Launching your product without breaking the bank

An MVP, or minimum viable product, is a stripped-down version of your app or website that gets core features into users' hands fast. This lets you see if there's real interest in your idea before investing heavily in development. It's all about learning what resonates with your target market, so you can iterate and improve based on their feedback.

In this article I'm going to walk you through some of the key factors to consider when developing an MVP as well as some mistakes that we at Yenovi have made before so you don't have to. Let's jump right into it!

It's all about time and money

When launching an MVP, there is a high chance that you will have a lot of invalid assumptions about your users. Maybe certain features that you thought of as secondary will turn out to be the main selling point, maybe you will find out that your target audience is totally different from your initial idea. Maybe the whole product will need to be changed. Regardless of what you will have to pivot on, you want to find it out as soon as possible, preferably before you invest hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into the development.

If you are a developer yourself and you think money is not an issue as you don't have to pay yourself, you are wrong! You may not need to wire any money to yourself in the process, but you are paying with your precious time that you could use somewhere else to make money with. For example in a regular 9-5 or freelancing. Its important that when thinking about the costs of your project, factor in your own time

An other important aspect is competition. While its very unlikely that most of us could come up with a completely unique idea these days, the sooner you are able to get your product to your audience, the lower the chance of anyone else getting in front of them before you with something similar.

How to minimise risk

In the following, I will provide some strategical steps to minimise the risk of investing in wrong assumptions. Remember that there is no magic ball unfortunately. Even if you follow every step, your idea may not succeed. That's just the risk of launching a new product.

1. Validate your idea

Before investing anything in developing your product, try to validate first. This can vary on a case to case bases, there are multiple possible ways for validating an idea but almost all of them start with creating a lander. Think of your lander as a way to convince your potential audience about your product. Usually you should present the product as if it was already available so you can accurately measure how many people are genuinely interested.

If you are interested in launching a lander for your product but not sure where to start, we are here to help! Book a call and we will help you with bringing your idea to life

When you have your lander set up, the next step is to put it in front of people to see their reaction. You have a couple of options here:

1. Post about your lander on social media. If you can find where your target audience hangs out online, you won the lottery. Of course it is not that easy, many communities like this don't really tolerate pointless self promotion. You need to be strategic about it, you need to provide value for the community and in return, you can get your lander in front of people
2. Talk to your audience directly. In case you can find people you are targeting offline, you can talk to them about your product. For example go to conferences or local meet-ups to find the people you think can be interested in your services
3. Pay for ads. Paid advertisment can be a great way of delivering your lander to lots of potential customers, but I personally would not recommend to start with this step, especially if you are on a tight budget. Paid ads can burn a lot of money really quickly especially if you have no epxperience and the results can be disappointing. Visitors coming from paid ads are usually not interested enough to spend the time on offering feedback, especially if they are not sold on your idea

Once visitors are on your lander, it's as simple as measuring how much they like your product, right? Right? Well, kind of.

1. The most straight forward option is to collect email addresses of your visitors. If a potential buyer is willing to sing up for your email list, it can be a good sign that they are genuinely interested in your product. The only problem is, people are very quick to act unless they have to pay...
2. So make them pay. Or at least make them think they are about to pay. I you can get your visitors to fill a fake payment form, you can get just about as validated as it is possible. But be cautious! Make sure you are not doing anything illegal (like actually collecting their card data) and that you are covered from a legal point of view

2. Make sure you are investing only the bare necessity in development

Remember! There is no such thing as a 100% validated idea. Even if your validation went really good, you can't be certain that you will make money with the product. When developing an MVP, make sure to not spend too much time on development.

By this I don't mean to release a product full of issues or one without any real features. All I'm suggesting is to decide what is 100% needed for your products minimal version to still be considered a product and only deliver that in the first iteration. (Thus the name, MVP). Don't fall in the trap of releasing a tech demo, thinking that it's your MVP. A good way of judging whether you have your MVP is to try to use it. If there are any other apps doing something similar already, that you even use, it's only better. Ask yourself, would you switch to your product in its current form? If the answer is no, you will need to work on your MVP a little more.

On the other hand, any feature that is not part of your core offering is going to the `next release` column of your Trello board. Without mercy!

3. Make sure you know your audience

It's crucial that you are aware of who you are targeting. No matter what means of marketing you are trying out, without being certain who you are talking to you can easily end up burning a lot of money or time or both.

What's even more important is to know the people you are trying to sell to. Maybe you know who you are looking for but if you are trying to reach them in the wrong places, you are no closer than before. Let's say you are targeting older generations who are running a farm for tourists. If you are posting about your product on X, in the build in public community, you have really low chances of actually reaching your audience.

But it's not enough to know where to find your users, you also have to know how to talk to them. Learn their language, find out what they are interested about and try to provide value even when you are advertising. Everyone loves to receive free stuff, and it doesn't have to be a particular thing (like a PDF or something), information provided in a tweet can also be valuable for someone.

4. Use the right tools

If you are a developer, especially if you are passionat about your craft, it's very easy to unleash your inner engineer and go full dev mode, trying to implement all aspects of your product yourself but I have some sad news for you. One of the key steps in launching a successfull MVP is to put on your founder hat and decide what is worth implementing yourself and what can be solved with existing tools. Don't reinvent the wheel, use what other people created already. Theese are usually free to start, and you can always implement them later if you feel the need for them (after you have some users, of course).

Here is a brief list of tools I've used in the past:

Note: I'm not sponsored by these companies in any ways, I've just used and liked their product and I feel like they can help you out too!

1. Firebase or Supabase - backend as a service
2. Stripe or Lemon squeezy - payment providers / membership management
3. Brevo or Mailchimp - for email campaings
4. Revenue Cat - for subscription management across platforms

5. Choose the right developer

We discussed many aspects of decision making when you are developing your own product but what if you are not an engineer? Easy! Choose a developer who is specialized in MVP development and already knows everything I've just mentioned or even more.

It's easy to fall for an agency that promises a lot but delivers a broken product or tries to sell you services that you don't need at this stage. To save yourself from headache, talk to multiple developers before deciding and keep in mind what your end goal is.