As a startup owner, you must first understand the need to create a minimum viable product (MVP) to ensure that your product caters to the customers’ needs effectively. Most of the bootstrap startups aim for mobile app development as a primary business platform.
Startups are based out of ideas that happen to provide customers with solutions to real-life problems: for example, Uber provides a highly effective solution to traffic congestion and an alternative to inconvenient means of transportation. It would be useless to release a product and find out that it does not appeal to customers the way you thought it would.
Therefore, continuous customer feedback is mandatory at regular intervals throughout the product development process. It allows you to comprehensively observe customers’ preferences and their opinions about your product, which in turn, helps you in developing it according to their requirements.
The app development process is a bit of a complex one, requiring a huge amount of time. It is impractical to rely on the final version of your product to determine its usefulness in a real world scenario. MVP lets you gauge the end-user reactions to the fundamental functionalities in your product.
In such cases, the role of a minimum viable product becomes extremely significant as the prototype of a final app can be launched as a Beta version with basic features. It enables you to have a productive feedback from the early adopters. Here are a few essential tips that work wonders for developing a minimum viable product.
1. Create it on a Facebook platform
Use Facebook Connect to handle your membership stack as it would save a lot of your time and give customers a highly satisfying experience. It prevents users from encountering problems, such as logout issues, collecting data about customers, spamming, and login sessions. It also allows you to get the e-mail ids of those who use your service.
2. More emphasis on fundamental functionalities
You should not try to add way too many features to your product as it can result in an unstable product. It leaves a poor impression upon end users and does not help them in getting a convenient experience. It is always ideal to start with a simple product, focus on core features, and then try to modify the product according to customer feedback.
3. Utilise bootstrap.js
Utilising bootstrap.js allows you to maintain your mobile application and web application effortlessly at the same time. It will allow users to have a satisfyingly convenient experience on both versions of your application. With the help of its pattern templates, it can also prevent you from wasting a lot of time in CSS.
4. Use jQuery
Bootstrap.js is not the only reason behind using jQuery. jQuery is easy to use and attractive. Moreover, it can be used on multiple browsers and has a vast community so it is extremely useful to use jQuery.
5. Use Software as a Service (SaaS)
A unique thing about SaaS is you would not have to deal with maintenance issues as it allows you to save your useful resources. There are plenty of attractive services that SaaS has to offer, such as Spreedly or Chargify for billing, Zopim or Olark for an effective customer chat service, Wufoo for collecting information, mix panel for enhancing analytics of your website, Zen Desk as a customer support platform, and GoodData for gathering information and analyzing.
6. Use Scribd for paperwork
Use Scribd to capture a widget with your document attached and put it on your website. It allows you to have a fine idea of the elements that you need to outsource and sections that you need to focus more upon.
7. Modify it and extend its usefulness over time
There are a lot of ideas that you intend to implement but it is better to modify the product with those ideas after some time. It is not mandatory to include all the features in the first version of your product. Rather, you should prefer to observe how customers are reacting to your product and then scale it further to let users tap it for utmost efficiency.
Conclusion:
There is a lot of competition amongst startups these days and as a result, customers have plenty of options for a particular service. MVP can certainly help you set the initial goals, providing you with the roadmap for future activities and upgrades. MVP is the best option when a bootstrap startup aims to deliver pathbreaking mobile applications.
This article, titled “7 tips to create most efficient Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for startup” originally appeared in e27.