I often get requests from people with ideas they believe will change the world in some or the other, the next big Uber/AirBnB what have you.
Being in the tech scene for a while, I wanted to dissect how you can easily launch your tech product without breaking the bank or even spending so much time on building the product. We will mainly look at the concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The concepts discussed in this article can be useful for small tech startups or even large organizations.
One of the drivers of wanting to help you launch your product is that, Eswatini needs to tap into the global tech opportunities that exist, from investors to partnerships.
What is an MVP?
In the easiest of terms, MVP is a terminology that refers to building an app with enough functionality to attract early adopters while learning and optimizing the product in the process of development. In other words, it is a beta, or a test, version of your product or service.
Building an MVP helps you understand the customer needs and find a balance with your product’s offers, thus enabling you to maximize your ideas at scale. Virtually, all the big tech products/companies you see today started with an MVP. Below is an example of YouTube’s MVP and you can clearly see the transition the product has undergone to what it is today.
Source: Medium.com
Benefits of an MVP
The MVP approach far outweighs other traditional approaches to launching a tech product.
- Reduce financial constraints
Building a product with all features you envision is by far, more costly compared to building an MVP.
- Attract investors
In one of the recent articles, we touched on the opportunities you can attract and leverage on a global/African landscape as a tech startup. One of the key prerequisites that investors often need before investing in your product, is an MVP with real-life users.
- Faster go-to-market
Instead of building a fully featured product in 12 months, you can easily launch your product in a few weeks or months depending on numerous factors such as your tech stack, software development approach, budget, and so on.
- Collect user feedback
User feedback is key when building products. Finding the balance between what your users want and what you offer is what sets apart successful products from unsuccessful ones. Some studies and reports indicate that over 123 000 startups are closed every day worldwide, approximately 85 per minute. This is largely due to poor market research which can be facilitated by using the MVP approach and collecting user feedback.
Source: Medium.com
How to build your MVP
Now that we understand what an MVP is and its goals, let’s look at how to go about building your MVP.
The following 4 steps can help you move from idea to launch sooner than you anticipate.
- Identify and define the problem
One of the challenges I have seen when consulting for startups is, wanting to solve either a problem that does not exist or solving so many problems at once. Pick a problem you have identified, what we call a user pain point. These are some of the questions you need answers to in this phase:
- Do users need this particular product?
- What problem is this product solving for your users?
Usually, some of the ideas that turn into profitable tech ventures, are those that the founders came up with by personally experiencing a particular problem. This is generally the rule of thumb I personally endorse to find ideas, identify problems you experience in your daily life, and solve them. By so doing, you get close to the problem and solve it much better.
- Carry out market research
Some entrepreneurs/executives/etc. are of the view that once you have an idea, you need to start executing right away. I personally chose to disagree, I believe (and so does research) that no matter how ‘brilliant’ you think your idea to be, some market research is warranted in order to build a profitable and successful venture. For instance, there may be similar products as yours, market research will help you identify these competitors and how you can be different (i.e. called a Competitor Analysis) and most importantly, you will better understand the Market (i.e. market segments, market size, total addressable market TAM and so on); this is what we call a Market Analysis.
Market research is the entry point to understanding and delivering on your unique value proposition.
- Identify the key & relevant features
Having executed your market research, you would be in a better position to understand what features your product should have which would solve your users’ problems. At this stage, you may deploy user journey maps which entail thoughts, feelings, and decisions that result in the user taking action on your product. User journeys are basically a visual representation of the relationship that your users will have with your product.
As an example, let’s take an idea where someone wants to build an app that allows residents in Eswatini to find the nearest private hospital. All a user needs is to be able to enter their location or better yet, use Geolocation in their device and the app shows the nearest hospital with contact details, etc. Before you can implement other features such as booking a doctor; identifying whether the hospital takes medical aid and so on, the primary feature you’d build is the one mentioned above.
- Develop MVP
Now comes the actual development. There are numerous options that can get your MVP build such as:
- Finding a technical co-founder
- Getting a freelancer
- Hiring an in-house software engineering team
All of the above depends on whether you are a startup or a corporate and this will determine your budget which is key.
In the software engineering world, there’s the concept of ‘over-engineering’ which is where you use complicated technology to build technology. My rule of thumb when building MVPs is to use the simplest most cost-effective technology stack to ship out an MVP. Such technology could be NoCode tools such as WordPress, Bubble, Webflow, etc. In most cases, Ruby on Rails is the go-to stack as it is termed the ‘stack for startups’, used by some of the biggest tech startups in the world.
- Measure and Learn - receive user feedback and optimize product
Once you are at the development stage, you may want to employ the Lean Startup Methodology sometimes called Build-Measure-Learn (BML). The primary goal of BML is to improve the feedback loop in your development phase.
Source: Theleanstartup.com
The concept of BML introduces the Continuous Iteration approach to software development, wherein, you continue making improvements to a product through the feedback received from users and building upon that.
To conclude, we’ve looked at a high-level view of launching your tech idea into a product using the MVP approach. I am happy to indulge you further on this and learn about your challenges trying to launch a tech product in Eswatini, feel free to reach out via email at thuba.mamba@codeswatini.org.