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As many of our readers know, CodeBright’s team is an advocate and a practitioner of the lean startup methodology and MVPs (Minimally Viable Products). We helped validate business ideas of many of our clients, most of which have hit some real success. However, often we see that business owners think that making a landing page to validate business ideas will necessarily lead them to success. This is a big misunderstanding of the main point behind the MVP and validation.
How some people imagine the MVP:
- Come up with an awesome idea.
- Create a good-looking MVP landing page. Make sure all the photos are optimized and all the pixels are in place.
- Get a million signups before building the product/service.
- Build the product.
- Make a billion dollars.
What MVPs should be like:
The thing is, MVPs are meant ONLY to validate business ideas. The process outlined above is a misconception about MVPs.
The steps above lead to a coming soon page to get as many emails as possible. However, this provides no validation. You can email those people but are unlikely to get any response. When we create landing pages, our main goal is to validate business ideas. It’s best to use the landing page as an initial validation of whether users would go through a long sign up process for the product. As soon as visitors go through the signup, you should send them a personal email to start a back and forth conversation about the problem that you are trying to solve.
Validate business ideas and learn
It’s also great to call people who leave their contacts to get more insights and better validate business ideas that you have. It’s better to have a few quality signups of people who would give you insightful knowledge about the problem than hundreds of people that would only give you their email address. Remember, a landing page as an MVP must serve to validate your business ideas – it’s about the knowledge you can get.
In addition, we must say that the harder the signup process – the better. If people take a lot of time to sign up for a potential solution for their problem, then the problem actually exists. This serves as a great way to validate your business ideas and as a point at which you can start the development process. At this point, follow up with all contacts and try to learn even more about the problems of the people. As a result, not only will you validate business ideas, but you will have all the necessary information to build a great product.
If you approach your landing page as a tool to validate business ideas through learning (through the actions users take, and conversations you have), it can be very powerful. Contact us today to get started with your MVP or the development process.
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