God created life i.e human beings. Human wants became vicious and unending. He created more things, invented technologies. Some of them were not required and redundant, so he threw them off i.e. rubbish and garbage. You readers out there might be thinking what I want to say, God, Man, Garbage…???

Exactly that’s the story of startup as well and that is where the concept of MVP lies. It’s no secret that on their way to launching the final product, startups have to make lots of small choices. Ideation, Budgeting, Revising etc. But creating a full-featured product, spending months of painstaking work, spending thousands of dollars, burning midnight oil to create an unwelcome guest i.e. another garbage, just to find there is no interest in your idea. The crux is garbage is man made and hated by all, then why creating more of it. It may sound bitter but TRUE.

Instead why not ask these questions “Is this product necessary for users? What do I want to verify? How big is my idea? Who is my target audience for this project? Whom do I want to impress with it?” That answer will tell you why your startup needs MVP.

What is MVP?

I suggest thinking about your start-up business in a similar way to how drugmakers think about experimental drugs. They first conduct preclinical testing in animals to determine if human testing might be worthwhile. The first phase of human testing typically involves a small number of patients. Subsequent phases add more patients to the studies. At every step in the process, there are predetermined primary outcome measures (and often secondary outcome measures as well). If the target outcomes aren’t met, the drug usually doesn’t advance to the next phase.

Following this process, entrepreneurs could determine ahead of time what financial results you would truly consider to be acceptable during each quarter of the first year. If the business doesn’t meet those levels, evaluate why they weren’t met. Unless you have a really good plan to resolve the issues, it might be best to cut your losses early.

Before going on MVP lets get an idea of its siblings viz., PoC, Pilot and Prototype.

1. Proof of Concept (PoC):

A proof-of-concept will cover a small part, not the entire system, and users will never get to see it because PoCs are used inside the company just to clarify which way to go with the development. But you can also consider building a PoC to get the seed-stage funding. A proof-of-concept is a small project created to test whether a certain idea or theory about the product can be implemented. For example, when you don’t know if a feature can be built, you test the idea’s feasibility by creating a PoC. And while building it seems like a waste of time, a PoC actually helps you save money: knowing if something possibly works leads to a lower risk of failure. A PoC is like small research that gives you green light to go further with the development of a product.

Example:

So, instead of investing a ton of resources into creating a functional version of the software for users to try, Drew created a simple video, explaining how the software was intended to work.
Despite the simplicity of the video, it caused an explosion of interest: proving that the DropBox concept, once properly implemented, would solve a hugely painful problem.

2. Prototype:

Just like the PoC, a prototype’s main purpose is to help you make the right development decisions and reduce the number of mistakes and save your product. But a prototype does it differently than a PoC.

While a PoC offers you a model of just one aspect of the app, a prototype is a working model showing several aspects of the app. The development team usually uses PoC to find errors in a concept while prototyping to discover errors in the entire system.

Prototypes are created for the sake of finding those errors and often are far from being perfect. By building a prototype, you can test the product’s design, functionality, and usability.Since the main goal of a prototype is testing, your potential users are among those who carry out the task. Building a prototype helps you get a sneak-peek at how real people will interact with your product.With a prototype, you can attract investors and later build a minimum viable product based on it.

Example:

To test that idea, Nick went to local shoe stores, photographed their stock and advertised them online. If the shoe sold, he’d go to the store, buy the shoes and ship them on. Fast forward a few years and eCommerce is a multi-billion dollar industry; and Nick’s business, Zappos, was bought by Amazon for $1.2 billion.Thus in Flintstoning, although it looks like your product and service is polished and fully-functional, you’re actually pedaling like hell beneath the surface.

3. Pilot:

The simplest way to think about a Pilot is “Almost Production.” Getting to Pilot typically means the following have already been completed:

• Detailed Architectural Design based on an assessment of business and technical requirements
• Environment build and configuration
• Infrastructure testing to validate failover, high availability, and possible scalability
• User testing and iterative feedback to optimize the user experience
• Documentation or training for pilot users and the help desk

What does a Pilot look like? It’s typically implemented in a phased approach over the course from weeks to months depending on the size of the deployment. It’s best to limit the size of the Pilot to 100 users or 10% of the total user population, whichever is smaller. Additionally, these Pilots should be fully functional. Since a methodical build and testing process has been followed, a Pilot represents lower risk, but allows for the ability to roll back to the previous “way of doing things” if needed. As Pilot proceeds, it can also be considered successful and even rolled out to the entire end user community after following MVP test.

Example:

At the end of the week, they’d receive a cheque for $10: but more importantly, they’d learn a huge amount about the parts of their service people loved, and the parts they didn’t. That insight allowed them to start developing a product they knew people would actually use.

4. MVP: Minimum Viable Product

The acronym MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. Frank Robinson first introduced the concept in 2001 before Eric Ries later popularized it.

