How to make your MVP the talk of the town

So you are launching your product or planning a launch but are you sure your product is going to make the waves? You don’t want to be spending your time, energy, $$ and efforts on a product, in vain. Maybe you are still working in a 9-5 job and are testing the waters in the startup community? Then it becomes, even more relevant to get your ideas validated by a targeted audience before you take the plunge, lock, stock and barrel!

Let’s get discussing how you can be sure that your MVP is sustainable and creates the necessary ripples in the market.

• Get feedback early in the process. Feedback from friends and family, who can be brutally honest with you. Doing so will also make you think deeply and clearly about your value proposition. Use your family and circle of friends to spread the word about your product.

          “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” – Albert Einstein

• Meetup.com – Gather a bunch of like minded people and brain storm your ideas. You will find out if someone has already treaded the path you are planning, learnings and consequences. You just might stumble upon your business partner or a seed investor.
• Social Media Marketing – Get going on the social media bandwagon, post information and images relevant to your product and get some feedback. Target your tribe through social media, utilise influencer marketing to check how your MVP is percieved. Follow other similar product brands and do some competitive analysis.
• Explainer video – Shoot an excellent graphical and easy to understand video while at the same time highlighting the features that define your MVP. Get this video out there on social media and analyze the popularity.
• Crowdsource – your branding and advertising efforts. Make your targeted customers be a part of the product development journey. They will not only feel connected to your would be product but also contribute to the making by with useful feedback. If they like it they’ll love to be brand ambassadors.
• Demand Vs Supply – Last but not the least check the demand of the product you are launching. If there already exist a dozen such products then it probably will be an upphill task fighting the competition. Thinking out of the box and finding an area where there is a demand supply gap is the wisest thing to do unlesss your product is so radical that it changes the way people have been experiencing other similar products.

Advertisement

The Start-up Lifecycle

The start-up industry may appear very glamorous from the surface, but it entails endless meticulous planning and back breaking hard work, it’s anything but a cake-walk. Most success stories that come into limelight have already gone through testing times and been bitten by failure at some stage or the other and have survived the winds of change.

The typical stages in a start-up are more or less as below:

• Ideate – An idea that has been incubating for a while gets more concrete and is at a stage where it can be implemented. It has to be beyond the pen and paper stage, on the path to a more concrete objective.
• Feasibility study – validate your idea, think through all the possibilities, market demands, fall back plan and get an initial feedback from friends and family about the viability of the idea.
• Conceptualize the idea into a business case, planning the inception, the initial capital required, the source of fund, the launch of beta version of the product and the marketing of the same to acquire a customer base.
• While you’re at it, you’ll need to create an online presence in this age of digitalization, you will have to be visible. Brand building and audience buying begins even before the actual launch of the product. Send out teasers in the social media, engage your potential customers and get them interested in your product.
• To allure the venture capital funding, your product has to be foolproof in this age of competition. The VC firms have to see a potential market for the product to be convinced to invest in it. Be prepared to be grilled.
• Midway, if gets bumpy and you realize start-up life is just not your cuppa, you should return to your plan B, in case you give up. But if you have a heart made of steel, there’s no stopping you….
• Then slog even harder. Learn from mistakes. Curate and analyze:

1. consumer behavior both offline and online
2. abandoned baskets
3. competitive analysis
4. social media analysis
5. shopping history

Success is hard work and in order to acquire new customers and retain the existing, there’s no short cut but to get the above steps right, if it does not work at once – reiterate. When success does come by, in the form of reaching targeted number of customers or reaching the targeted revenue, all the hard work does pay off. The incredible feeling of having achieved something, which is your own, based on your accomplishments, is almost hedonistic. Handmade success!