MVP development starts with the discovery phase, where you evaluate a business idea and potential project success.

You can do this in several ways:

• Collect feedback from users on similar products.
• Use AI to model demand for your IT solution.
• Analyze the market and study its trends.
• Conduct surveys with your potential audience.
• Test out Proof of Concept (POC) for several ideas at the same time.

But keep in mind. While this preparation is quite helpful, there’s still some guesswork involved. The true test of your MVP business performance comes only after you launch it into the market.

Let’s model a situation where you’ve already entered the market with a newly created product. To assess the project’s success, we’ll determine the strategy and MVP criteria.

You’ll need to integrate analytical tools into your software to collect metrics. They’ll help you understand what is MVP in your business and how its performance aligns with your goals.

Once you have these systems installed and configured, you’re all set for measuring your MVP’s effectiveness.

Determining Factors for Evaluation

Let’s figure out how to measure success of a product through the quantitative and qualitative factors. Here’s how they can be classified.

Audience Quantitative Metrics

This parameter shows how many people are using your digital product. If the user count is on the low side at the beginning, it’s a common thing. Early MVP stages are always more about collecting feedback rather than hitting high user numbers.

Remember: A healthy trend is a steady, gradual increase in user numbers. It’s also ok when growth levels off for a period. Especially after a spike in user numbers after a marketing campaign or feature update. What’s important is the overall upward trend.

But if you notice that your user count isn’t growing. Or worse, if it’s declining, it’s time to reconsider your strategy. Perhaps, users simply don’t understand how to use MVP. Or your application doesn’t contain features that are critical for your audience. To get to know the reason for the lack of growth, consider getting user feedback and running market analysis.

Consumer Loyalty

The loyalty of the audience is measured by how frequently they use your product. For example,  how often they open the app or perform certain actions. Typically, we look at this over a set period—30, 60, or 90 days. The more consumers use your digital solution, the better the indicator.

Moreover, look at how users interact with your product. If they’re using most of its features and spending a good amount of time with it, your audience shows great loyalty.

Subscription renewals, repeat purchases, and referrals will also tell you whether the users enjoy your application.

Monetization Effectiveness

The more revenue you generate from subscriptions, in-app purchases, and advertising, the clearer it becomes that you’re onto something good. However, this also depends on your pricing policy, sales tactics, etc.

Remember to subtract what you spend on development, marketing, or other things to see if you’re actually making a profit.

Compare your earnings and growth to the goals you set for your MVP. This will tell you if your monetization strategy is working or if it’s time for a plan B.

Expanding Customer Base

In other words, this means getting more users for your MVP. The more people install your product and register in the system, the more successful it is. 

However, it’s important to pay attention to timing and other details, too. For instance, you get 1000 registrations within the first month after release. That’s good, isn’t it? But if this number doesn’t go up or even decreases in the following months, it may indicate that people lose interest in what you’re offering. That’s a cue to change your strategy or improve your product.

Gathering Real Feedback

Feedback will help you improve the software to achieve stable audience growth. Typically, you receive fairly objective criticism directly at the app marketplaces (AppStore and Google Play).

Additionally, you can use alternative platforms to get a better vision of where you need to tweak your product to make it even better.

Surveys

Use surveys to check out what your users think about your MVP. You can do it on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) to directly communicate with your audience. 

For more advanced options, you may consider SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or Typeform. These tools will help you create neat and easy-to-answer surveys. If you don’t want to lead your users to external sources, create a pop-up questionnaire right in your app or website.

Personal Communications

First, choose channels for communication with your users. Make sure they’d be comfortable talking to you through the platform. Don’t overlook messengers, email, and media streaming platforms.

Send them messages saying you’re looking for feedback on your project. For deeper insights, you might want to chat one-on-one over video calls or even in person if possible.

Audience Actions Analysis

You can observe user actions in your application using built-in tools. They will enable you to watch how users navigate through your app. Which features do they use the most? How long do they spend on certain pages?

These insights will help you decide what parts of your MVP to enhance, change, or maybe even remove.

Test MVP Iterations

How do you determine success of new MVP features without collecting audience feedback? You can test concepts before integrating additional functionality into your product.

Concept Formation

Consider MVP labs results or experiment findings to add something useful to your application. From the pool of generated ideas, assess each potential feature considering technical complexity, cost, time to market, and how well it aligns with the product’s core value proposition.  

Testing within Beta Users

When you’re thinking about adding new features or updating the product design, roll out the changes to a limited number of users first. Monitor how these updates perform compared to your current version. If everything goes well, deploy the update for all your users. If not, move on to the next step.

Restart Testing

If the last feature didn’t satisfy your users, the first step would be to understand why. Perhaps, the concept was pretty good but the way you brought it to life didn’t work out. Or it may turn out users didn’t need it. From there, you can either improve the new functionality or implement something completely different. Again, get it out to a small group of users to see how your changes affect your audience this time.

Comparing Results

After several cycles of testing and analyzing, you will intuitively know which updates to add to your MVP and which ones to drop or rethink.

Reevaluating Priorities

To keep up with trends and cater to your target audience, you’ve got to be quick to adjust your MVP’s direction. This requires some good business analysis.

Market Analysis

Keep an eye on market changes. What are your competitors doing? Have the needs of your target audience changed? Is there anything new in the industry? This will help you reconsider the MVP concept and timely add updates to attract more users.

Financial Schemes

Review monetization models, change concepts, and implement new mechanics. If necessary, apply a regional pricing system that will regulate the product cost for each region you aim to work with.

Inspiration from Competitors’ Successes

We don’t recommend copying others’ ideas. But there’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from what’s out there. If you come across an effective solution that can help you improve your own MVP, run with it. Just make sure to add your own twist to make it uniquely yours.

Modernization/Scaling

Undoubtedly, starting with an MVP has lots of advantages. Mainly, it works great for gathering feedback from early users. But as you refine your product based on that feedback, scaling becomes the next step. This stage opens the doors to new opportunities for growth and improvement.

Focus on Improvements

Everything we’ve talked about indicates the importance of qualitative and quantitative indicators, customer communication, and analytics in general. This data equips you with insights that will help you further polish your MVP. These enhancements can spark audience’s interest, drive new users, and increase your profit.

Re-testing

After making any changes to the product, conduct re-testing. This is a cycle of A/B tests that let you identify effective solutions you should add to your MVP for its success.

Restarting the MVP Success Measurement Cycle

If you plan a long-term life cycle of the MVP, its transformation into a full-fledged IT product, and scaling, you need to test the success of each subsequent iteration.

About 9 out of 10 startups fail. But it doesn’t have to be your story!

You can enter the market with an effective MVP and scale it to a successful feature-rich product.

Continuous testing and analyzing results will help you understand how your IT solution is performing and how to improve it.

If you are planning to create your MVP, entrust this task to the professionals at AdvantISS. We will help you shape your idea, check its viability, and bring it to life. Get in touch with our manager to discuss your project.