Core Features of a successful MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
By: Denis Cangemi
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Productivity, Product Management, Business, Startup

Core Features of a successful MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

MVP will save your new business

MVP, Minimum Viable Product, is a term derived from the startup industry which expresses the state of a software between the prototype and a good-enough product for public consumption.

The MVP is the first version of your product that your audience will be exposed and the challenge is to give them enough features to resolve their problems without taking care of side functionalities that are not essentials for users to determine if your product is useful or not.

The MVP is the first real contact with your customers and it’s an opportunity for your business to connect with early adopters and convince them about your product even it’s not finished yet.

The MVP is the first handshake between you and your customers

Scoping Your MVP

We can find the definition inside the MVP acronym itself with the words “minimum” and “viable”.

What’s a minimal product?

A simple product that is only able to contain the core functionalities without any fancy additions.

What’s a viable product?

It’s the essence of the solution to your audience’s problem, a tool that does exactly what it promises to do, and nothing more.

These two concepts, “minimal” and “viable”, are limiting the scope of your product, from different directions.

You can always make your product more viable, but you can’t make it any more minimal without losing your customer.

Even if it’s important to deliver only the core features, a minimum viable product should contain a few structural components that represent a standard for other products on the market: your users should be able to sign up and log in, solve their problem, and be able to pay for your product.

Targeting the audience is very important to understand which aspects of your product need more attention than others. If you build a tool for developers, an API and some documentation might be enough. For customers who need a bit more than that, you will have to provide a well-designed interface.

Regardless of which type of product you’re working on, it’s important that your MVP has an easy and well-designed interface and solves one core problem.

Every part of your product should lead your customers to the core functionality and if you find yourself having trouble with interface and user journey, it means that your MVP has too many non-critical functionalities.

So, that’s the scope of an MVP:

solve one critical problem really well.

We don’t need anything else. If there is nothing to distract your customers from seeing the value of the product, you have succeeded.

Let’s see different aspects that you should care if you want to create a successful MVP, an MVP is not only a prototype, this approach includes many different aspects that make these products very important to avoid waste of money and time.

Timing your MVP

Once we understand what an MVP represents and what it should contain, it’s very important to define how much time you have to invest on it.

Building features required time and it’s common to wrongly focus on the big picture and having the feeling that the result is never enough.

One thing to take in mind to change this perspective is that your customers want to have one less problem in their lives.

The key is to ship the MVP as soon as humanly possible and let customers interact with your product as soon as possible, then you can find out what works and what doesn’t.

Ship early, and release to early adopters.

If you can get them not just to use your MVP but actually commit to it by paying you a non-trivial amount of money, you will have a real shot at building a sustainable business.

Free but not forever

Let early adopters using your product for free is the key point of an MVP and it’s a good start to know if your customers like what you propose and the usage frequency.

Those parameters give you a clear perspective about the future of your project but it’s not enough to understand if building a business around it could a good idea or not.

In the previous chapter I told you that an MVP only contains the core feature and nothing else and it’s true but we need other types of feedback if we want to discover different aspects that are not directly related to the core feature you offer.

If you want to measure customer commitment, add a rudimentary payment system from the beginning.

Give liberal amounts of free trial time, but set an end to it, don’t let customers using your product for free forever, and find out if your first customers only stay with the product because it’s free or they are willing to pay because your offer is too good.

Requirement Volatility

Beware of reacting immediately to early customer feedback.

Your MVP is particularly prone to the core problem of software engineering: requirement volatility.

Your prospective customers will expect different things from their tools over time.

Worse yet, they might not know what they need, or they might have internalized their work too much to adequately express what their requirements are.

Some customers will tell you what they think you need to hear instead of just telling you what they know.

One Platform at a Time

Don’t try and build the very first version of your product for all possible platforms it might be used on and for.

Find the audience of your product and identify the platform where they are for the most, you don’t need the same solution over different devices and context.

Security

You should care about the security and privacy of your users since the development of the MVP.

Don’t ask customers useless information you don’t strictly need and use a well known and secure system to manage users and their data

Client-Side Monitoring

I found one thing to be incredibly useful in the MVP and all later versions of our product: client-side monitoring.

By getting notifications for errors immediately after they happened in the browser or apps of our customers, we could see the stack trace and additional information before your customer even noticed the error.

Customer Service

Talking about communications with customers: provide a way for the customer to reach you.

Give them an easy way to contact you with a simple form, or with a real-time chat solution, just make sure they receive help when they need it.

This not only relevant for delivering a good user experience, but they represent your feedbacks source that are vitals during the lifetime of an MVP.

None of these features have to be part of your MVP from day one.

They just should eventually become part of it in some form or another.

You can do a lot of the work manually for a while, working with basic tools such as spreadsheets, email, and even phone calls. But eventually, you will want to funnel all the activities through your (soon-to-be-)automated systems.

Don’t wash your dirty linen in public

It is extremely helpful to build a product that solves your own problem.

You will know when your MVP is minimally viable since it will solve your problem enough at some point.

From there, it will be good enough for others as well.

This practice is called “dogfooding,” named after a television ad from the 1970s, where the owner of a dog food brand claimed that he fed his dog food to his own dogs.

In the IT world, this process has been made famous by Amazon, where Jeff Bezos forced all his development teams to build internal APIs that would eventually be made available to external developers too.

That way, all external services would have gone through a long time of internal use, ironing out the bugs and making the interfaces usable.

If It Fails, Don’t Throw It Away

Like everything in the beginning stages of your bootstrapped business, the MVP is mostly a tool for validation.

MVP is a useful validation tool for your product that lets you improve your idea but also to know if it’ll fail.

Some of your customers will not like your MVP for some reason, and your job is to find out why.

An MVP with acceptance problems has not yet failed, it’s just incomplete.

Sometimes, however, you might just have created the right product for the wrong customer.

In general, you will have a choice:

Adjust your MVP to solve the problem better

Solve a different problem for your audience

Look for another audience

I recommend trying to salvage your MVP before scrapping it altogether.

Conclusion

Make a successful business with a digital product is very difficult when you try to jump some important steps such as user research, ux testing, ecc…, and creating an MVP of your product is the right choice to reduce the possibilities of failure.

That doesn't mean that MVP gives you the superpower of creating only successful products, It’ll help you to evaluate ideas in the early stages and decide if investing money and time is worth it, either success or failure of the MVP will allow you to become a better entrepreneur.

Thanks for reading!