29% of startups fail because they run out of cash, according to CB Insights. They often focus on developing a product the market doesn’t need. As a result, they fail to secure sales and continue creating or adjusting the wrong product.
Startups should focus on scaling properly instead of faster and prematurely, leading to a more significant return on investment. Aspiring entrepreneurs can achieve it with the help of the MVP builder.
What is MVP? How to build one? What do you need to know about the MVP tool to avoid any mistakes in the future? In this article, the Dewais team will tell you everything about it. Working with many startups, we focus on efficient delivery, and our startup-oriented attitude always helps achieve this. We know how to investigate the market’s readiness to accept the product or improvements before the official release. We offer cutting-edge software solutionі to automate, digitize and provide a better user experience.
What is an MVP?
MVP (minimum viable product) is the product with the highest return on investment versus risk. Such a product has enough features to attract early adopters and validate a product idea in the development cycle. An MVP gives a product team a chance to receive user feedback and improve the product as quickly as possible.
One of the main characteristics of an MVP is its sufficient value for the customers willing to purchase it initially. Therefore, it has to demonstrate enough benefits and potential to retain early users. In return, MVP should offer the necessary feedback and insights about customers to guide future development.
Why Should You Build an MVP Without Code?
No-code MVP is a way to start the product development process without hiring experts, so there is no need to rely on engineers or developers skilled in coding. Despite what you are planning to build, the goal of no-code MVP is to learn everything you want to know about your clients and the market.
Among the reasons to implement the no-product MVP approach are:
- It minimizes product development costs.
- It allows you to gain valuable analytics about the end users by leveraging a product/market fit.
- It lets you build a customer base before even having a finished product.
- You can release new versions and make changes quickly as you learn from the feedback.
- You save lots of resources, money, and time.
How to Build an MVP?
If you are taking a no-code approach to building your MVP, here is a guide to help you get through the MVP creation process without diving into the technical details.
Step 1: Start with a comprehensive market research
Before a business can initiate an idea and embark upon an MVP development cycle, it should gain insight into the problem and its solution. It is the best way to ensure that it fulfills the target users’ needs and to clarify the value proposition, set of features, user experience and competitors.
Surveys are a popular tool to get this information. As a result, you will be able to define the product idea and the goals you plan to achieve through the MVP development process.
Step 2: Focus on the details
Once you’ve finished the research, the next step is identifying and prioritizing the defined features. Features should match the users’ pain points. Start by creating a product vision and listing the features you want and your customers need to have in the product.
The next step will be prioritizing and grouping them. You do not need many features during the MVP stage. Instead, focus on those conveying the product’s core value.
Step 3: Launch MVP
Once you’ve learned about the market and decided upon the main features, you can go on with creating the MVP. The MVP should not be lower quality than the final product and should fulfil the customer’s needs.
In the case of a no-code MVP, it should validate an idea and get appropriate feedback, so you need to visualize your concept in the best way possible. You can create blogs, landing pages, surveys, advertising campaigns or explainer videos to implement this. The idea here should represent and clearly explain how the product will look and the features that will add value to it.
You can save time and resources as a startup by hiring a highly skilled professional team. The outsourced model benefits startups helping develop and launch the MVP. Dewais has helped to launch an MVP for a leading Norwegian EdTech company in only six months. We provided software architecture consulting and conducted the architecture-design stage.
Step 4: Measure the success
After launching the no-code MVP for your product, the next step is acquiring analytics and measuring MVP’s success. Knowing whether your idea will come through, you need to make improvements, or create a new one is essential.
User engagement, NPS, number of downloads, and customer lifetime are only several success criteria and metrics you can use to assess your product.
5 Lessons From Real-Life MVP Use Cases
Now that you are familiar with the MVP, it might still be unclear how you should use it or what benefits you can get. We would like to provide several real-life examples of companies that used the MVP concept to develop their idea. Looking at them will help you discover how they learned from their mistakes and achievements and, most importantly — inspire you.
Airbnb
Airbnb’s MVP is an example of thinking big but starting small, very small. They had an assumption they wanted to test — whether strangers would pay to stay in someone’s house. So, they created a website, “AirBed&Breakfast,” with a listing for the air mattresses in their living room. Their goal was to confirm that a sufficient number of people were willing to rent what they were offering, which worked, and they continued to scale further slowly.
Lesson: Build simply to learn and readjust at the earliest stage possible.
Dropbox
If you’ve ever lost a USB drive, you are not alone. But for Dropbox, this was a problem worth fixing. Drew Hudson created a simple five-minute video to demonstrate how the technology was meant to work. It drove the interest of hundreds of thousands of people, with the beta waiting list blowing overnight.
Lesson: An approachable demo will be enough to explain your product, gauge interest and get feedback from your target audience and potential users.
Buffer
Buffer started as a two-page MVP with a description of the product features to get feedback about the idea. As people started clicking on it and signing up for more information, he decided to check if people were also ready to pay for this concept. So the MVP turned into three pages with pricing options.
Lesson: Build on the feedback you get. MVP allows you to confirm or deny hypotheses as you learn more about your market and users. Pre-release signups are also a great way to validate the need for your product.
Uber
Uber started out focusing on a smaller market — black car clients, yet with the same idea, we know Uber today. Their MVP app worked the following way: you use iPhone or Android app to set up your pickup location on a map, Uber sends the nearest driver, and you receive a text message with the estimated arrival time and when they arrive, tell a driver your destination, and you are on your way. Uber’s MVP app also offered cash-free payments, automatically charging the card on file.
Lesson: Less is more. The first version of Uber was simple, and without many features we know Uber has today. They focused on one core feature and kept testing and validating their general idea.
Mistakes to avoid when building a no-code MVP
Launching a new product is never risk-free, as it’s almost impossible to avoid mistakes. In concluding the four lessons from real-life use cases, here are some of the mistakes you should avoid building a successful MVP without coding:
- Aiming for a complete product
One of the most frequent mistakes startups make is wanting to create a complete product with all the features. However, this is not the objective of a minimal viable product. It often results in the waste of time, effort, and resources. - Targeting the wrong audience
When building an MVP, user feedback is a vital part of the development as it allows you to validate your product. It is necessary to consider comments and feedback from your target audience. Targeting an irrelevant audience might mislead your takeaways and lead to changing your product for the wrong reasons. - Losing focus
Your product strategy should be at the heart of your business. It helps to keep your vision clear and scale your product according to your business goals, for example, when adding new features. Not following the product strategy or having it set up ineffectively can result in losing potential, customers and massive product failure.
Build a No-Code MVP with Dewais
A no-code MVP has a good chance of succeeding and provides the right development direction for the future if you keep your focus clear and make sure you undertake market research.
However, you should not strive for perfection with MVP. It should only include the features required for the product to function and provide an understanding of how you can scale your MVP.
With no code solutions, such as websites or demo videos, you can build your MVP with the smallest budget possible and at the lowest risk. It allows you to test your ideas, get feedback and tweak your product to meet customers’ needs better. However, no code does not mean it will not require the help of experts.
Dewais provides software development services for startups. We cover every aspect of software development, starting from MVP coding to IT consulting and post-maintenance support. To develop a product that matches your vision and tech requirements, we apply our tech expertise and work within your budget and timeline constraints.
If you are looking for assistance with building MVP solutions, including no-code ones — contact us. The Dewais team will advise on the best solution to help you achieve high-quality results at any project stage.
