About

Kevin Sahin

Co-Founder at PricingBot, book Author, Indie maker

Contact: [email protected]

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sahinkevin

Medium: https://medium.com/@sahin.kevin

Linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-sahin-89700586/

Q.1 How do you prioritize features for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?

There are many ways to do it. One “easy” way is to answer these questions: What is the biggest problem that I’m trying to solve? What is the easiest solution to this problem?

As soon as your core feature is implemented, do a soft launch with a limited set of users, ask for feedback, implement the most requested features, test, learn, iterate!

The most important thing to keep in mind is not to implement features “because it’s cool”.

Q.2 How did you build your minimum viable product? What steps did you follow?

We built the initial version for PricingBot in two months. It was really basic, it did one thing, and it did it well. We then soft launched it in Alpha with the users that registered on our landing page.

After several weeks of iteration and calls with our initial users, we released the beta on ProductHunt.

It was great because it brought us 2000+ visits on the websites, several hundred sign-ups, and the users had lots of different use cases/insights.

Instead of asking our users if they would be willing to pay for our product, we just froze accounts and added a paywall. Once the first few users started to pay, we knew our product was viable.

I think there is a big difference between someone telling you he’s willing to pay and someone who actually enters his credit card on your website.

Q.3 What are the best practices for a Minimum Viable Product?

Use the tools you know best. Don’t use a tool because it’s cool or because you want to test technology. Sometimes you don’t even have to create a product to reach your goal.

A simple landing page, a form, a survey is often enough. Once you have validated an interest you can move forward.

Q.4 After developing and launching an MVP, how can you define whether your MVP was successful or not?

There are different answers to this question because there can be several goals for an MVP. For us, we wanted to 1) Validate that there is a market for E-commerce price monitoring and 2) Get some insights

During our MVP, we learned that users hated configuring their account by themselves, so we created a new onboarding process to help them. We immediately saw our metrics (activation, MAU…) increase. So this was the first success.

So whatever your core metrics are, they should go up during your MVP iterations.

Then the moment we got our first paying customers was another winner!

Q.5 Is building MVP still useful in 2019 and coming years?

Of course, it is. I feel like there are more and more “early adopters” online, which is your target when you launch an MVP. It’s never been easier to reach those early adopters, thanks to all the online communities, Facebook groups, Slack, online ads… Users also love to play a role in product building, it’s a trend you can see in lots of industries.