Every startup idea which has ever sprouted in your brain needs to come alive into the real world, for it to be visualized, experienced and used by other people. If it doesn’t happen, then it is just another idea without any real value. To bring this idea to life, you as a founder need to take the first step of building an MVP. It helps people around you experience the idea in real time, and understand its basic concept.

What is an MVP?

An MVP is an abbreviation for Minimum Viable Product, which is usually the most basic and initial version of a product built for validation, that you can share with early users to test out and give their feedback, and then it gives you an idea if more resources, time and money should be spent on continuing to build this startup or not.

An MVP should usually not burn your pockets, and can be built with minimal costs, keeping your resources lean, while you get a taste of early market feedback to understand if there is a demand for your product/solution which you’re offering. This way you’re not overspending on the team, tech, marketing, or design before a proper validation.

You have got to collect maximum feedback with minimal efforts, which helps you to work on your product based on this feedback and take the next step forward towards an iteration or a complete pivot if necessary. If users are already ready to pay you with an experience they have with an MVP, then the journey is in the right direction.

“The version of a new product which allows a team to collect the
maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least
effort.” - Eric Ries about MVP in The Lean Startup

The goal of an MVP is to validate assumptions and not aim for perfection. Do not waste a lot of time building an MVP, make it fast and release it in public to seek feedback. One of a huge mistake many first time founders usually make is spending a lot of time perfecting their MVP without releasing it. It does not matter if the initial release is very simple with bare minimum features, because your goal here is not to launch a full blown project, but understand the market need.

The Mindset Behind an MVP

An MVP isn’t about building a “mini version” of your dream product. It’s about finding the simplest way to test your idea with real users. You do not build an MVP to just launch early, you’re building it instead to learn quickly while also keeping the budget minimal.

You might be uncertain about your idea, as every smart founder should be. It is smarter to be doubtful at the initial stage than to be overconfident and tone deaf. An MVP helps in clearing those doubts with real proof rather than just having assumptions that my product will definitely work.

Your mindset should be focused on solving one core problem towards one niche audience. An MVP should not be 10 different features being built for everyone. A product usually built for everyone is actuallybuilt for no one. It is okay for an MVP to do less, but do it right.

Steps to Build an MVP

Step 1: Define the Problem

You as a founder should be crystal clear as to what the problem is which you’re trying to solve. Many founders make this mistake of building a solution and then going out to find a problem for it. Avoid  making that mistake if your goal as a startup is to generate revenue or gain traction.

How do you now validate if this problem even exists beyond your own circle? You go out and conduct surveys, interviews, or even just observe around. This step should be done even before an MVP is built. Stop worrying about the solution at this stage, and just gather information that the problem you have defined is big enough, is also a worthy inconvenience to others, and they too would love to have it solved in one way or another, for that particular problem to just go away.

Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience

Defining a problem is great, but it will be completely useless if it isn’t targeted towards the right audience. Imagine you’re building an expensive luxury item with the greatest quality available in the market, but would you go pitch it to a tier 3 town’s rural audience who doesn’t even have the PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) to afford it? You have got to create a niche persona of a potential user for your product.

You need to ask yourself, who will exactly use your product? The more focused your target audience is, the faster you can get meaningful and real feedback. This is the exact market for which you will be building your MVP.

Step 3: Map Out the Core Features

Before you start building, take a pen and paper and list down all the things you want to build in your MVP. Once done, remove 70% of the features, and concentrate on the most important 30%. When you follow this exercise, you yourself are weeding out the unnecessary time and resource wastage to rather focus on the core issue, and it even gives you a crunched space to identify the core features required for the MVP.

Imagine you’re building a new blogging platform. Your MVP should have the bare minimum features of signup, post creation with editing and a publish button, that’s all. No need to build an exact copy of Medium, or Wordpress or a Substack with all of their extensive features in an MVP. Those all can come later as you iterate, as you build along with user feedback and market demand.

Step 4: Choose the MVP Prototype

Now you have got to decide how you will present the MVP to your target audience. A prototype can be in any form, be it just a landing page explaining the problem and its solution, or just a WhatsApp group, or even a vibe coded app/website. The goal is to start a discussion and gather feedback, be it qualitative or quantitative or a mix of both.

Work with whatever you’re most comfortable tools you're building with, and focus on how it can help you in gathering the necessary feedback, which can help you in deciding the next steps of building your product.

Step 5: Build Fast, Cheap, and Functional

As said above, focus on the core of the problem, and launch fast. Don’t give importance to aesthetics, fonts, colour gradients of the buttons, ten different types of signup OAuth methods, logo designs, detailed privacy policies, terms of conditions, formatting, profile integrations, etc.

Let your MVP be the bare minimum, as emphasized in the "M" of MVP, but also don’t forget that it has to be viable too. The user flow method should be friendly, easy to understand and functional. It needs to be cheap so as to keep your expenses lean, until you get the initial feedback, revenue or necessary funding.

