There is always something you feel you can't go live without… You develop that feature, and then you think "Well this would be really beneficial to my product too"… So how do you know when to go live? Well I am going to share with you a scenario I encountered recently when trying to determine a launch date for our product and what the MVP would look like.
Firstly, I'll describe our product fairly briefly… It is a product that connects job seekers with potential employers. When thinking about how to market our product we had to start thinking about what would attract job seekers and what would attract employers. We decided it was rather cyclical, which employers would bother to come to use our product if we didn't have an existing user base of talent? Similarly, if there are no employers to connect with why would any talent use our application?
However, we also had a tool within the product that job seekers would use… This tool was not intended to be used independently of the rest of the product. However, with some tweaks it could become a standalone application that we could use to attract talent and form a user base which we could then roll out further features and updates to.
So we refocused… We channeled our energy into perfecting that small portion of our app. That way we could start marketing and growing a user base whilst we still developed the main product in the background. We went from a feature that was barely part of our MVP to a feature that was our MVP. We did this all by thinking about how we could grow our user base and which users would be easier to attract.
When you are defining your MVP think about what it will take to get people using your product. You can then roll out additional features down the line, but you already have the recognition so it gets a bit easier. Your marketing team can start working their magic sooner, and you will learn a bit more about what the users want and what they don't want. This means it can be easier to pivot early, which can save a lot of valuable development time.
