Solve harder problems with MVP
Even if the idea is worth a billion dollar it can’t bypass certain check points if the MVP isn’t impactful.
Hi 👋, Welcome to the 53rd newsletter post.
Here’s a hot take: MVP is more than just validating an idea. It helps find answers to the hardest problems.
Let me give an example: Vegpal is one of the companies I’m working with, it primarily comes under the vegan app market. As customers can use it to solve their different problems, it broadens the market which makes it difficult to reach a large target audience and each customer categorises it in its own understanding which might not resonate with the actual idea.
So, to help customers further break down, it can be positioned into 3 categories:
Community for vegans
Social app for vegans
Dating app for vegans
Now, it can’t be all three where the company fulfils each different customer’s expectations and delivers value at the same time. Building an MVP, here, will give the product direction from where it should be led. Considering:
Current market trends and future forecasts
Competitors and why you should exist in the first place.
What makes you better and how do your potential customers see you?
How it will economically help the app grow and generate revenue.
Decode risks involved - Is it something people really want that will support your business?
And most important - what’s its realistic timeline?
All these things are involved in building a successful product. Let’s get into what impact and deliveries you should consider while building the MVP.
But before, a quick word from our partner: Byldd
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Move over default positioning
Initially how you thought about the idea might not be something you end up building. As you try to solve a problem you’ll need to find one way that monetize, automate and expand the user base.
Figure out how your product should be positioned. In MVP, you can make many experiments until you see if your product is positioned in the way customers understand what it is.
Keep a goal to reduce the number of decisions users have to make while using the product.
The more decisions a customer has to make to reach the desired value, the harder and more confusing will it be for them to position it. The fewer decisions they have to make, the faster their journey becomes.
Here’s 2 risk factor every new business idea need to cover:
Market risk: do people want this enough to support a business?
Execution risk: can we build this within a realistic timeline?
Solve a small problem for a larger audience
Here’s a scenario:
Me: What kind of healthy bagels would you perfer after a workout?
Customer 1: Diet bagels are great to have in a bakery.
Customer 2: I prefer Guten-free bagels.
Customer 3: Chocoloate portien bagels. 🙌 (I don’t know if that even exists😅)
When you ask your customers how would they solve their problems, they’ll have their own options. And it becomes your signal to serve all the customers based on people’s magic words. 🤦♀️
The thrill and excitement to build something worth solving a problem based on conversation is not new.
As you’re solving to the larger audience, the core ones get hard to reach. Leads to the next question, how you’ll expand it? The market will be evolving and you might be getting competitors. Selling each type of bagel will become difficult, as the focus will shift from “people who need it after workout” to “people thinking of them as regular bagels at a bakery store”.
Not every product has to become the solution to everything and not every product crosses the border of a very niche down problem.
Start by solving your own problem. MVP won’t solve the complete problem but it will bring you one step closer. This will help you set up a different customer profile, which is mostly, a small solution which is needed by a larger segment.
Free will attract low-intend customer profile
Free is a trap. What you should expect is, that if someone is paying to use the service they are getting the value and people using it for free will have low-intend profile you don’t want to attract.
Yet pricing is something very hard decision to make. You might be losing a vast pool of potential customers; setting a rate can be scary and slow growth. Yet all these give you the right path.
Charging is a scary choice but makes for much clearer signals.
MVP is all about building the right product through clear feedback and data. Most of the scenarios look like this: build an MVP try onboarding users and ask them for feedback - they give a very general statement, not much worth working on - but as you put a price on it, it starts showing the product's actual value.
Build it with DIY and then automate
In the beginning, there are no customers, and getting feedback and building something valuable will be hard. That means you have to be your own customer first then build a customer-centric product.
Now, here’s a thing, you might want to add many fancy features to attract customers and make them feel they have control over their work and they feel like they’ve got it all. But 45% of the features you add just to simplify the work get overlooked. Most of the customers don’t use them and it just bills up your cost of operating and maintaining.
Each feature or automation you add should create impact and reduce Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). That should be the goal.
The best way is to learn which part is actively used and can be automated. But before that, you manually do the work. Also, this automation will open a new target segment, expanding the product roadmap.
Ending with
It is advisable to know from an early stage who you’re selling to. That initial market shapes what you build, not the other way around.
Instead of spending months & several thousand dollars on building the product that you think the market wants, spend time on crafting something your customers want by testing in the promising niches.
Until next time👋,
Ritika
👋 PS: I’m Ritika founder, product marketer and advisor for early-stage to unicorn startups, work with me or connect with me here. If you’re a first-time founder looking for curated resources, download here. You can also promote your product in this newsletter or share your feedback or questions here.
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