SaaS Startup Founders on Deciding Features for MVP

Understanding customers is the key to selling your product in market. Gaining an understanding about your customers’ interest in your product gives you an idea of getting success in the market. A minimum viable product (MVP) is a minimal version of a product for early customers. It helps in validating a product idea in the early stage of product development. An MVP should have enough features to be usable by early customers which can help in learning about customers and the market.

Here are insights shared by entrepreneurs on how to decide the features for MVP to get to the market fast.

Shayak Mazumder, Co-founder, Eunimart

Studying the customer profile will tell us the intersection between what are the biggest problems, the most in-demand solutions, and our USP. This intersection set is the prioritized list of features needed to go to market early.

Robin Das, CEO of Brandintelle

Here are certain ways you can decide what to keep in MVP-

• Groom your backlog using good product prioritisation techniques.
• Make sure your do not spend too much time in building complex features and focus more on quick releases.

Pramod Gummaraj, CEO, Aprecomm

Aprecomm is solving everyday problem faced by the general Internet customers. Domain Expertise and firsthand experiences faced by our teams helped us to select the MVP. As technologists, we tend to focus on overly sophisticated features and think that would be the key differentiating factor, but they may not be the need of the hour to the customer. This is where we must think very differently. Reach out to customers and talk to them. Mostly, it would be 3 out of 10 features that you have planned that are what the customers' needs. At Aprecomm, we have focussed on these features as our MVP to hit the markets faster.

Arjun Gupta, Founder, Courseplay

This brings me back to my first answer - talk to your customers. They will tell you which features are nice-to-have and which features are must-haves. Cut out all the nice-to-haves (and half of the must-haves) and you’ve got yourself an MVP. When we first launched Courseplay we only had the bare minimum learning features on the web. Our employee experience suite for coaching, mentorship, individual development plans, behavioral scorecards, mobile apps, chatbots all came later on. You will be surprised by how little you need to launch the MVP. Stay minimal and stay agile.

Shreyan Gandhi - Director and Co-founder, Comket Solutions

Because building the software product is always an ongoing process, it makes sense to start with features available at the moment. We’ve adapted the same philosophy in our release timelines. Currently the card allows you to share all sorts of links, but other integrations such as loyalty reward points, multi-brand store to redeem points and other products are to be launched in the 2nd phase. The iOS and android applications too have been scheduled in phase 2 since, our web based platform allows for a dynamic experience without them.

Sarvagya Mishra - Co-founder & Director, SuperBot (PinnacleWorks)

The features which are of utmost necessity to launch the product and get the execution in the process are the ones to keep in MVP. The refinement and addition of features and the evolution of the product is a never-ending process. And if we plan on launching the product only once all the features are live, then the product will never be launched at the right time to capture the market.