Startup Lithuania pre-acceleration course: Startup Guide

Create an MVP or prototype on budget

Creating your MVP or prototype on a budget depends on your budget and skills. The more you can do by yourself, the less money you’ll have to spend. To create your MVP on a budget, consider hiring freelancers instead of establishing an additional workplace for a new employee, or even doing everything on your own. There are many platforms where you can find skilled freelancers (Freelancer, UpWork, Fiverr) to help you in creating a professional MVP very quickly and at an acceptable price range. But creating an MVP is not the only task at this stage. You should also:

• create the MVP
• foresee how potential customers will engage it
• set up analytical instruments to measure indicators important for your hypothesis verification
• set up a feedback system with customers to get additional insights and suggestions from them (live interview, online chat, survey, etc.).

Additionally, you could think about employing various online tools if you find them useful in your case. Here are just a few examples:

• QuickMVP is a one-stop-shop, enabling you to record and analyze your customer interviews, build and test landing pages, and calculate metrics such as market size and profit margin.
• Sharewell helps you validate your ideas through customer feedback. Watch how real users interact with your design, prototype, or website. Quick and simple usability testing.
• Five Second Test helps you gather first impressions of your landing page, brochure, logo, marketing material, or home page.
• Google Forms is a free tool for online surveys. It allows you to collect a huge amount of data absolutely free of charge, unlike most other online survey platforms that limit you in one way or another.

Plan and run the experiment to collect required data

1. Declare expected outcomes of the experiment. If you have completed the experiment card, this job should already be done. You should clearly know the goal of your experiment, how you’ll measure results, and what criteria are being verified for each hypothesis.
2. Clearly defined time or conditions for how long you will be running the experiment. Decide how long you will run the experiment (for example, until you conduct 50 customer interviews, drive 500 targeted visitors to your landing page, or get the first 100 people to sign up). It’s up to you to decide. In any case, it’s very important to set a maximum time limit for how long you will run the experiment. It might be that you’ll never get 100 people to sign up if your value proposition or call to action is terrible. So there is no sense waiting for miracles! If you don’t get your expected result in a set time frame, change something, and run another experiment!
3. Seek realistic results instead of chasing precision. You need to accept the fact that you will probably never have all the needed information you really need with perfect precision. But you’ll need to make a decision in any case. So it’s better to seek to measure results that would reflect a realistic situation.
4. Measure actions, not words or opinions. Remember, saying is not the same as paying! This rule applies to any other action you want a potential customer to make. So don’t just ask “if you’d like to sign up to get product updates.” Instead, create a signup form, drive traffic to it, and check to see if people are really signing up.
5. Always have a control group. This is probably one of the most important rules to run effective experiments. If you don’t have a control group (unaffected by your experiment), you’ll never be sure if your experiment results are valuable. You can only draw justified conclusions when you have a control group and their results are different from the experiment group.