15 ways to verify minimizing viable products (MVP)

Eric Rise, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, puts forward the idea of "lean Entrepreneurship" in his book "Lean Entrepreneurship", whose core idea is to make a simple prototype when developing a product--minimizing the viable product (Minimum viable product, MVP), Then through testing and collecting user feedback, rapid iteration, and constantly revise the product, and finally adapt to market demand.

However, even minimizing viable products, the development and testing process is by no means simple. How to test your MVP, and how to effectively get feedback from users is also a complex learning. Christopher Bank, head of UX design software Uxpin, published TNW's article to provide us with 15 good ways to test the MVP.

1. User Interviews

In the entrepreneurial process, there is no strict theorem, only a variety of different opinions and assumptions. The important way to verify the correctness of the various viewpoints is to communicate with the real user, explain to the user what your product can do for him, and then ask them how important they are to the different parts of your product. Adjust the product according to the information collected.

It should be noted that user interviews should focus on finding and solving problems rather than selling products to respondents.

2. Landing page

The landing page is a portal for visitors or potential users to learn about your products, a marketing opportunity to introduce product features, and a great time to validate the MVP in combat, so you can see if the product can reach the market's expectations.

Many of the landing pages are just asking users to fill out an email, but there are more extensions to the landing page, such as adding a separate page to show the price list and presenting the optional pricing package to visitors. Users ' clicks not only show their interest in the product, but also show what kind of pricing strategy to gain market recognition.

In order to achieve the desired effect, the landing page needs to show the right content to the consumer at the right time. At the same time, in order to accurately understand the user's behavior, developers should also make full use of Google Analytics, kissmetrics or Crazyegg tools to statistical analysis of user behavior.

3. A/b Test

You can try A/b test when you are unsure how to effectively increase the registration rate and conversion rate. Develop version two pages, and then push both pages in a random way to all browsing users, and then get feedback from users about different versions through optimizely, unbounce or Google analytics analytics tools.

4. Advertise

This may be contrary to conventional wisdom, but in fact, advertising is an effective way to validate the market's response to a product. You can use platforms such as Google and Facebook to deliver ads to specific groups of people, to see how visitors respond to your early products and see which features are most attractive to them. You can collect click-through, conversion-rate data and combine with A/b test through the SITE monitoring tool.

But please note that the search advertising is very competitive, so, the main goal for the MVP ads is to verify the market attitude to the product, do not blindly pursue exposure, the user's real feedback on the product is priceless.

5. Fund-raising

The Kickstarter and Indiegogo sites provide a good platform for entrepreneurs to test their MVP. Entrepreneurs can initiate public offerings and then judge people's attitudes toward products based on their support. In addition, they can help entrepreneurs reach a group of early adopters who are very interested in your product, and their word-of-mouth and ongoing feedback is critical to the success of the product.

Kickstarter has many successful examples, such as electronic paper Watch Pebble and Game host provider Ouya. They raised millions of dollars before the product was developed and got a huge response.

Of course, if you want to get good results on your site, you need persuasive text, high quality video, and a seductive return.

6. Product Introduction Video

If a good product picture is better than thousands of words, then the value of a high-quality video presentation is immeasurable. The most famous example is the video that Dropbox the MVP when it was validated. This video describes the Dropbox features, registered users overnight from 5000 to 75000, the Dropbox even the actual products are not.

When you develop a product that solves a problem that the user has not found, it is difficult to reach the target consumer group. Dropbox introduction video played a good effect, if Dropbox in the introduction just say "Seamless file synchronization software", absolutely impossible to achieve the same effect. Video allows potential consumers to fully understand how this product will help them, and ultimately trigger the willingness of consumers to pay.

7. A fragmented MVP

The so-called "fragmentation MVP" is the use of off-the-shelf tools and services to do the product function demo, rather than fully developed.

In the early days of Groupon, the founders used tools such as Wordpress,apple Mail and AppleScript to manually generate a PDF of the orders they received from the site. It takes time and money to build a variety of infrastructure, far less than using off-the-shelf services and platforms in which developers can use limited resources more efficiently.

