Practical Steps to Take After Releasing an MVP

As an entrepreneur, you may find yourself in a situation where you've developed an MVP but have to figure out the other half of the equation. Observation, analysis, and further planning are what you'll be busy with next in order to turn your MVP into a full-fledged product and reach market success after it undergoes a series of development cycles.

In this article, we will provide the post MVP meaning and explore the practical steps every startup should progress with once achieving a minimum viable product status. We'll also contemplate how to measure the performance of the product to determine if you've reached MVP success.

Why an MVP Is Just a First Step

An MVP is only the first crucial milestone of product development. As the initial version of the software, it is designed to assist you in investigating and testing your business idea before you enter the market. There are multiple MVP benefits for your business:

• idea and hypothesis validation;
• faster time-to-market;
• easy-to-budget modifications;
• improved user experience;
• helps to build a community of supporters.

While reaching the MVP stage is a significant accomplishment in product development, it's not the ultimate objective. At this point, you've tested the core idea to validate the concept and ensure the problem exists. You did this to find out whether the market is big enough, that the target audience you had in mind is really yours, and, thanks to your early adopters, if your functionality set is what people want. But to truly thrive, you must surpass the MVP level.

What Comes After MVP Product Creation?

To advance to the post MVP level, you have to assess whether it is reasonable to evolve the offering and continue with the project further. Sadly, at times, the MVP release can prove that there's no future for this idea, and the project comes to a full stop or requires fundamental changes, which might imply going all the way back to square one with more testing. But if things go well, you have to strategize and think through how to carry on with it best.

If it's confirmed that the project is worth proceeding with, usually, teams move on to upgrading the existing features, deploying new ones, and making a minimum marketable product (MMP). An MMP is a product that, although small and not fitted with loads of features, is ready for the market, has higher quality, and can start bringing back revenue.

How do you achieve that? Basically, an MVP and MMP are consequent steps. With the help of the MVP, you can gather valuable feedback and insights, which can be used to make informed decisions about how to enhance the product, refine the plan, and meet customer expectations better. By listening to your users and taking their feedback seriously, the company can build stronger relationships and nurture a more loyal customer base. Not to mention that user feedback and other findings are growth leverage. 

Yet, it takes lots of work to enhance the early version of the released product to actually make it sellable. How do you ensure it's enjoyed by users? While product teams strive to create successful MVPs, many fail to succeed after MVP release. Common reasons for this include the lack of product-market fit, subpar execution, and insufficient resources. To avoid these pitfalls, we've gathered the best practices and easy-to-follow steps.

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Top Six Steps to Take After Launching An MVP

What comes after an MVP? How do you get closer to an MMP and establish a consistent development process that'll get you to the point of reaching a mature or maximum viable product version? Let's go over the things you have to take care of once your early product version becomes available to users, which should help you decide whether you’re ready to move on with the product's further development.

Step 1: Collect Customer Feedback

Collecting customer feedback is one of the first things that should come after MVP launch. Gaining insights and opinions from your customers will give you an idea of how to improve your software product in consecutive iterations. Besides, it helps to pinpoint your MVP's imperfections and shortcomings and gain an external perspective of the current and future state of things.

There are various professional ways to collect customer thoughts on your MVP at very early stages. Here are a few methods your startup can use during this vital step:

• In-product surveys enable you to gather valuable feedback using different forms of scores from your early adopters, such as the Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Net-Promoter Score (NPS). By analyzing these opinions, you can assess user satisfaction levels with your product and identify areas for improvement to enhance your MVP.

• Interviews can be a time-consuming but efficient process disclosing each user's pain points and perspectives. They let you gain valuable insights beyond a simple "yes" or "no" answer but rather personal opinions from your focus groups. 

• Landing pages help introduce the product and its functionality to large user bases. Interested customers can be encouraged to sign up for further information. By tracking their engagement (such as clicks on pricing details) with such an MVP type, it is possible to gauge potential interest and gain feedback.

