How to Optimize the Launch of your Product with the ‘Minimum Viable Product’

48% of the businesses created in Spain between 2006 and 2011 have failed during that time, according to facts from the National Institute of Statistics. This means that almost half of those entrepreneurs saw their idea die in five years or less. Increasingly, efforts to reverse these figures have allowed entrepreneurs to keep on following their dreams. Opinno, with its double profile as start-up and as a specialist company in prototyping and the validation of ideas, wants to be part of this movement and therefore has been a speaker at Startup Pirates.

The meeting held throughout this week in Zaragoza (Spain) claims that its attendees "operate in the world of start-ups and entrepreneurship" and receive "the tools to develop a business idea from scratch." One such tool is the Minimun Viable Product (MVP), which was the concept selected by the expert Opinno Beatriz Ferreira to talk about during her session.

A report from the School of Industrial Organization shows that the main cause of business failure is the lack of “a serious study about the viability of the product” in 87,5% of cases. This data shows the importance of pre-launch analysis. The MVP was born precisely to facilitate this analysis because, as its name suggests, it is about designing a minimum version of the product for compiling as much information about it with the least effort.

Thanks to this tool, Ferreira explains that the MVP generates a "continuous feedback on the acceptance that the product will have on customers and in the market before launching it." The methodology for creating a suitable MVP is to incorporate the fewest possible features into the product, but enough to collect the necessary data. The final idea is to not build things that customers don't want.

To illustrate the usefulness of this tool, Opinno's expert uses cases such as Buffer and Dropbox. The first, which is a platform for managing social networks, accompanied the launch of its website with a message to warn surfers that the page was not available at that time. Buffer used this strategy to account for the clicks made on the page and thus calculate the acceptance of their product.

The cloud storage company "Dropbox, however, decided to develop a video presentation of the product to ask potential customers if they would pay for the solution offered to them," Ferreira said. This campaign on the platform’s operation obtained more than 75,000 beta users in just one night.

The ultimate goal is that every functionality of the product has been validated by potential consumers, further expanding the information of their needs over time. It is a cycle that never ends and in which each error will originate a new improvement.

The very motto of Startup Pirates reads: "The difficulties teach us that there are great opportunities." This is shared by Opinno, who fights so that a fear of failure is never an obstacle on the road to entrepreneurship. Therefore, these concepts are not only applicable in day-to-day business, but could help the rest of the community to overcome their challenges through collaboration with initiatives like this one.