My brother and I have just got underway with a project after spending a long time considering different ideas. Our idea seems good, rates well with the grademybusinessidea model and is in an area which I am trained and have experience in.
Since it is quite a complicated SaaS app to build (could take 9-12 months to build the AI version) we are keen to test it first with less time input to test the market. I think this is a wise idea vs maybe spending 12 months building something the market may not want. We can do this relatively easily by just cutting out the AI at first and running it manually so long as we keep to a small number of users.
By doing this we can cut development time down to maybe 1 month for a very basic version which we run manually for testing purposes. This was partly inspired by reading "The Lean Startup" and understanding the idea of minimum viable product (MVP). On the other hand we don't want to make the MVP version too basic and want to include enough features to make it interesting without taking to long to make (and long time to run manually).
My question is: how basic should a MVP be? How polished does an MVP need to be (eg the app GUI in this case)? How basic is too basic for validation of the idea? Building a nice looking app can take a long time, so do you settle for a bit less than your best for this stage?
I know all these things are very difficult to quantify and the answer is somewhat, "it depends". So...how would you define MVP in a simple way?
Since it is quite a complicated SaaS app to build (could take 9-12 months to build the AI version) we are keen to test it first with less time input to test the market. I think this is a wise idea vs maybe spending 12 months building something the market may not want. We can do this relatively easily by just cutting out the AI at first and running it manually so long as we keep to a small number of users.
By doing this we can cut development time down to maybe 1 month for a very basic version which we run manually for testing purposes. This was partly inspired by reading "The Lean Startup" and understanding the idea of minimum viable product (MVP). On the other hand we don't want to make the MVP version too basic and want to include enough features to make it interesting without taking to long to make (and long time to run manually).
My question is: how basic should a MVP be? How polished does an MVP need to be (eg the app GUI in this case)? How basic is too basic for validation of the idea? Building a nice looking app can take a long time, so do you settle for a bit less than your best for this stage?
I know all these things are very difficult to quantify and the answer is somewhat, "it depends". So...how would you define MVP in a simple way?
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