Testing the MVP

Once your MVP is launched in the market, you need to have a lot of questions which you should repeatedly ask, analyze and iterate based on that feedback. You need to start collecting qualitative feedback (surveys, interviews, pain points, user experience feedback, etc.) and also analyze the quantitative feedback (signups, engagement and retention). This collective information can help you determine how successful your product is going to be as you keep expanding.

Talk, talk, talk. At this stage it is all you have got to do, going and talking to users who have used your MVP. Ask them what they liked, what they didn’t like, what would they like to be improved, what other things would they like to be added which can make their experience better. You need to analyze if a user will be disappointed if this product stops existing tomorrow.

Then with all this accumulated data, you have to measure the response and engagement, and then work on expanding your MVP into a full blown product.

Iterating and Improving

This is the stage where your analyzing has to become robust, and you start to identify patterns from the collected feedback. Use these pain points to help improve your solution. You should also see what is working and what is not. Maybe out of the three features you have in your MVP, almost nobody is using one of the features at all. You may simply remove it, and focus on iterating the other two features which the users have been using constantly.

Assumptions fly out the window at this point, as you have started getting real raw data and feedback. Your product refining has now got to be done based on these real user feedback, rather than what you yourself love working on the most. Keep repeating this cycle of iterating and improving again and again until you find a consistent traction or clarity for your next version of the product.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

We have talked enough about what all should be done to make your MVP good, but we will also now highlight some of the mistakes which should be avoided during this build process.

Stop building for too many users at once. Random people give random advice. With too much noise your feedback loop gets polluted. Concentrate on a niche audience, and work with them to get quality feedback. Good 100 initial customers who can convert into long term users are far better than 10,000 signups done in a week who will never return to use your product or even care enough for your solution long term.

Do not delay your launch by trying to perfect your MVP. Remember that it is not a complete product at this point, and does not have to be grand and perfect. Keep it basic, keep it simple, and keep it small. You do not have to over-complicate, or spend months together building something which users probably do not even want.

Feedback is a goldmine, do not ignore it. Especially since you are presenting your MVP to a niche target audience. They are already facing this problem, so listen to them how they want it to be solved. Maybe they know a more simpler and easier way to have it solved than what you’re already building. And please do not pitch your MVP to a wrong audience, as it skews your feedback report and lets you go astray. Stick to the people who genuinely care, as they are the ones who help improve your product in the long run.

Do not ignore the competition. In fact you should actually research them extensively. See what they are missing, and build something around it as that can even be your initial MOAT. Go to your competitors' product reviews and sort the worst ones, see what their users are complaining about constantly and are frustrated with. Work on resolving those issues in your product, which can help those frustrated competitor’s customers convert into your potential ones.

When to Move Beyond MVP

This is the most exciting stage, because you have cracked the initial code and are getting closer to a PMF. You can now move towards the next step when users have started paying for your product, or users are coming back regularly, which is increasing your retention rate. You will start to identify your growth channels and can focus on what is working and keep pushing towards those particular pain points more, and try to reduce the friction in the steps needed to solve these issues.

At this stage you have achieved at least a basic version of product-market fit signals, and you have got to work towards polishing and fine tuning the user experience to make it better quality and more being more robust.

This is the perfect time for scaling, and focusing more on the user experience. You should start improving your UX/UI, designs, marketing push, and automation. Reduce the repeated manual tasks you have been doing yourself until this point, and go with either hiring, outsourcing or automating them, as you will now need more time to focus on the expansion process.

Goals Before Building an MVP

There are some basic points you have to concentrate on even before you plan to build your MVP, and ask yourself these below questions:

• What problems are you exactly trying to solve? (identify your value proposition)
• Who are you building this solution for? (your target market)
• How big is the opportunity? (Potential market size)
• How are you going to measure your growth? (revenue strategy and metrics)
• What are the alternatives out there? (your competition in market)
• Why are you the best startup to pursue this? (your differentiator)
• Why is now the best time to introduce this product? (market window)
• How will you deliver this product to the market? (your got-to market strategy)
• What are the factors which are critical to success? (solution requirement)

Once you can answer all the above questions logically, you will get a clear idea and a conclusion about the need to even build the MVP or if this idea needs to be scrapped and move on to the next potential problem.

The goal is overall simple, stop getting stuck in tarpit ideas, do not waste time money/resources building mvp’s and products which have no real market demand, or the need to complicate the process of launching MVP’s with over engineering and excessive build, which aren’t necessary in the initial stages.

Remember, building an MVP is not about launching something incomplete, it’s about launching something purposeful, even if it’s just a basic toned down version of the whole product. The goal here isn’t to build the best version of your product at this stage, but it’s to build the version that helps you learn the fastest.

This is the sixth of the many resources among the Startup 101 series. You can check out more articles on this topic, as and when we keep writing and publishing them. Our goal is to provide an open, unbiased and helpful resource, which can help you build your startup, and avoid common pitfalls.