MVP and ways to fix them – We already know that an MVP is the launch-able product version that includes the minimum and integral features. We also know that an MVP is launched primarily to understand how well it will do in the market and how worthwhile it might be. Sometimes MVP is considered more of a process than just a product. It is significant to discuss the challenges you faced building MVP for startup to ensure that someone building an MVP has prior knowledge and knows how to deal with these unseen challenges.
The challenges.
Although an MVP is regarded as a work in progress, how well it is made will ensure your final product’s success. Although it is meant to solve any problems or issues that may arise, it is challenging.
Top MVP challenges.
Here are the most common challenges to MVP that we need to understand and ways to avoid them.
Perfection.
While perfectionism is an admirable virtue, being fixated on it can make you lose a lot of time, money, and effort – even before testing the MVP in the real world itself. If you try to focus more on perfecting your MVP itself rather than put it out in the market with the integral features of your final product, you will be wasting your most valuable time and opportunities as well. In effect, you would have already given scope for your competition to take over the market by then.
The Fix.
MVP and ways to fix them- You can safely believe that your MVP doesn’t have to be perfectly perfect. It can have flaws that can be overlooked during the better testing phases. An MVP is built and developed to understand these flaws and make a perfect final product readily accepted by the market. Even if your MVP shows you the mistakes and flaws through the entire testing phase, you will learn from them and focus more on perfecting your final product.
Inadequate skills.
Although a team with inadequate skills may be OK when you have a smaller budget, it will render you a failed product in the end. This is one great challenge entrepreneurs, and startups face in today’s world.
The Fix.
MVP and ways to fix them – Even if your team is highly motivated, you will still need to employ a team with high skills in designing and developing your MVP and your final product. This team will bring with it real market experience and project management skills as well. Every minute detail related to the project needs to be taken care of to ensure that the team successfully builds an MVP and the final product.
Market and customer needs.
You may be bursting with great ideas. However, that just might not be enough. You must identify and meet exactly what the market and customer need. It is a foolish move to develop an MVP without knowing exactly what users need and want. Your MVP should address all the issues that users are already facing from such products.
The Fix.
So how do you identify customer needs? Simple. Just carry out extensive market research. It is essential and equally crucial that you research all that you can on the needs and wants of the customers and the market. Only such extensive research can give you deep insights into what the market expects from your product. And only with such deep insight will you be able to provide them with exactly such a product. Market research will save you a lot of time and money while addressing the actual problems that customers fish.
Too many features.
MVP and ways to fix them- Of course, stacking your app with many features is great to create an impression. However, doesn’t that mean that it would take more time, effort, and money? An MVP is more like the skeleton of your product with the most integral parts and features included to evaluate how well the product will stand when the market has to test it. An MVP has an iterative process with it. If you delay your MVP, which you were launching for your final product, will also get delayed. And to add to all this, you may have already exhausted a lot of your resources and patience.
The Fix.
Instead of entertaining such chaos, it is far more prudent to prioritise the essential features to integrate into your MVP. Feature prioritisation for an MVP helps narrow down the functionalities rather than over stuff your MVP. It is a great way to discard the features not required with your MVP and keep the essential ones. Here in this stage, we implement what is known as beta testing.
Inappropriate tech stack.
Let’s explain this in a very simple way. Imagine that to bake a cake, instead of using baking powder; you use bleaching powder. Do we need to say more? Your MVP also requires such particular ingredients and inputs. Using the wrong ingredients and inputs will not only make you have to do it all over again, but even then, it may not be appropriate.
The Fix.
While your research team can provide extensive and in-depth insights into what the market truly requires and needs, your engineering team will be the one to analyse and decide what tools and resources to use to develop your MVP and application.
It is crucial to use industry standards, proven development frameworks, and cross-platform architecture to develop and create an almost perfect MVP in today’s world.
Conclusion
Frankly, these are not the only challenges that an entrepreneur freezes while developing an MVP. However, these are the most common challenges that every startup and entrepreneur face during the development of an MVP. You need to share what are challenges you faced building MVP to ease these matters for everyone. To be honest, there will be many other problems and challenges unique only to the product that you are proposing to launch.
Remember that it is more about finding ways to make your ideas work. And MVP is only the first step towards that goal.
