Advantages and Disadvantages of Minimum Viable Product
What Does Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Mean?
A minimum viable product is a method of releasing a product or service with core features or functionalities into the market to attract target customers, investors, stakeholders, and even influencers to test and review the product to enable the product developer to further develop the product in line with the market needs.
The minimum viable product simply means a test copy or first version of a product that is usable and salable.
It’s a way of presenting your innovation to the general public to garner ideas about the market and the consumers to make a quality finished products that would be highly profitable.
What’s the Purpose of MVP?
The purpose of launching MVP is to factor the customer demands and wants into your product development, and not just focus on the market needs only.
Other reasons businesses develop the minimum viable products are the following.
To help in existing product redesign and rebranding or to learn and speed up the development of innovative products.
To serve as a feasibility study to gain insights into the market needs wants and demands, and other market niches to serve as a guide in developing a marketable and profitable products.
Advantages of Minimum Viable Product
It reduces failure-rate
No matter how solid a business idea is or how detailed your research about a need in the market, launching a finished product into a competitive market can easily fail.
The minimum viable product helps most start-ups to reduce their chance of failure since they test their product on real customers, request feedback, and use the data to improve their product, saving funding costs, time, and other resources.
You understand the market better
Rather than conducting expensive extensive market research, you can collect validated market behavior at less cost with MVP.
Also, you can better understand your customers’ needs. The feedback you get from the real consumers of your product is far better than the professional advice you get on product development and business analytics.
Less distraction in MVP development
While developing a minimum viable product, your focus is only on the vital elements of the product, thus, your focus is mainly on the drive of the product development.
Since you’re only focusing on a few things at a time, you’re able to develop it better and quicker, and there would be fewer distractions from adding unnecessary features and functionalities that may not help you sell more.
It helps to make good use of your Investment
You only invest a small capital in developing a minimum viable product, and you can now use the feedback from early users of your product to channel your capital properly into the product features that have high demand.
With this, you can easily avoid bad investment, and improve the buying motive of your target customers since the product is tailored to their demands rather than the market needs.
Also, innovations can require huge funding such as testing a new business model, therefore, launching a test copy to see how the market reacts to it is important to understand how you should invest in such innovation.
Early customer feedback and relationship
Getting customer feedback early can help to further user-oriented products, and you can develop relationships with your customers early.
Engaging your user and potential business partners in the early stage of development of your product can help to develop loyal customers and good ambassadors of your product.
Easy release of product into the market
One of the main advantages of developing a minimum viable product is the ability to release your product quickly into the market.
After developing the core functionalities of your product, you can launch the product without polishing it, and employ the customer feedback for later development.
Disadvantages of Minimum Viable Product
Loss of Focus
Normally people who are creating MVP reduce their focus on the concept at an early period.
So here, the best option will be to work in a manner that will complete work on time and with full accuracy.
They must have their target that must be their motive to achieve in the future.
It’s difficult to determine the core features
It may be difficult for a product developers to determine the core features to build into their MVP.
While developing the core functionalities, there’s a high tendency of adding redundant features and messing up things with MVP.
Launching MVP is complex
Developing a minimum viable product is one thing, launching it at the right time and to the right people to get reliable feedback is very important and a complex process for a product developers.
It requires expertise and experience, and you would likely have an experienced hand on your MVP processes.
Competition Might Be There
We are living in an era of technology. People normally have the same idea; this increases the competition level in society.
If your option has some negative things, others might make the required changes and create their options with better results.
Perfect Design
To create a perfect design of MVP, there is a dedication to a good time. For that specific time, customers will have to wait.
A person should try to keep their focus on creating a simple design to avoid wasting time.
