MVP (minimum viable product) testing helps you in terms of gauging the market’s potential profits and interest. The main idea behind MVP is to efficiently engage your niche (or target audience) and then try to capture quick and valuable feedback from them. You can then utilize this feedback to improve your product and produce one that fits your audience perfectly. In doing so, you get to boost your sales immensely. However, developing a minimum viable product is not always sufficient. In some cases, you have to test out your MVP, then validate it against some key premises. Doing so helps you confirm that your product satisfies your user quality standard and requirements. However, many testing approaches exist, which poses the question of the best MVP testing strategies to use?

MVP Testing Strategies

• Customer Interviews

Carrying out interviews with customers can provide you with pretty helpful information. You can then utilize this information to learn what your customers think about your product. Finding this kind of information using other means is pretty much impossible. Hence customer interviews are one of the best approaches to utilize.

By interviewing your target customers, you can learn first-hand the issues they face. You can use this info to gauge your product’s usefulness to your niche. On top of that, you can utilize this chance to showcase your product’s value to your customers.

Interviewing customers is also crucial as it provides the most honest feedback when you compare it to other approaches. Customers online can sugar-coat, lie, or even offer fake reviews. However, when you interview them face-to-face, the chances are that you will get honest feedback.

For you to get optimal results out of a customer interview approach, you need to:

• Create a database containing potential online users
• Offer these users a chance to try out your MVP
• Draft a list containing potential issues

Once you are done, ask the users to rank the issues, then ask them if your minimum viable product solves these issues. Record the feedback as this will help you improve your product.

However, the following points will help you if you keep in mind:

• State all your assumed problems – doing so will help you get honest and transparent feedback on each of them
• Gradually grow your interviews – do not start your discussion on a high note. Instead, start on a light note using simple questions, then advance on gradually to the more descriptive questions.
• Do not sound promotional – whatever, you do not speak about your MVP in a promotional manner. Take a value route instead.

To cover a more extensive scope at once, you can opt to utilize a simple survey to pass on interview questions. Survey questions are pretty similar to interview questions. However, in this case, your customers get to answer the questions under no supervision. As you’d guess, this method is not as efficient as carrying out an actual interview, but it is effective.

• Explainer Video

If a simple image can convey more than a thousand meanings, a video can convey more than a million. With that in mind, explainer videos are excellent ways to test and showcase your minimum viable product to your customers.

Using this approach, you can:

• Easily showcase what your MVP can do to your potential customers
• Bring forth the reasons why your potential customers need your product

At the end of the explainer video, your potential customers can choose to either sign up, which is excellent or not-sign up, which is not great. You can then gauge your MVP using the sign-ups as they portray the individual who likes your product.

While making explainer videos, ensure that they bring out the obvious facts. Please explain in detail how each component in your product works and how they all combine seamlessly to work together.

• MVP Experimental Testing

Sometimes carrying out an experiment is the best way to test your MVP. That is because experiments attract the attention of your potential audience. They also provide a way to effectively gauge your idea at the “idea” phase before putting much effort into your project. Importantly, this MVP approach helps you save a more budget. That is because once your experiment breeds unsatisfactory results, you can simply bail on the entire project.

• Manual-first Approach

The manual-first approach is another MVP testing approach that is pretty efficient. In this approach, you put on a complete service/product “impression.” That means that once a customer orders a service/product, we manually deliver it. So the customers get the service/product that they ordered, and they believe that they are experiencing the complete product. However, the actual job is happening manually in the background.

The main advantage of using manual-first is that you can test out your minimum value product on multiple levels using minimum investment.

• Concierge MVPs Approach

The manual-first and concierge approaches work in an “almost” similar manner. The one difference that sets these two approaches apart is that in concierge, the service/product you offer is genuine.

Since you’ll be offering a genuine service/product in this approach, you get a chance to customize the user experience.

You can utilize the concierge approach efficiently:

• Validate various assumptions and
• View whether customers are going to buy your service/product

• Piecemeal

The piecemeal approach blends in concierge and manual-first. In other words, this approach can help you build your product demo using existing tools. Doing so enables you to save a lot of money and time, which would have gone into making the demo from scratch.

• The Digital prototyping approach

Digital prototyping is all about building wireframes, prototypes, and mock-up representations of the actual product. The prototype demonstrates how the real product will eventually function.

You can present the prototypes to your target audience and then ask them to provide feedback. Using this feedback, you can assess your product’s viability and then decide on whether or not to produce the product.

Digital prototype ranges from low-fidelity drawings and non-complex screenshot previews to complex demo applications.

You can utilize tools such as MavelApp, InvisionApp, and Figma to create practical prototypes.

• Paper Prototyping Approach

You can consider paper prototyping as a simpler, less complex digital prototyping alternative. That is because paper prototypes are pretty easy to create and execute. You do not require any high-end software or fancy tools to build a paper prototype. All that you need to carry out this endeavor is a paper representation of your minimum value product, and that’s it. What’s even fascinating is that you can even utilize a rough drawing of your product which you can easily make using a pencil and paper.

Paper prototypes assist in two significant ways:

• They significantly reduce your MVP testing cost. Paper prototyping takes this cost to the absolute minimum
• They encourage collaboration and also lets various designers explore different ideas at minimal cost

Check: MVP development cost

• Single-feature

Single-feature is an approach that lets you focus on one feature at a time. In doing so, you get to narrow down your customer base, which reduces your development time.

What’s more, this approach also lets your customers focus much better on the product’s primary purpose. These features make the single feature pretty effective.

Also read: How to Prioritize MVP Features

Conclusion

MVP testing is crucial as it helps you gauge how well your product will do in the current market. It enables you to tune your product to fit your niche, and it also helps you capture more customers. Every approach that we have gone through in this article works efficiently. Find one that suits your product and watch your profits sky-rocket

Any queries? connect with MVP development company!