• A/B testing with users is a way to introduce various versions of your product to potential customers. Eventually, you gather feedback on multiple versions to determine which one resonates most with your user base. There are plenty of MVP tools to help you do that.

Whatever method you choose, make sure to continuously organize, analyze, and act on generated feedback. This is what comes after MVP: the essential steps of product improvement based on customer opinions.

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Step 2: Analyze and Monitor User Interaction with Your Product

What comes after minimum viable product release for public use? First, visitors start interacting with the product's initial version and generate tons of behavioral data. It's your ultimate goal to then gain insights into user behavior and identify flaws in user experience. 

This is where product analytics tools like Mixpanel or Amplitude come in handy. It's a piece of software that helps track and analyze data on your product, including user engagement, traffic behavior, and revenue opportunities. With this information, you can enhance your product, spot growth opportunities, and make informed decisions regarding future tweaks and adjustments.

Design, ease of navigation, and copy matter too. So, you can take advantage of various product performance metrics indicating the different avenues for MVP improvement:

• clicks per UI element;
• sessions per visitor;
• adoption rate;
• retention rate;
• churn rate;
• feature drop-off;
• and many others. 

Step 3: Act on Major Roadblocks

By gathering user-generated data and customer feedback using different methods, you can better understand the most pressing end-user problems and how to evolve MVP offerings optimally. At this point, it's crucial to reassess the obstacles your clients are encountering so you can enhance the MVP design and develop efficient solutions.

One of your primary objectives is to constantly come up with new ideas and meet the diverse requirements of your growing clientele. Among them, you can typically find the following:

• Performance requirements: monitor current digits and test the MVP's performance to ensure it meets current needs. It is also vital to lay the projected RPS in the product's architecture so that it adapts to the increasing load.
  

• Scalability requirements: address the envisioned vertical and horizontal scalability of the product's infrastructure in case the user base starts to grow.
  
  
• Product's reliability: if the product is unreliable or difficult to use, customers will likely look for alternatives and eventually switch to competitors. As you progress with the post MVP stage of your product, make sure you regularly handle QA testing and deliver a consistent UI, and solve user problems.

Moreover, you have to assess whether your current solution has everything it needs to scale. Scalability can be an issue if your plans are bigger than what the systems can handle. Thus, this technical or even due diligence side has to be considered and re-checked.

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Step 4: Prioritize Features

When it comes to improving your product in the after MVP phase, you can use the insights accumulated through previous sessions: initial feedback, user interaction patterns, and technical roadblocks. Are people requesting additional features or sharing ideas on how to improve what you have now? Or maybe a minimum marketable feature (MMF) could be what you need at the moment?

Based on that input, you can consider which features will truly enhance the product and bring value to end-users. It's likely that you have plenty of ideas in the backlog by now, you just have to decide what's worth developing and what should be handled first.

Unfortunately, you won't be able to implement every idea due to time, budget, and resource limitations. Instead, we encourage you to use a structured approach to feature prioritization. You will have better chances to succeed by using objective metrics, such as rankings, charts, and matrices that include customer feedback and align with your product strategy.

There are diverse product prioritization frameworks that can be instrumental in solving your particular problem. Here's a glimpse into the most popular ones:

RICE Scoring System

The RICE method combines individual scores for reach, impact, confidence, and effort into a standardized overall score. This objective approach helps product teams prioritize essential features based on their potential value to the business and user experience. The findings can help you better shape your product development roadmap.

MoSCoW Technique

This method classifies features into four priority categories, namely Must-Have (Mo), Should-Have (S), Could-Have (Co), and Won't-Have (W). Product development teams prioritize the "Must Have" initiatives before moving on to the "Should Have" and "Could Have" features. The latter elements are still crucial, but if there is any resource or deadline constraint, they will be considered in later iterations.

