Many people starting their online business believe that they should release only the finished product. This may take a lot of time, while the situation in the market can change. It is the main reason to begin with MVP.
Minimum viable product (MVP) is a demo of your application’s core functionality that will let you get the relevant evaluation from real users and attract the attention from investors. In such a way you will be able to discover the viability of planned features.
In fact, your idea is a simple hypothesis that should be tested and checked carefully. To do it, you need to:
Formulate the hypothesis as clearly as possible
Make a list of criteria to evaluate the result
Create an MVP to support your hypothesis
Gather and analyze the user feedback from early adopters
Make conclusions and formulate the next hypothesis, if needed
Test the next hypothesis, if needed
The launch of any business is fraught with risks, especially if it is a lean startup. At the very beginning, you need to establish sharp-cut criteria of success and failure and consistently move to the triumph. It may seem that everything is clear but time is against developers. Things change rapidly: technologies, tools, market, and project requirements. Creation of the minimum viable product allows receiving results and correcting them, taking the changing conditions into account.
The most important requirement for MVP is that the basic idea itself must carry a value. If the project is not completed and useless to the client, no one will be interested in a complex architecture, excellent productivity, or extensive functions. You need to implement the most useful features inexpensively and quickly.
At the start of any project, it is important to understand the limitations - time, cost, and quality - the classic service triangle. These indicators depend on each other, thus, changing one of them, you need to adjust the others.