Why lean startup methodology is best for MVP development?

Startups are all about experimenting with your ideas in the real world and creating an impact through innovation and efficiency. Even though experimentation and taking risks is a part of starting a new venture, startups would benefit by knowing that their customers already exist before even building the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This would minimize their risks and assure the future of their business. This is why lean startup methodology is best for MVP development.

A lean startup methodology is an approach developed by Eric Ries, and author of The Lean Startup, that helps companies improve their decision making in order to reach to a broader market. It aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable. This approach is also known as build-measure-learn, which increases the value to customers through lesser experimentation.

Imagine you want to start a new company or introduce a new product. Would you rather be uncertain about your customers or 100% sure that you are developing products that have already established customers as soon as the product is launched? Of course, you would want to be sure of your customers! This is what startup methodology does. It helps your startup launch Minimum Viable Product that customer actually wants. Using lean startup methodology, you can prevent chaos to your MVP by creating a new product under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Lean isn’t about failing fast and cheap but it is about putting an efficient methodology around the development of a product.

Every startup attempts to answer a significant question while developing an MVP. The question is not “Can we build this MVP?”. Instead, the question is ” Should we build this MVP?” and “Can we build MVP sustainably with minimum wastage?”. Lean startups have solved these questions once for all. By having already established customers for your MVP, lean startup methodology will offer detailed specifications to businesses for what needs to be built according to the needs of the customers. That will save time and effort to make MVP for its already existing customers. To quote in Eric Ries’s words: “By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers”. Through minimal interactions, you can choose the best and shortest way to success.

MVP is a partially functional product with a minimal set of features that has room for continuous improvement and development. The initial version that you’re offering needs to be analyzed and improvised. This involves collecting real-time feedback from your consumers. Lean startup methodology provides authentic feedback from the existing customers to plan the MVP’s future: features, marketability, and business goods. According to a lean startup expert Henrik Kniberg, if you need a way to get around, you don’t build them a car first. Start with a skateboard (Minimum Viable Product) get their feedback and improvise to give value to the customer.

Analyzing your progress using feedback from genuine customers will help you make sure that you’re headed in the right direction. The lean startup method helps you do so in real-time and provides you with an opportunity to keep up with the current trends.