Top 5 Ways to Validate Your Minimum Viable Product

The main feature of building a minimum viable product is to validate your product that you are going to release in the market.

People may have various misconceptions about MVP. Let's make it clear that MVP is not at all an unfinished product or a low-quality product. It is a proven process to get maximum customer feedback for your product. You can choose an MVP development company for building your startup's MVP.

You are not required to develop MVP for your startup to check the scope of technical improvements in your product, but it helps make sure that whether your product should be or should not be built in the first place!

Once you choose to develop MVP for your startup or a product, you need to validate your minimum viable product after the development.

You might be wondering how to test MVP? Then here are the proven ways to validate your minimum viable product.

#1. Landing pages

You can create landing pages for your product or service where your future customers can gain more detailed information such as its advantages, uses, and value offered by your product.

With the help of landing pages, you can get an understanding of how your customers interact and behave.

These landing pages display the users' interest with the way they interact & behave on your page. You can track customer analytics with various tools like Google Analytics, KISSmetrics, etc.

Buffer, an application that allows you to sequence your social media posts and tweets as per schedule, created a landing page for testing their MVP. And once they got the users positive, they kept updating the page and developed the final product.

#2. Customer interviews

What could be a better way to get feedback from those who are your ultimate users? Here, you can test your MVP with the feedback of the users.

You can conduct interviews with them, identify their issues with the product to get the details. These details will be quite useful for you to decide the market need for your product and the required improvements to release in the future.

#3. Explainer videos

You must have heard the saying. "If an image is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million words." So, you can make a simple video that explains your MVP and how it will solve the problems for your customers.

Here's a great example of Dropbox, that has created an explainer video for their MVP;

They have explained the intended functionality of dropbox in the video. And you will be amazed to know that they achieved 75,000 signups from 5000!

#4. Wizard of Oz

Do you remember the popular fairy tale the Wizard of Oz and the hero of that tale? You must then be aware that the hero in the story used various special tricks to pretend to be some frightening character.

Well, here you have to do something similar to that! You will use tricks to give users the impression that MVP has all the demanded features, whereas, in actual, it's all a facade!

You will be doing all the behind-the-scenes work manually, and your customer will think that they're using and interacting with the real product.

One of the great examples of companies that tested its MVP with the Wizard of Oz is Amazon. This online bookstore's owners didn't keep books in stock, but they ordered them as per the customer orders.

#5. A/B Testing

The MVP testing technique is more effective for the developed product versions.

It's quite simple to validate your minimum viable product with A/B testing. You can show your users two different versions of your page. You can then get insights about users' interactions with tools like Unbounce, Google Analytics, etc. to know which version is more liked by users.

Wrap Up

It is very useful for you to develop MVP before rolling out a full-fledged product to your customers, especially for testing your MVP.

Once you make a mind to test your hypothesis and validate MVP, you can use one of the above-mentioned ways to test MVP. And ensure to go for the technique perfectly suited to your business model and market.