In layman language building an MVP means you create the most basic version of your startup idea as quickly as possible. MVP for startups does not in any way mean a raw product made in a hurry. MVP development simply spends minimal time on the product, and it contains only key functions, the relevance of which should be tested for real users.This way, you can test your assumptions and optimize your idea for product/market fit based on user feedback from your early adopters.

Example:

Once they achieved success at this small scale, it became much easier to justify the time and resources required to scale-up the service – safe in the knowledge that their fundamental assumption had been proved right.

* POC vs Prototype vs Pilot vs MVP:

* MVP Challenges:

Few Challenges about MVP can be mentioned as below:-
1. Ignorance of the difference between PoC vs Prototype vs Pilot vs MVP
2. Wrong determination of target audience
3. Wrong selection of project compatible management methodology

But these can be very well overcomed and are nowhere a reason advocating that MVP should not be resorted. Because its benefits are very huge as compared to the above stated challenges.

* MVP Benefits:

Today’s most successful apps all started as something much simpler than they are today. Apps like Spotify, Uber, Foursquare, Groupon, Dropbox, AngelList for example, are all mature apps; they’re the result of years of development and large amounts of capital. Developing an app of a similar scope requires a lot of time and a large investment.

This is where an MVP comes into play. An MVP provides immediate value quickly, while minimizing development costs and revealing the most suitable direction for further development.

What an MVP entails can be very subjective, differing from organization to organization based on business needs, industry, and competition. In some verticals, for example, the minimal feature set for an app could be quite complex as it is the industry standard. Nonetheless, these are major benefits to choosing an iterative, agile process over the all or nothing approach to app development. In a nutshell, MVP can :
1. Save huge cost & time
2. Provide opportunity to acquire influencers in the market
3. Assure high ROI along with low risk

* MVP Life Cycle:

Following are the steps for successful implementation of MVP:

Step 1: Analysis of What Solution you are providing

What is the Actual Problem faced. Find pain points, that is, the needs or wants of the users. The application must solve at least one problem for your target users or target audience. The first thing you need to do is evaluate the business idea. Try to think like your user, and answer questions like why you need this project? and how it can help you? This is the formation of your goal in addition to determining your target users.

Step 2: Explore Competitors

Darwin said” Only the fittest survive” and it’s true everywhere. Find out what your competitors are missing. Look for something special about your startup that will make people prefer you over someone else. Note that even if you do not think that you have direct competitors, your belief in the uniqueness of your product is not a sufficient reason for confident promotion of your product on the market without first testing the idea out.

Step 3: Tasks of End Users

To determine the main flow of user activity, you need to first focus on the product’s goals and its main tasks. For example, if your product is an online toys store, the main tasks that the user wants to solve are “find toys,” “buy toys,” “manage orders,” “track delivery,” and “receive an order.” When you have correctly defined these goals and objectives, you can then progress to specific functions for each phase of product use.

Step 4: Careful Planning, Organising and control

Define your priorities, remember 5P’s “Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance”.
When approaching the development, you should have clear answers to the following questions:

• Which of these features guarantee a focus on target users?
• What features of the product must be included in MVP, and which ones should be saved for the full release?
• Which will help you not just stand out but even surpass your competitors?

Remember that the most important goal of your product at any stage of its development should be a solution to the “pain” of the customer or user. Only then will there be a demand for your product and its ultimate success.

Step 5: MVP Development

MVP development does not usually take as long as it takes to create a fully fledged product, but this process has its own modulations. A completed MVP can be considered successful only when it is high-quality and it is created with a minimum number of functions.

Step 6: Testing

After development, the product must be tested. Experts do this first, and they determine the product’s readiness in A/B testing. Beta testing is what gives you a real picture of how users are perceiving your product. On average, this process can take one to two weeks. Feedback from users will be a guide for changes, improvements, and modifications. Only real users can determine what functions are missing and which ones are superfluous.

MVP Inclusions & Exclusions:

Conclusion:

Whilst listening to 1000s of startups and meeting with 100s of them, I usually found that there is a lot of confusion and fog around varied MVP aspects and its whereabouts. Hence an effort has been made to not only get clear sky clarity on it but also to try implementing it in real sense. All these aspects have somewhat different goals and are definitely unique in application. So, it’s always better to talk to an expert business analyst before deciding on which approach at any given point of time is right for your startup to adapt.

So we would conclude from where I have started this blog, that no investor would like either to invest in garbage made without following an MVP process scientifically neither would you like to invest your time, money and efforts. Because at the end of the day, you are also an investor only in your own startup.

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You can get your startup checked with the most innovative and worldwide proven scientific process at Check My StartUP irrespective of whichever stage you & your startup are standing, may be before initiating the MVP Life Cycle, during or after that. Similar to an Eagle in sky who watches its prey on ground, Transparent can guide you on what investors would like to see you achieving from your MVP Process to build a successful startup.

Do you think MVP helped you figure out  improvements in your startup? At what stage is your startup currently running? Do let us know in comments.