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One, foreword

MVP and A/B testing have been mentioned A lot in the last six months of working on agile projects. Is your product really MVP worthy? How to make MVP right? This article has given me deeper thinking and more firm ideas to share with you.

In fact, MVP is not about simply developing a small product and putting it on the market. The value of an MVP is not in achieving market success, but in an uncertain startup, the value of a minimum viable product is in validating ideas, testing features, and getting key input from customers to make the right adjustments for eventual long-term success.

What is MVP?

The goal of MVP development is to get a basic version of the product to market that real customers can buy, use, and respond to. Then you clean up the faults and fix the weaknesses; Most importantly, determine what product value your customers find.

The reason we do MVP is to test the feasibility of the product and make sure it’s worth the time and resources.

Being able to change and adapt on the fly is the hallmark of a great early-stage startup. ** Customers may even tell us that 90% of what we do is wrong and only 10% is right; But if we can capitalize on that 10 percent, we could be winners. An MVP should allow us to make changes quickly and easily, and that means an MVP can’t be without a feedback loop, an architecture that can be easily modified, and a kill switch. This allows us to enable and disable some or all of the features, locate individual users, remove a feature, cut off some users, disable some features, and so on without canceling the entire test.

Should you make an MVP?

Some entrepreneurs spend months or even years working on an idea without writing a single line of code. In this case, building something tangible gives us something to believe in.

If we believe in our idea and have the confidence to make it happen, roll up our sleeves and get to work. Whether you code yourself, or put up a little money or equity to start an architecture, it pays off during the validation process and beyond.

But too many MVPS are being put on the market these days and doing badly. This creates a lot of problems that entrepreneurs need to avoid.

  • Put a bad product on the market and create a bad customer experience. Customers can accept a product that doesn’t meet all of their requirements, but won’t accept a product that does poorly or nothing at all at the things that matter most.
  • Some important things have been sacrificed on the product, such as security and privacy. If these products get too much exposure, it will definitely kill their prospects.
  • It defeats the purpose of having an MVP. At best, the MVP version is A/B testing of some features.

Four, how to five-code development MVP?

How do you build a product with low technology and no code? This is not just a model, but a product that can be released, sold and developed.

The key is to build an experimental MVP around the core idea.

** People are code: ** Start with human intelligence and practical learning. In the MVP phase, people take the place of code, each process takes all the input and comes up with a way to make the product work. They should record all the outliers, errors, problems, and numbers, and this record will eventually tell you what you need to build first, how much it will cost, and how flexible each part needs to be.

** spreadsheets: ** spreadsheets are very basic, non-relational, and very weak featured databases. It may also provide the logic and calculations needed to run some of the product’s functions — the mathematical foundation that will ultimately be handed over to the technical team. You need to create spreadsheets for users, attributes, costs, benefits, and any results with numbers attached.

** Shareable documents: ** Shareable documents can be restricted to a single user or group of users. It automatically collects all kinds of meta-information, including user ids and timestamps. With these documents, bits and pieces of information can be gathered in a structured form.

** Your API — SMS or Email: **SMS is probably the smoothest user interface you can imagine, without any app, without any format. For advanced runs of low-tech apis, tools like Slack and Zapier can manipulate messages as they are sent and received.

** Online payment platform: The most important part of a ** product is how to receive payment, and there are now many suppliers that can handle everything for you.

** Bulk Email Service: ** Bulk email service is an easy way to start building a customer relationship management (CRM) system. It provides basic reports on the number of open screens, clicks and conversions, and is completely self-service for customers.

** Social Marketing: ** Social advertising and online advertising are ways to let people know about your product. Tools like Google Analytics generate traffic reports from social and advertising portals, and have apis that connect directly to those portals to track clicks and even conversions.

However, as you design and tailor your product flow around these code-less solutions, always consider whether a final solution with a lot of code is feasible and how expensive it will be.

5. How do you determine if an MVP is viable

A typical WEAKNESS of an MVP is that it raises more questions than it answers. We can use reverse exclusion to determine whether MVP is viable.

The wrong product

It’s easy to attribute other aspects of your success to your product, but these distractions must be removed.

