If you have a big dream, fulfilling it requires big resources. A minimal viable product is your golden ticket to scaling your product from day one. A minimal viable product has the just essential features that allow you to sell your product to early adopters. It is generating revenue, and receiving critical feedback in the first stages of development.
Thanks to social media and digital marketing, minimum viable products can be pre-sold, marketed, and advertised just like any blockbuster product release. By the time you’re ready to fully launch your product the buzz, critic reviews, and consumer feedback will be immense. This is the power of a minimal viable product.
Preparing The Essential Experience For Early Adopters
The key to a successful minimum viable product is capturing its most essential benefits and features within the prototype. You can digitally generate your product or service in a video if you can’t actually create a physical prototype yet. Your main challenge won’t be the concept, but the manufacturing cost of your prototype. It should be cheap enough that the margin allows you to sell a small batch of a few hundred units to early adopters. If you’re lucky, you’ll make a sizable profit margin from this initial early adopter release, and you can use it to fund the development of your manufacturing process. If not, so long as your margin is balanced, the minimal viable product is a success.
The objective of a minimal viable product release is to identify if there’s a demand for your product. The secondary objective is to get your product to the next stage of development with some consumer feedback. This allows you to validate your product by its market. So you don’t manufacture 100,000 units of something that everybody hates.
Preselling, Marketing, and Advertising
Social media and technology present a unique opportunity for marketing products that don’t yet fully exist or aren’t market-ready. Startups are constantly releasing minimal viable products to their market using videos that present and exhibit their prototype products or service. Videos allow you to present an idea with inclusive detail so vividly it feels like you’re holding the product or service in your own hand.
- When DJI first released their line of drones, they proved that minimum viable products can generate massive success. They created videos flying over fields to show farmers and shown how valuable the possibility of image mapping their ac rage without the need of a helicopter.
- Dropbox, the digital storage platform, generated over 70,000 email signups in one day with their minimal viable product video release. They showed people just how they might benefit from their service on the day it eventually released.
- Airbnb, Twitter, Groupon, Uber, Spotify, are just a few other massively successful companies that all started with a minimal viable product. The key is presenting your product’s most essential features and benefits in a way that’s tangible enough for people to want to sign up or pay for it today. A video and website sales funnel accomplishes this in a major way.
How To Create An MVP Sales Funnel
- Create a rich, detailed and persuasive explainer video. Add a call to action at the end of the video with a link that drives viewers to a landing page. This landing page should have another video or the same video, with some sales copy that adds even more value, and a limited time offer, like a discounted rate if they purchase a pre-sale now.
- After this copy should be an email list collection. Upon submitting an email action, the user should receive an email welcoming them into this exclusive, high-class community of your product’s early adopters. This way, you can call on them when it’s finally time to buy your product’s official release.
5 Steps to Create Immense Social Buzz Around Your Product
1. When You Do This Right, a Minimal Viable Product Is a Lot Like Crowdfunding
In fact, crowdfunding is an appropriate system for designing and utilizing a minimal viable product. Companies like Gofundme, Kickstarter, and Indiegogo have helped many businesses and entrepreneurs launch products that aren’t ready for mass production yet.
This is an option for you as well.
2. You Need to Answer a Question With Your Product
Funding may not be a challenge for you, and it’s not the only reason for a minimal viable product release.
Identifying a need for your product or service should always be your main reason for your minimal viable product release.
3. Another Strategy Being Used Today Is Influencer Marketing
Getting your minimal viable product in the hands of social media influencers who can create viral videos around the product is a cost-effective way to prime your market for your product.
For example, if you are releasing a fart noise machine, you could send a unit to five different influencers and get them to make funny videos using your fart machine in public. People love to share prank videos. The call-to-action link in the video description could be a link to your pre-sales funnel or explained video.
4. Change the World
If your product has high potential to change the market, change the world, and impact people’s lives then no doubt your minimum viable product will be a success.
Identifying market demand is the primary objective in designing and executing a minimal viable product release. It’s not just about what people need because people tend to buy what they desire more than what they need.
5. Thinking of the Numbers
If you can deliver an engaging, interactive presentation to the market and attach it to a sales funnel, you can potentially generate hundreds of thousands of leads and presales.
- Crowdfunding is a good platform for presenting and releasing a minimal viable product.
- Influencer marketing and viral video campaigns are potentially the best options for marketing your minimal viable product.
Taking Your Product to the Spotlight
With a successful minimal viable product design and release, the power is in your hands from day one. All you need to do is implement these steps.
Let us know in the comments below how you plan to use these tips in your design. Then, release of your minimal viable product and enjoy success!
Images: depositphotos.com.