Why is a minimum viable product important?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 20% of startups fail during the first year of their existence. The reasons include legal issues, poor business model, sharp competition, lack of money and passion among team members, poorly analyzed market, etc. It's possible to predict and prevent some of these problems with the help of a minimum-viable product.
An MVP contains the basic product features essential to provide consumers with the necessary solutions. Very often, this term is confused with a prototype. While an MVP is a released product, a prototype is just its model.
It is also super close to Agile Software Development approach, which basically means delivering in small iterations and constantly getting feedback. As much as possible.
The important thing here is that you don't need to make the user super happy in the beginning, you need to find a pain or problem you solve and improve the solution step by step.
But the solution should be working, so it should have no bugs, at the same time it should not include all the features you can imagine to help users.
Don't rush on a quick release, release when a small group of test-users are happy enough when they are ready to make a twit regarding your product to share with friends and sell it for you.
Coming to Marketplace MVP
Unfortunately, the current level of competition is high, you can not build super simple platform today to win the market. You need to come up with a solid solution.
But you have to build an MVP
That means you need to be a bit more creative and make your hands a bit more dirty.
You need to find customers for your future marketplace without solutions. So do interviews with potential customers and providers, and figure out what is important for them. Build a few pages on landing-page builders like Squarespace or Wix. Do groups on Facebook to connect people, and get into the actual routines both parties do every day to get service executed
As soon as you do this you get enough network and understand what you need from the marketplace solution and what MVP is.
How to build Service Marketplace today?
There are many options and it all comes down to the budget you have.
I would assume it's not that big, so you need a cheap solution, which means it's super hard to outsource this, the average salary of the full-stack developer is 5k$, and you would have to hire as well a QA, designer and Project manager. So the budget will be 15k$+ in just one month.
I also would assume that most of the people are not developers, meaning the platform should be built on top of something which is simple to set up without coding knowledge
Then we don't have that many options on the market today, here is the good summary of them
It's implemented and ready for launch, what's next?
Before launching your MVP to users, it is vital to identify your learning objectives. Keep in mind that MVP launch is an experiment to validate assumptions, and Eric Ries (the author of The Lean Startup) advises against aimless launches. Answer the following questions before launching:
- What specific data will you collect in the experiment?
- Which assumptions do you want to verify in this experiment?
- What influences the success/failure of this experiment?
To answer these questions, determine the actionable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of your marketplace business. These metrics will help you make informed decisions in response to the results of the experiment.
Summary
An MVP is the smallest solution to solve the user's problem better than the alternatives. It should be delightful, not just minimal.
MVP for marketplaces should solve the issues on both sides.
While execution is important it is also important to measure the results right after the launch and continue on small iterations of improvements to find your customers and win the market.
