What is a Minimum Viable Product or MVP?
A minimal viable product (MVP) is a simplified version of the goods or services that a business creates and releases with the bare minimum features necessary to appease early users and collect feedback for further development. A minimum viable product (MVP) is built on the idea of testing hypotheses and lowering the risk of developing a fully developed product that might not satisfy market needs.
An MVP’s primary objective is to quickly and cheaply test the marketability and acceptability of a product or service. Startups may quickly learn from interactions with real users, get insightful feedback, and refine their product in response to that feedback.
Understanding the MVP in the Easy Way-
MVP simply means launch the product quickly and iterate.
The most important thing about MVP is that you can only understand what the user wants when you give them the product. So basically getting the product out to the users quickly and via feedback to make the product better is what MVP does.
Many founders want to launch the product only and only when the product has achieved 100% perfection. But this may result in a waste of time and resources.
So MVP is the best way for a startup to launch the product because when you have launched the product quickly you can talk to earlier users and understand how can you make the product better which can solve the customer’s problem. And by knowing that you can iterate. You can repeat this process again and again which will eventually result in getting the product market fit or a viable product.
Let’s learn through a hypothetical example:
It’s an era where there is no toothbrush and nobody cleans their teeth.
One day you, as a consumer, said, It’s a problem, and I need to clean my teeth, and I want my mouth to smell good, etc.
There is a founder who offers you a solution, which is a tree stick through which you can rub your mouth, and it will be cleaned. You will accept that solution because you want the problem to be solved and there is no other option. Though it’s not a perfect product, it is a minimally viable product.
Now the next thing is that you tell the founder that the tree stick is okay, but can you provide some better tree sticks that can clean my teeth better? The founder will work on it and find out that the neem tree’s stick is the best. He offers you that, and you try it. Now it is better than the earlier product, but still it is not the best solution.
The founder again follows up with you and tries to understand the product’s market fit, and you tell the founder that it is better than earlier but it can’t be reused and it doesn’t have bristles that can clean thoroughly. Now the founder works on the solution and develops a tooth brush for you.
He follows up again and again, and makes it better every time. That’s how MVP works.