You’re finally on this amazing journey of building an MVP. Congratulations!!!

You’ve probably checked out a couple of minimum viable product examples and you’re thinking of mirroring their technique. Don’t worry, no one will tell, but how aware of you of the downsides?

It’s important to know the stumbling blocks or mistakes to avoid when building an mvp and the features to prioritize when it comes to your mvp.

At the end of this article, you will be well prepared for the possible issues that need to be cleared before or while you build your minimum viable product.

Content

How do you prioritize features for your MVP?
11 Common Mistakes to Avoid when Building an MVP
Looking to Build an MVP?
Summary

Key Steps to Building an MVP

building an mvp
How do you make sure you don’t focus more on the ‘minimum’ than the product and how do you ensure that you don’t fill your mvps with so many features that it confuses your prospective users?

Here are some steps you need to consider when prioritizing your features for the minimum viable product;

Determine the Core Issues
Identify your target audience
Define Essential Features
Make Use of a Prioritization Framework
Identify your Limits and Capabilities
Check out your competition
Don’t be Afraid to Test and Validate

1. Determine the Core Issues

Building an MVP is an exciting journey and sometimes you might end up getting caught in putting out features that might not be solving an exact problem.

Focus on the primary issue that your product solves for your intended audience. You can call this the clarity stage.

2. Identify your target audience

Not everyone can be your target audience, which is fine. After figuring out what main problem your product is solving, then you map out the pain points of your audience that would be using your product and possible road blocks that might stop them from using your product. The MVP should align with real user demands.

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3. Define Essential Features

Building a minimum viable product doesn’t mean it should be more “Minimum” than “product”. Listing out core features that would contribute to the main problem your product would be solving.

Postpone certain features you intend to add after your MVP has gathered the feedback you need. This would determine if they would be needed in the long run.

4. Make Use of a Prioritization Framework

building an mvp
You can use frameworks like MoSCoW which stands for ‘must-have, should-have, could-have, won’t-have’ to rank features based on importance and effort.

Allowing you to focus on high-value, low effort features that are essential for the MVP.

5. Identify your Limits and Capabilities

Evaluate time, budget, and technical feasibility to ensure the MVP can be built with your current resources.

This ensures that you’re choosing features that are practical and within the startup’s capacity, while avoiding those that could slow down development.

6. Check out your competition

Do thorough research of who your competitors are, how their product connects with their audience, what they might lack and how you can improve on their shortcomings when it comes to your MVP.

Related: Top 11 Tips for Effective Startup Building Without Burnout

7. Don’t be Afraid to Test and Validate

There is no such thing as bad feedback in this case. After all, this is why you’re building an MVP in the first place.

After prioritizing the features and running it through potential users, ensure that they align with real-world expectations. Remember that feedback is the backbone that refines an MVP further.

11 Common Mistakes to Avoid when Building an MVP

how to build an mvp

These are some of the most common mistakes made by startups when building an mvp;

Overloading your MVP with Features
Thinking the Product would Market Itself
Forgetting to Set Clear Success Metrics
Allowing User Feedback to Take a Back Seat
Poor Market Research
Poorly Defined Problem Statement
Focus on Perfection
Poor Testing or No Testing
Not Concerning Its Scalability
Thinking the MVP is the Final Product
Kicking off with the wrong team

1. Overloading your MVP with Features

Like it was previously mentioned, too many features that have nothing to with the specific solution your product would be solving is a capital NO.

The purpose of building an MVP is to make sure your idea is validated and that it’s actually filling up a space in the market.

When building an MVP, you have to think of your users, the development time and the cost. It’s better to start out simple and refine it as time goes on when the feedback is ready.

You could also try out dropbox’s mvp release style, which involved putting out a landing page explaining the prospects of their product and if it was a welcome innovation. Resources were saved and feedback was successfully received.

2. Thinking the Product would Market Itself

This has to be said early on. Once you’ve decided that you want to turn your brilliant idea into a product, keep in mind that marketing will be done with full power.

Do not assume that users would organically pop up without proper marketing.

There are a ton of products out there and it’s easy for your product to get lost in the multitude that might be better than yours. What will set you apart is the way you display and distribute yours. Even the best MVPs fail when no one knows about them

Developing a basic marketing strategy which would involve pre-launch campaigns would help your product shine in the face of the millions out there.

3. Forgetting to Set Clear Success Metrics

how to build an mvp
Success metrics are important everywhere, especially when it comes to the release of a product.

Building an MVP is probably the easy part, identifying the goals that you would look back on to know if the release was successful is the tricky part.

