How to Launch Your Minimum Viable Product at Minimal Costs
Once your chosen MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, is developed, you can then proceed to launch it. Launching involves releasing the MVP to the market in order for it to serve its purpose.
Launching your MVP may be divided into two separate phases. These are named the soft launch and the hard launch. Because the purpose of the MVP is to collect true insights from the market, the purpose of such division in phases is the same. The results garnered from the first phase serve as input for the latter one. Both phases enable you to either confirm or disconfirm your market assumptions. Let’s dive deeper into these two phases.
Soft Launch
The soft launch is the launching phase wherein the target audience and marketing resources are limited. Because this initial phase’s role is to confirm or disconfirm initial market assumptions, it is important to not pour all resources into it. Make do with limited resources.
Given the limited resources, make sure to focus on a certain segment of the target audience who seem to be most likely to use your product and eventually convert into paying customers. This specific segment is also known as early adopters. These early adopters can be reached through different channels and places.
When doing this, some startup founders may ask people within their circle to test the MVP in the first place. However, there is a risk in testing with people that you know. For one, they are aware of the effort that is put behind product development. Thus, their opinions may be more biased. Additionally, usually, they may not have the same customer persona as the audience you want to reach. Thus, their feedback may not be so useful for further product development.
In doing the soft launch, it is important to maximize resources that are free, available, and accessible. Because this step is for confirmation of the initial hypothesis, it would be reasonable to allocate resources wisely until you have verified what the target market is willing and ready to pay for.
There are three key points in the soft launch. These are:
- Validate the needs of the customer by generating and collecting data or feedback on the customers’ behavior.
- Validate options for monetization. Better yet, quantify the amount that your target audience would be ready and willing to pay in order to avail of your product or services.
- Come up with your customer persona.
After gathering information pertaining to these three key points, you can then proceed to the hard launch.
Hard Launch
During the hard launch, the product is officially released to the market. Because of the rise of SaaS models, several tech companies have realized that the products they’ve released need to be continuously updated and upgraded. Because of that, they tend to do this hard launch not just on mature products but also on validated MVPs (ones where they have already gathered insights on the monetization model, customer persona, and customer needs). These founders opt for a hard launch when they want to gain significant market share in a short period of time and when they want to conquer the market.
Doing a hard launch makes sense when:
- Your target market’s size is large enough for your efforts in marketing to be maximized.
- Your product and operation team have enough structure. This means that they are able to respond quickly and smoothly once the number of customers peak due to efforts in marketing.
- Your system in reporting has already been set up and is not ready to capture high volumes of data generated from the market. This data would be necessary in order to make the most of your marketing campaigns later on once the marketing budget for the hard launch is used up.
Going for either a soft or hard launch
Opting for either a soft or hard launch would ultimately depend on how well you know your target audience. It is important to know, though, that because of the constant changes in the landscape of digital-edge customers, most founders would opt to start with a soft launch before going massive with the hard launch.
To know more about MVP development, check out the Ultimate MVP Guidelines.
