support. Something that was merely optional for MVP users becomes a must when introducing a fully developed product you want to sell.
Last but not least, you need to know if you can afford all this process. It’s easier to fund it if you and your team sincerely believe in the project, so evaluate that too.
Business challenges for creating a marketable product – how to sell an MVP?
Technology is only one factor. You necessarily need to develop your business model and marketing strategy.
The question is, how will you earn profit from your well-developed product? How much you’ll make out of it? Moreover, your brand-new product needs a thoroughly thought-through marketing strategy. How will you promote your solution? What channels and techniques to use?
How to sell an MVP? How much will you charge for your product? How are you going to deliver it to your customers? All these questions need to be answered before you transform your MVP into a sellable product.
Management challenges for developing Minimum Viable Products in Agile start-ups
Agile is perfect for this purpose. While we believe that creating an MVP is purely an Agile project, you can employ all the perks of Agile in the process of transformation into a grown-up product as well. Still, apart from this, start-ups owners need to make a couple of important decisions about managing the whole process.
You can choose from various ways to organize software development. In our earlier article, you can read about the pros and cons of hiring freelancers, full outsourcing, in-house software development, hiring a dedicated team, and our favourite idea – hybrid teams that employ the best ideas of agile software development.
If you decide to create an in-house team, hire a dedicated team, or set up a hybrid team, there will be some key points to solve. Defining all the roles in an agile team may be tricky if it’s your first time scaling up an MVP. Later on, you might need to complement your team with certain specialists due to employees turnover. Sometimes it’s because unexpected challenges occur.
Young agile start-ups often don’t have the capacity and experience to know, how to build a competent team quickly. Even experienced companies may find it difficult, as turning MVPs into products is a whole different story from what they normally do.
Where to find experts who will help you grow your Minimum Viable Product?
Minimum viable product agile development and further transformation into a marketable, fully developed solution rarely is a piece of cake. Take your time looking for experts to find people you’ll trust.
Let us know that you want to schedule a consultation session, so we can work out, what’s the best solution for your MVP.
Q: Can a Minimum Viable Product be a marketable product itself?
An MVP can become a marketable product if it is constantly developed, however, it is also vulnerable to quality issues if the budget is stretched for too long.
Q: How to market an MVP?
After releasing an MVP, track customer feedback and user interactions to evaluate their user experience. Based on this, plan further actions to improve and add features to the MVP to make it a marketable product.
Q: What are the technology challenges in transforming an MVP into a marketable product?
Experienced software architects are needed to transform new ideas into a reliable and sellable product. Challenges include code review and application refactoring to improve code clarity and performance.
