Rarely is a company so in tune with its niche that it can float along with minimal effort. 

Sometimes, entrepreneurs focus so much on the challenge of honing the business idea and building the MVP that they overlook certain essential aspects of launching a new product. For example, they fail to include the costs of taking the product to market and maintaining it in their plan. 

You also need to allow for things not going according to plan and the fact that you may need to wait for satisfactory ROI. Remember that you’ll need an initial kick-off budget before receiving a return.

You need to condense down what your user needs and initial needs. 

Your list of features should have several categories: must-haves, should-haves, could-haves, and won’t-haves, where must-haves tie closely to your value proposition and won’t-haves are on the other side. Not being able to select features you won’t include in your project is a warning sign. It suggests you don’t have a good idea or are unclear about the core value proposition. 

Focus on the problem and the users, never the solution.

Avoid feature death by asking users for features they think will solve their problem. Ask them what problems they face and why they face those problems in particular.

The insights you gain make valuable input that you’ll rely on throughout the whole product design and development process – at the MVP building stage and beyond. Developing a simplistic product with a limited number of functionalities means the clever allocation of the budget in the short and long term.

When deciding on an MVP, you need to be sceptical of your convictions. 

By assuming that you know what things are, you risk failing to test assumptions critical to the entire project. Instead, you spend weeks verifying hypotheses based on facts that may not be true for anyone in your target demographic!

How do you know when you have a product-market fit? 

Creating an MVP is an iterative process. As you progress, you prototype, test, and act on user feedback. By committing to garnering user insights and working on them, you put the user in the centre of the process. 

What tends to happen when you have a product-market fit is that people start using your product so much that you transition from doing anything other than just keeping it online.