Common Mistakes in Creating MVPs for Startups

Many global companies started with market research. Analyzing, collecting materials about competitors, studying cases, writing a business plan, developing and launching MVPs are the basis for the success of many global companies.

After testing, it is important to assess the potential of the project - its positive and negative sides, and progress in product development. They also calculate the cost of launching the final version and optimize costs. Read more about what this type of service includes: https://smarttek.solutions/services/mvp-development/

Newcomers often make mistakes by getting too involved in the creation process. Here are common mistakes in building an MVP:

1. Overwhelming functionality will scare users away. A person will not want to understand something new and will watch tutorials on YouTube. He's not interested in your site unless he sees it as useful to him.

2. An MVP that doesn't solve the user's problem. For example, a person needs a financial assistant with loan rate calculations and reminders, but your service only helps keep track of income and expenses. The customer's problem is not solved → the customer leaves.

3. The product solves a small problem or part of a problem. There's no point in spending money on a product that doesn't improve the customer's life.

4. Incorrect definition of target audience. The phrase "our product is for a broad audience" is a misconception. The same financial accounting needs those who keep track of the money. Therefore, define the audience accurately to avoid showing the product to a "foreign" audience.

5. A product for yourself and not for the customer will not help you make money. Your goal is to be useful to a person, then you can get customers and feedback.

6. Wrong choice of technology stack. A company doesn't do a preliminary analysis of the relevance of the technology stack to the project tasks and chooses a stack just because of its popularity. This can waste unnecessary time and money.

7. Unorganized product delivery and update processes. The process of developing and refining a product is continuous. Each new version is released with a constant periodicity, for example, once a year.

8. Lack of feedback events. Customers whose opinions are ignored go to competitors.

9. The architecture does not fit the needs of the project. A competent technical manager will be able to choose the right architecture.

10. Perfectionism, the desire for perfection. It is impossible to make a perfect platform or program: improvements are always needed. If you fixate on small improvements, the budget will be wasted.

11. Lack of feedback. Joint work with the client will help to identify successful and unsuccessful moments in relation to the product being prepared.

12. Lack of a product ideologist. There are too many people involved in the key decision making process who are not united by a single strategy, which hinders the work.

13. Lack of analysis and analysis. When creating a minimum viable product, you need to identify key metrics that will show how successful the product is. Examples of such metrics include:

14. Inexperienced team. The team starts to implement the project, but due to lack of experience and coordination, they make mistakes and cannot fix them quickly.

MVP is not necessarily a product with the minimum number of elements. What matters is that it should have key features that are sufficient to realize the idea and retain early adopters. Exactly how many, one or ten, is secondary, the main thing is to create a base.