8. SaaS & PaaS

In the early stages of product development, do not invest too much in the server, there are too many tools available, such as: AWS, Heroku, MongoDB, Facebook Connect, Chargify, Mixpanel, Mailchimp, Google Forms , LiveChat, WordPress, Drupal and so on. Use these services and platforms to speed up your development process and bring your MVP to market as soon as possible.

The design and development framework can also effectively save time and money, with a wide range of choices, such as Twitter Bootstrap, Zurb Foundation, Ruby on Rails, Django, Bootstrap.js, and Node.js. These frameworks or directories provide a great deal of documentation to help you quickly build your MVP and market.

In addition, many developers face the browser compatibility, mobile interface design, code optimization and other issues can be easily resolved. All you have to do is focus on developing the product.

9. Blog

Through the blog can easily verify their ideas in the target group, through two-way communication can be in the MVP development process timely collection of user feedback.

In addition, the blog can also be your product of the early prototype, "lean Entrepreneurial" author Eric Ries is first on the blog and readers have a certain exchange, and then began to write. Through the blog can understand the audience's views, and stimulate their desire to buy books in the future.

10. Fictional MVP

In the early stages of the product, in addition to making videos and building code frames, you can also use fictional MVP to simulate real products or services before a product is developed, to make consumers feel they are experiencing real products, but actually the work behind the product is done manually.

Shoe Electric Trader Zappos just started, Nick Swinmurn, the founder of the local store shoes on the site, to measure the demand for shoes online. When someone orders, he goes back to buy the shoes.

Although this method is very small, but can let you in the key stage of product design with the consumer to maintain good communication, understand consumers use the site when the primary information, more quickly find and solve real transactions in the consumer problems. For consumers, as long as the product is good enough, who cares how behind the operation. Zappos was finally very successful and was bought by Amazon in 2009 at a price of 1.2 billion dollars.

11. VIP MVP

The VIP MVP is similar to a fictional MVP, but is not a fictional product but a highly customizable product for a particular user.

Clothing Leasing service Rent the runway, when testing their business model, provides face-to-face service for female college students, who can try them before renting a dress. In this way Rent the runway collects real feedback from a large number of customers and the willingness to pay.

12. Digital prototype

The physical model, wireframe and prototype can show the function of the product and simulate the actual usage. These prototypes can be either a minimum-fidelity framework or a screenshot of the actual user experience.

13. Paper prototype

Paper prototypes, like digital prototypes, can be either cut or painted on paper, to show the user's experience with the product.

The advantage of paper prototypes is that both product managers and designers, as well as investors and end-users, can use them. And don't need too much explanation, because it gives you the epitome of the actual product.

For mobile phones, chairs and other physical products development, this method is very valuable.

14. Single function MVP

When minimizing a viable product, focusing on a single function can save development time and effort, avoid distracting users and focus on the main features of the product.

Foursquare at the beginning of the line just to allow users to sign in on social media. Their first version of the app has only one simple feature. Buffer was originally timed to send Twitter, each user can only bind a Twitter account.

This restriction helps you narrow down the early adopters and lets you focus on more important issues, such as testing whether the product fits into the market and not worrying about the mess.

15. Pre-Sale page

Pre-sale is similar to the public, help you find potential customers, even before your product development to attract them to buy.

For example, Oculus Rift, the VR device, released the pre-sale page before the developer version was put into production. Many of the projects on the Kickstarter are also in the form of pre-sale. Through the pre-sale, you can understand people's demand for products in the end how much, consider whether to continue the project.

The challenge of pre-sale is to be able to ship as promised. No one likes the illusory things, consumers give you faith and financial support, you must be responsible for them, can not disappoint them.

Let's go.

In some ways, the development of MVP adds a lot of extra work, and it takes a lot of time and effort to do product iterations and validate requirements. Therefore, in the test MVP must avoid unnecessary details, according to different products to choose different methods. In the end, you need to turn the validated MVP into a real product and accept the market test.