How to Validate Your Startup's MVP

Photo: Sum2000/Pixabay

Saying that members of startup culture walk to the beat of their own drum would be an understatement. Ask anyone who has ever spent a considerable amount of time in Silicon Valley how the vibes were, and they’d tell you it’s incomparable to any other place on earth. 

Those who are part of startup culture have a distinctive attitude, style of dress, and if you didn’t know any better—you’d swear they had their own dialect. And if startup culture truly does have its own dialect, the term minimum viable product (MVP) would be part of its vernacular. 

Minimum viable products are defined as being the version of a product that enables a full turn of the build-measure-learn loop with minimum amount of effort and least amount of development time. 

Simply put, a minimum viable product is the simplest version of a product with just enough core features to attract early adopters. 

There’s a thin line between an MVP—and a product that’s not quite ready to be presented to the public yet. And the key to your startup’s success will hinge on your ability to recognize that line.

Have a hypothesis 

Delving even further into hypotheticals, if the startup community were to somehow ever have its own country, part of that country’s founding documents would definitely consist of quotations from author Eric Ries’ bestselling book, The Lean Startup. 

Published in 2011, The Lean Startup is regarded by millions of founders around the world as the unofficial blueprint for methodically developing both successful products and businesses. 

In the book, Ries highlights the importance of startups having a value hypothesis. Which he defines as the exact value that your products or services provide to customers at the moment. 

A value hypothesis is an informed and testable proposition that examines and helps articulate internally how the most important people to your startup (its target customers) perceive the value and functionality of your product and whether or not it’ll fulfill their need, solve a problem, or be deemed useful enough for them to purchase. 

Steps to devise and corroborate a value hypothesis

If you and team strongly believe you’ve built a product that albeit may not be ideally perfect at the moment, yet could still provide enough value to consumers they’d find it worthwhile to pay for—these are the steps to validate your hypothesis:

• Understand your target audience: In order to know what is missing in a customer's life and provide value, it is imperative that you’re aware of their actual lifestyle. 

  
  

• State the problem and the solution: What particular problem is your product set to solve for its customers? Why would your target customers spend their hard earned money on the product? State those answers clearly so that your entire team completely understands them. 

  
  

• Prove your premise: Collect customer feedback by allowing a select group of your ideal customers temporary access to the product. Then, conduct in-depth interviews, tests, and comprehensive surveys to gather the necessary data that either corroborates or contradicts your theory. 

Closing thoughts

The very essence of any founder worth their salt is to be irrationally confident at all times. It’s a founder’s superpower. But for as much of a superpower as irrational confidence may be, it could also be detrimental to startup founders that believe their products are more valuable to the customer than they actually are at the moment. 

A value hypothesis helps validate or disprove theories around the perceived value of a product from a brand's target customers’ point of view. Which is invaluable information that could either validate your startup’s MVP—or provide insight on whether or not to make particular improvements—or pivot altogether before presenting it to the public. 

If you now feel more ready than ever to launch your startup’s MVP and need help attracting its early adopters, schedule a complimentary client consultation with us today so that your startup could become the next Decryption client to Connect via Culture!