Goodbye MVP, hello MLP

To start, what is an MVP?

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MVP stands for a Minimum Viable Product - a product with enough features to attract your first customers and validate your app idea without you putting all your budget into its development. 

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What should an MVP include?

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Too often, businesses use time and cost to determine what features they include in their MVP. This may seem like a reasonable approach to determining your product's feature roadmap—you can't build everything for the first version, and time and money are often the two most significant constraints on development. 

The problem with this approach is the features you end up including in your MVP, more often than not, do not solve the core issues you set out to build a solution for or do not adequately meet your target users' needs - both can ultimately lead to the failure of your product.

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Read: 5 mistakes founders make when defining their MVP (minimum viable product)

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There is a better way. 

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In short, instead of using time and money as the determining factor in your product roadmap, engage with your target audience to better understand whether you've correctly understood the problem you are solving for them. This will ensure you can better prioritise your feature list to meet your users' needs. 

We call this approach's end result a minimum loveable product—or MLP for short. By engaging with your users ahead of starting development, you're better able to ensure that what you produce is something they both want and need. This significantly increases the chances that your app will succeed and can save you from investing your precious time and money into a feature set that doesn't add value to your users.

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Want To Build Your MLP?

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If you're interested in this approach to product development and want to build your minimum loveable product, then look no further. 

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