Great companies are made with great products. The truth is so obvious that people are likely to take it for granted. Many startups fail to reach the stage where their product is considered as product-market fit. Reasons could be the customers aren’t quite getting the value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing too fast, sales cycle takes too long or lots of deal might never close.

To understand all about Minimum Viable Product and Product-Market Fit, Ojasvi Bhatia, City Lead of Headstart Gurgaon Chapter, moderated a panel discussion with Saurabh Srivastava, Ex-CXO @ Jabong and Mobikwik and Radhika Mehra, Global Product Lead @ Expedia at the September 2018 edition of Startup Saturday conducted by Headstart.

Below are the questions answered by these Industry experts:

Q: According to you, what is Minimum Viable Product?

A: Saurabh: Minimum Viability of the product is the definite need for which the product has been built for. It should have sufficient features to satisfy early adopters. They should validate the viability of the product. The final and complete set of features is only designed and developed after considering feedback from the product’s initial users.

Q: What are the things we need to focus on when figuring out MVP and product-market fit?

A: Radhika: 1. Find a Problem that you need to solve, not Problems. The problem should be the one that you have seen by observing your users;

2. Figure out the hypothesis for the product;
3. Find a product manager and build your product;
4. Test your product with your hypothesis.

Q: How has MVP evolved over years?

A: Saurabh: Over the years, consumer’s expectations have been changed. Now the MVP is more about minimum viable consumer experience. The threshold of building a product that satisfies consumers has been moved up. These days the products are being compared to the likes of Amazon and Uber because of which the MVP has evolved dramatically.

Q: How to ensure that a product is at a “go to market” stage?

A: Saurabh: 1. Identify your target audience and observe them.

2. Determine your USP.
3. Identifying how your product is different from your competitors.
4. Seek feedback from early adopters of your product and change accordingly.

Q: How to build a product for both local and global market?

A: Radhika: The process of building the product remains the same. It should be made according to the standard must-have features be it any market. Once the basics of the product are built, the location-specific features can be altered according to the localization and policies of any particular country.

“Build for the world and then localize for the country”.

Thank you for reading.
If you enjoyed this article, please share it with others who might enjoy it as well.

About us: Headstart is one of India’s oldest and largest startup ecosystem development organisations established in 2007 with the vision of ‘changing the world through entrepreneurship’. It is a non-profit, run entirely by 120+ passionate volunteers across 23 cities.

The content was captured & written by Shefali Singh, a volunteer at Headstart Gurgaon.