In my previous blog, I spoke about how to get started with an MVP application (Find out more). This blog is about how to measure or validate your start-up application. There are many ways to measure application success, especially with an MVP approach.
Steps to Validate an MVP Start-up
User engagement
This step would be analysing the user behaviour in the application. It can be measuring the active users per download, the most frequently used feature, and the time they spent using the application.
Tools to monitor user engagement:
Sign-up or downloads
This step is analysing the users sign-up if any, or the number of downloads per each platform. With these statistics, you can validate whether the app you made interests users to download or to sign-up.
Word of mouth
This step can be a traditional approach, where you have to ask some of your users, potential users what they think about the application. This step is similar to the requirement phase, you can interview or get feedback of what they think about the application, and will they feel like using the app. This step is useful to measure the success, user problems and even add points for the next iterations.
User feedback
Collecting feedback for each iteration would be the best thing to do, to validate your application. With the feedback, similar to word of mouth, you can get positive feedback to add in new features, negative feedback to improve. The critical thing is to gain more users and to retain the currently active users. Keeping that in mind, you can validate the application accordingly.
User costs and profits
This validation step is the financial aspect of the application. We would check the cost per user, cost for a user to use all features, the profit gained by each user. This cost and profits can measure the application growth or the cost to do the next iteration. This stage is essential when validating the application. If the application is not gaining more profits, you would research or put more focus on converting the user engagement to cover the costs.
Conclusion
As I spoke about the MVP approach from my last blog, it is a must to go through the guidelines to put your MVP application to the market. It is somewhat harder to understand the market and the users need, but with a regular validation or measuring the MVP product, you can divert the application course accordingly. The results gathered might not be as expected, but it helps you achieve more in time.
We at Fonseka Innovations, have completed many MVP applications. If you have any queries, you can contact us. If you want to share your thoughts and experience with handling MVP applications, you can leave a comment below.
