Venture capital (VC) firms want the startups they fund to develop innovative, full-scale products and speed them to market so they can get a return on their investment. To make startups profitable, VCs must find ways to help them transition from minimum viable products (MVPs) to minimum acceptable products (MAP) that can be used by customers at scale. Making a successful transition from MVP to MAP involves many considerations.
Here’s a checklist of 10 factors that your VC or startup can use to determine whether you are on the right path to delivering an exceptional product that can be used at scale to reach a better valuation.
1) Is the product limited to a single industry or use case?
Focusing on a single use case helps you understand the needs of an industry so you can scale functionality over time and orient the product toward addressing customer pain points.
2) Does the product solve for immediate pain points?
Instead of developing functionalities that meet potential, future needs, design features that speak to customers’ immediate and urgent problems.
3) Have you developed the appropriate pricing strategy?
The value of the product will change as it transitions from an MVP to a full-scale solution. A pricing strategy should be based on the benefits users get from the product’s functionalities and features.
4) Have you designed a marketing strategy?
Transitioning to an MAP means understanding your product’s audience so you can segment that market and target the right customers.
5) Are you testing the product?
As you introduce the product to a wider market, you need to use customer feedback to fine-tune features and functionalities. Conducting load testing will determine if the solution is scaling to accommodate more users.
6) Is your product meeting expectations?
If user feedback is telling you the product is meeting or exceeding expectations, you may be able to scale the product without making many changes. If not, customer feedback allows you to adjust the product’s functionality.
7) Does your product support a distributed or monolithic application architecture?
A monolithic application architecture is great for building and testing, but a distributed architecture makes it easier to fix bugs, adapt the product, and scale to meet performance needs.
8) Is your current product set up to support enough users and ready to go global?
As you take on more users with a full-scale product, you may need to redesign it or identify bottlenecks so you can make changes on the backend to avoid latency. Eventually, the MVP must be capable of meeting the needs of a global audience and supporting an unexpected increase of users and transactions.
9) Have you set standards for the product based on the initial use cases?
Basing product standards on use cases in a few key industries helps you pace the scaling process so you don’t overlook root problems that might cause issues later.
10) Do you have a product development roadmap?
Your developers and project managers should have a clear idea of how to adapt and scale the product based on the requirements defined by initial use cases.
Scaling and Adding Value to Your Product
Developing a profitable full-scale product is key to the longevity of a startup. Transitioning to an MAP also allows a VC to make money on its funding of that startup. Developing a successful MAP will help a startup get a better valuation in its next round of funding.
IO Connect Services can help your VC and its startups make a successful transition from MVP to MAP through our consultancy services. As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, IO Connect delivers cutting-edge cloud technology, including the AWS cloud expertise and vetted competencies needed to create valuable and scalable products.
Find out more about how IO Connect partners with AWS to deliver cloud solutions to our customers. Read our article “Migrating E-Commerce Sites to SaaS Using A/B Testing and AWS Edge Services.”
