So you have figured out your exciting Big Idea and are ready to start building it. The most common mistake founders make after this stage is to go in a shell and work on building the perfect product for their users. The problem with this approach is that most often your Big Idea is only a good starting point (or so you would hope) from which you begin your journey. As you build out your product and test it with users, the feedback from them will guide you to improve the product & reach the elusive product market fit. Given this, your job as a founder at this stage, is to figure out a way to quickly build a product that delivers the core value to the users and talk to them.

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Prerequisites for Stage 2:

Discovered a good idea from Value chain mapping and stress tested against GIC and ORC checked. Clickable MVP demo tested with 5 potential customers

Stress test your idea against GIC and ORC for non-profit organisations and for profit organisations.

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2.1 Goal

The goal in this stage is to translate your idea into a tangible minimum viable product (MVP), test it with a  few early pilot users and iterate based on their feedback.

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2.2 Timeline

1-1.5 months, 4 people (includes 2 interns)

 

2.3 MVP Development Process:​

• Decide the MVP: minimum set of features which will deliver enough value to customers to try the product. The following factors go into designing MVP

  •  Customer problem understanding

  • Ease of building a feature: Best is to prioritize easy-to-build features which returns big value to customers

  • Technical feasibility of features/value: Specially with AI-based features, it is not always known upfront, what kind of accuracy/performance you will get.

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• Finding users/customers/design partners: It is useful to have users who can give you feedback as you build the product and are ready to adopt the product once it is built. Finding such users is useful, however many-a-times, users take you seriously only when they have a built-up product to see. The founders must test their market and see, at what stage of product, they may get users. Product development and finding users should be a parallel process, with 75% time to the former at this stage.

• Develop a product roadmap Go through Product Development Checklist 

• Develop a technical development plan. Refer to tech plan checklist. The rule to build MVP is to use the tools which reach the development quickest (under reasonable costs) without worry of scalability and long-term costs.

• Decide resource requirement and based on capital, hire employees/interns.

• Go into execution and do weekly releases on product. Have friends and supporters as your testers.

• If some features come to be technically infeasible or customer feedback is poor, then reiterate on MVP feature list.​
   

MVP: MVP is the first version of your product with just enough features to test with a few pilot/early customers, take feedback and iterate. It is important to highlight that this first version should be able to deliver core value to the user. The below example is an imperfect metaphor but still illustrates the point of what is not an MVP.