If you can’t tell if your MVP has moved in the right direction, then the wrong choices would definitely be the order of the day.

Some of the KPIs you can set for the success of your product include;

Number of sign ups or downloads
Growth rate of new users
Daily active users
User feedback/surveys
User retention over time
Stickiness (indicating how often users return)
Churn rate (the percentage of users who stop using the product)
Customer satisfaction surveys
Qualitative feedback
Free to paid user conversion rate

Let the numbers guide you on the next steps to take.

4. Allowing User Feedback to Take a Back Seat

You’re building an MVP, not a personal project, which means user feedback is what your product would depend on to thrive and be refined over time.

A minimum viable product is meant to test your assumptions and validate them with real users with real problems that need solving.

If you ignore the feedback of your users, your product will not meet their needs, which means it could be considered a personal project because an MVP not solving any problem is as good as non-existent.

Build in mechanisms for collecting feedback from the beginning. Engage with users, listen to their pain points, and prioritize improvements based on feedback received.

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5. Poor Market Research

Do not release a minimum viable product without properly understanding the market or user needs. Remember when it was earlier stated that everyone wasn’t your target audience? You are also not your target audience and relying on assumptions can lead to misguided decisions.

Proper market research will provide insight into whether the product is one that attends to the pain points of your prospective users.

It also helps you tailor your minimum viable product to specific user demographics, understanding what motivates them to engage and what features they value most.

Without considering this, you actually risk creating a product that doesn’t fit any market segment at all or appealing to any demographic rather than one that fits a particular audience perfectly.

6. Poorly Defined Problem Statement

If you haven’t properly defined the problem your mvp will be solving, how do you expect your users to understand it too?

Your problem has to be properly defined so that the solution would be clearly defined as well.

When going through the process of building an MVP, you have to first define a problem statement and ensure that it addresses the problem in a simple and focused manner. This will help you identify the features you would be adding to your MVPs.

7. Focus on Perfection

Nothing ever built is really perfect at first. It has to go through moments of mistakes, issues, criticisms before it gets to the point of “almost perfect”.

As long as your features aren’t overcrowded, it has a seamless user experience and the solution is well defined, your product is good to go.

When building an MVP, the product just has to be “good enough” for the market and not “perfect”.

Toss the mentality of wanting it to be perfect and focus on speed because you might not be the only one with the same idea. With time, it can be refined using real user data instead of “founder’s intuition”.

8. Poor Testing or No Testing

Since you’re building an MVP and are more focused on getting user feedback and identifying if your product is one that solves real-life problems, you might wonder if there’s any reason to test it thoroughly thinking the user would understand.

Ever heard of a bad first impression? You don’t want that for your product.

An mvp that’s filled with glitches and annoying bugs only pushes the users of your product and makes it almost impossible for them to give you a second chance once it’s been fixed.

Ensure that the basic functionalities work smoothly. Fix critical bugs, run usability tests and make sure that good user experience is at an all time high.

9. Not Concerning Its Scalability

It’s important to note that while you might be prepared for failures, you also have to think about successes. If your MVP is successful, what next?

Try not to neglect future growth and have that plan ready to be implemented once you know the next steps to take.

Also remember that neglecting future growth can also lead to bad technical debt.

Make use of flexible and scalable technologies that will grow with your product as time goes by and ensure the architecture can handle future iterations and expansions.

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10. Thinking the MVP is the Final Product

This is a crucial one and it goes hand-in-hand with the previously mentioned mistake.

Build your product with the mindset that it is going to change and evolve over time because of the feedback that will be coming in once your product is live and out on the market. You have to plan the steps that will come in after your launch.

If you built the product without any help, this might be the time when you need to bring in the big guns and get your team ready to move on to the next stage.

11. Kicking off with the Wrong Team

Scaling a product wouldn’t be difficult to do if you started off with the right team.

There’s nothing as great as knowing you have a team of experts who believe in the dream of the product and what you can achieve if you have the right steps in place.

If you probably said, “I can get it started on my own”, yes you can, but if your goal is to scale your product effectively while getting burnt out in the process, then you are definitely on the right path.

Do not make the mistake of choosing people that have vast technical knowledge but are experts in nothing. You would be setting yourself up for bad technical debt right there.

Looking to Build an MVP?

Now that you’ve done your research and you know the right steps to take, which includes getting the right team for building an MVP, here’s a tip for you.

Getting a team as a startup might sound super expensive and the hiring process is definitely going to be tedious, but the solution is simple.

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