First things first, what are your goals for your MVP? For us, it should be to prove there is product market fit while taking on the least amount of risk possible. Founders are often excited about their ideas and are eager to start building features without proper planning. This could result in assumptions about their product being glossed over about their customers and their product as a whole.

During the earliest stages of your company, it is especially important to have open communication with current and potential customers to gain insight as to how they may use your product. Here at Launchbase, we achieve our product outcomes through design sprints which lets us decide quickly and efficiently understand the problems that may come up and get real-time feedback from our clients and their customers.

We implement these three things during the design sprint and the initial build of a product and design:

– Providing the product market fit so the product can be monetised

– Validating whether there are high risk factors to your product such as sensitive data.

– Getting actionable user-feedback through a MVP in the hands of your users to learn and facilitate what the next steps should be.

As a founder, you will need to get to the core reason why someone would use your product after its release. You should be asking yourself these questions:

“What Problem Does Your Product Solve?”

Answering this question will let you understand your customers. It can be surprisingly easy to come up with solutions to problems that you may think exists. It shouldn’t be about what your product does, but what problem does it solve for your customers.

“How Big of a Problem is This?”

Is this a problem that people are experiencing on a daily basis or is it a minor inconvenience? Because, if your customer is having an issue it does not mean that they will go through the effort of using the product.

“What is Your Value Statement?”

Your unique value proposition should explain how your product is uniquely equipped to solve this problem and how this separates you from your competitors. By getting clear about why people would choose your product to solve a problem, this will help you sell the idea to customers, but also help our developers narrow in on what features should be prioritised for your MVP.

“What Are Your Must-Haves and Nice-To-Haves?”

As you are going through this process and asking yourself these questions, you are more than likely to come up with a large number of ideas of what your app could do. It is in that time that you should hone in on what your MVP needs to do. Ask the questions, does this feature need to be included to validate your product and does it align with your value statement. It is important to remember that the goal should be to build the absolute minimum needed to validate the product idea with minimal risk.