Services are not products, and businesses generate substantial profits, but most of those profits are generated by people, not products. Brands are not products, and these brands rarely achieve the expected conversion rate. Customer experience, marketing plans, etc. are not products.

If these alternatives are how we measure MVP, then we end up with products that won’t sell, last, and scale.

Wrong market

Entrepreneurs always try to define a large enough total potential market, but if that market is not as large as it should be, it can lead to misjudgments about the market.

If we build a privacy tool for social media users, our market is not “3.5 billion social media users.” We had to think about how many users were active enough, how many cared enough about the tool to pay for it, how many networks we could sell the product to, and then think about about 20 or 30 deeper questions.

Mispricing

The biggest mistake is to use price as an entry point to increase your initial customer base. The correct pricing method should be based on the following three points:

  • Customer acquisition Cost (CAC) : How much did it cost you from the time you first contacted the customer to the time they paid?
  • Profit margin: This is not profit, it is the minimum and maximum we can make between the cost and the price the customer pays. We also need to know how profit margins expand and shrink as the number of customers increases.
  • Lifetime value: Our customers will not always be our customers. We need to know when they are no longer our customers, how much they will spend with us, and how much it will cost to keep them during that time.

Mislocation

Being an obvious choice for target customers depends on how we position the product.

I usually see two errors in positioning. First, positioning is either an afterthought or not an idea at all. The second mistake is that companies tend to regard market trends as their own unique differentiator. But these trends don’t make the company’s products more viable.

Ask the right questions

Can this MVP be sold? Then list all the reasons why it won’t sell.

Can this MVP last? Are you attracting long-term customers who are interested and satisfied with your product? How do you do that?

Will the MVP grow in size? Are you preparing your business for growth, or are you going to have a problem with costs as customers grow?

MVP release Guidelines

Here are five things you can do to make your product launch even better before announcing your MVP.

Make sure everyone knows the MVP goal

We should only ship core features, which should be exactly the same as those in the actual product. Ancillary features may require extra work, or be provided for demonstration purposes, or not.

Defining success, failure, and what to do when the MVP falls between the two

It is essential to have clear criteria for success before release. If our MVP is technically a huge success, but usage is not ideal, we need to locate the problem and fix it in time.

Do all the tests

Before the first customer sees our MVP, we should check every use case, every extreme use case, and every extreme action we suspect the customer will do.

Get friends and family involved

They are chosen because they will be honest with us, and we will do our best to solve problems when they arise. This is a rare learning opportunity.

To make a decision

On rare occasions, an MVP can be wildly successful or a disaster. But for the most part, we’re somewhere between success and failure. Our ultimate choice is usually binary: throw everything we have and bet on this product, or call it off now and never talk about it again. So even with all that testing, preparation and data, we still need to have the courage to move forward.

7. What can your MVP do?

** This is one of the most challenging and nerve-racking problems a startup can face, having to express an extremely complex idea in about 15 words. ** Even if you’re perfect in every aspect of your MVP launch, if you screw up the messaging, the product will basically go cold.

What people are really interested in is the story — a very short, deceptively simple story. So the MVP message should be as personal and groundbreaking as the product it describes. Here are a few principles that can help you better communicate your product message.

The MVP’s message is not so much about solutions as about the problems we solve. ** For example, instead of saying “we’re a better car wash company,” say “We keep your car in top shape when you’re in the office.”

** Don’t confuse messaging with corporate mission. ** There are all sorts of great and selfless reasons why you design a product, but that’s not why customers buy it. Therefore, the delivery of product information should be separated from the mission of the enterprise and go deep into the hearts of customers:

  • The problem has to be painful to the customer.
  • This issue must be at the top of the customer’s mind.
  • Your product must solve this problem in a cost-effective way.

** List the evidence. ** As long as it is the right data, it is vital to put numbers in front of customers as evidence of product value. When you put yourself in the client’s shoes, you realize that what the client really wants is time, convenience, simplicity, freedom, comfort or professional growth or even prestige.

Keep up with the tide of change. The future is one of many complex concepts that product messages convey. We need to imagine a world in which our products and services have become the norm.

Eight, the original

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