MVP – Minimum Viable Product

Did you get the great idea you see in him the potential revenue opportunities, millions of users supported by millions of accounts. You got it! Creating a business plan, specification painstakingly writing out the way newer and newer ideas, countless functions that are absolutely necessary for proper operation of the project. You send the specifications to several agencies that serve large spreads or valuation significantly exceeding your budget ..

Every budding entrepreneur met with such a situation. Sometimes he is undercutting the wings and made the plans to build your startup running down to nothing. But it does not have to be that way. You do not have to spend huge sums to validate and implement your idea into effect.

1. Analyze, analyze, and once again… talk!

Focus on what is the best thing about your product or business. What is the value you offer future users? What make you choose just your product? Is there really a need in the market that caters to your product? What is the main and most important feature of your site? There are several ways to answer no to the question.

First, do an interview, not only among friends, but most importantly among potential users. Just as the rule says Lean Startup Get out of the building! Talk, ask questions, and above all, listen to what your prospective customers currently use, what are the problems and how they would like to have been resolved. In this way, you verify that your product meets their needs. It may even happen that thanks to these interviews will discover a completely new needs of your customers. And all this before you write (or will write for you) even one line of code.

Second, you can take advantage of expert advice. In Poland, more and more grows accelerators, incubators that support entrepreneurs, inventors of new innovative startups. Often they offer free ‘office hours’, where you can consult your idea with experienced mentors, listen to their suggestions and even establish interesting contacts. These office hours in Krakow offer, among others, http://www.innovationnest.co/ or http://colab.pl/#accelerate. As a result, you get valuable feedback from people with great experience and interesting ideas.

2. Prototyping

Once you for sharing your idea of a large group of people gathered opinions and you know perfectly well what is a key function of your startup, you can start prototyping. Reducing the amount of function in the first stage to this single key will certainly be easier for your pocket and better for your users. Together with the contractor Create a model of focusing on simplicity and ease of navigating the service / product. Creating a mock-up that makes you have a real preview of how your product will look like, so you can look at it as a fresh and critical pattern.

When the mock-up stage and the image is already behind you, in the end comes the first part right – programming. Contractor everything that has been discussed implements. As a rule, projects MVP does not take a lot of time to program due to the small number of functions, so you can not rest on our laurels because you have a little time to …

3. Marketing and lead generation for your MVP

While developers are working feverishly You can already start marketing by creating a landing page with a brief description of your product and an invitation to sign up for the test / beta. This shows prospective users, that you care about their opinion and they can have an input into product development. In addition, you can provide on the forums and industry, social media – important that it was a valuable discussion and not a simple product advertising. A good move is also to create a separate fanpage’ów, where, for example, you’ll be informed about the progress of work or communicate with other users.

In addition to the online forms, one of the simplest but also the most time-consuming method is to simply participate in various conferences, meetings, events of either startups or industry typically appropriate for your product. In this way you will learn a lot of other people who are at a similar stage as you, and above all, build a base of potential customers.

4. Important feedback from first customers

Design a basic version completed, he goes in the world under the critical eye of users. Monitor the traffic, which is a frequently visited, what interests them and what repels. Encourage contact and leaving feedback. Ask about the sentence, which function to develop, and we add new ones. It’s for them is this product so their sentence is one of the most important, you should follow.

In summary: selecting development startup / business method MVP accelerate implementation work, save money, focusing on marketing, getting the opinions of current users. With this method validates your idea and you gain momentum for further development of the product.