Building a Solution
Once you are done testing your product idea and figuring out the market need, you need to build a solution in earnest. It is important to develop a solution that can be put to test in the real world. The following section will focus on best way to build solutions/product quickly and get the first few customers.
Often there is more than one way to solve any problem. As entrepreneurs, our job is to find the way that the market will be willing to accept. Once you have validated the problem, it is important to list out all the possible ways in which the problem can be solved and create small experiments to see if the market is willing to accept the same as a viable solution to the problem that they are facing.
In some of the cases, it is easy to prototype a solution using existing tools before you start creating a solution of your own. In other cases, such as enterprise solutions or hardware solutions, it may not be possible to test it out in a hacky way.
In many of the consumer facing cases, it is easy and quick to prototype and test the same with the market. While in the latter case, it would be important to start speaking to important stakeholders about the solution(s) and getting their opinion on the same.
Either way, building the lowest common denominator is important, the features without which you have nothing to offer at all. Build the use case and get started.
When you take a look at the PayTm app today it is capable of a lot of things. You can pay almost any bill that you can think of, transfer and transact money, even shop online. But when they started, they were merely a recharge app for mobile. Just that ONE thing.
Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the bare minimum that you need to offer in order to be able to actually solve the problem faced by the customer. As is always the case, there will be nuances and there will be many things that can be added. The objective of the MVP is to ensure that you get to market quickly and start generating revenue.
The best MVP is the one that gets you into business right away. The objective of an MVP is to test the market and see if it will respond.
If you have a business that is built on data and data monetisation, the MVP should be able to generate the required data for you to feel comfortable about the success of it.
In most cases, people tend to test their MVP without charging people for using it and this does not accurately represent how the market would react when you do charge. The ultimate success of any product is in making the transaction take place.