Kano Prioritization Model

The Kano model provides comprehensive prioritization guidelines for product development teams. It helps to evaluate MVP features in two dimensions: satisfaction and functionality. To gain user insight, you can create a Kano questionnaire and inquire how your customers would feel with or without a specific feature. The obtained results will help you better determine your OKRs and KPIs and further product plans.

Step 5: Assess Your Finances and Choose a Monetization Strategy

As you proceed with your after MVP strategy, it's vital to consider how you will monetize your product. This involves evaluating your revenue model, implementing proven and inventive monetization tactics, and keeping up with current trends in monetization.

The idea behind MVP monetizing is another aspect of your product's ability to deliver value and stay competitive. You need to test new ideas before jumping into full-scale agile MVP development. At this stage, previously accumulated knowledge of your user base and market will pay off.

Find efficient ways to generate revenue tailored to your target audience and aligned with your current and long-term goals. Consider different startup pricing strategies and revenue models for your product, such as the ones below:

• one-time payment (grant access to your software product through licensing);
• recurring subscriptions (charge users a monthly/yearly subscription fee to gain access to your services);
• freemium subscription (encourage users to sign up for your standard product offering for free and charge a fee to access a locked version);
• pay-as-you-go model (provide active customer groups with the ability to pay for the product, its parts, or available capacity on-demand);
• in-product advertising (generate revenue from selling ad spaces to agencies and trade desks);
• affiliate marketing (post partner links inside your software product and earn a commission when users click on them).

Likewise, review your business or startup budget to ensure you have enough resources to carry on with the advancements you have in mind. Additional milestones and product enhancement come at a price, so you need to do the math to be certain that the financial side is taken care of. If not, you'll probably have to put development on pause and handle the matter of securing additional funds, be it via loans, seeking investors, or some other way. Moreover, you should also consider the ways you can cut costs.

Step 6: Develop a Rock-Solid Marketing Plan

Having a strong marketing plan and establishing a solid online presence is essential to grow your business and attract new clients. After all, how else are you planning to make your MVP sellable and profitable?

This means creating a marketing strategy that resonates with your early adopters and first customers and effectively communicates the value of your product to potential traffic segments. To reach potential customers, connect with your target audience, grow brand presence, enhance visibility and engagement, and build a database of leads, consider leveraging:

• social media;
• SEO;
• influencer marketing;
• content marketing;
• email marketing;
• create ads and use paid advertising.

Make sure not to ignore data analytics and consistently track consumer response to the first working versions of software. Plus, encourage your customers to spread the word about your product.

How to Measure an MVP's Success

Suppose you know what to do after MVP release to continue its production and growth. But how do you determine if your efforts pay off?

Market conditions and customer expectations can change overnight, which adds complexity to success measurement processes. The ultimate path to assess your MVP's performance is to monitor your progress on the go and continuously evaluate your key success metrics and customer feedback.

Why do you need to do this? Well, apart from better understanding how to proceed with your product, these vitals will also be essential during an MVP pitch for investment. VCs care about numbers and facts, so you should have such backup at hand.

MVP Metrics to Keep an Eye On

Upon releasing an MVP, data visualization becomes an indispensable tool for analyzing your KPIs. As you continue to improve, expand, and tailor the minimum viable product to better meet your customer's needs, you should observe an increased performance of the critical metrics. If this isn't the case, it may indicate that there are issues with your MVP that you have to address or signal the need for a business pivot. Here's what you can measure:

Gain Continuous Customer Feedback

User feedback is what comes after MVP in the first place. While analytics dashboards operate on quantitative data, they don't provide a complete picture. The missing piece of that puzzle is qualitative research: customer input that you need to consider.

Multiple ways to gather customer voice can come to the rescue, including surveys, interviews, in-app questionnaires, social listening tools, and email campaigns asking for opinions regarding your product. This can allow you to track the improvements your subscribers suggest for the product so that it keeps evolving alongside consumer needs.

However, the general rule of thumb is not to fulfill every user request. Otherwise, you will have to tweak the product all the time back and forth, leading to lost money and scattered resources. To avoid such MVP mistakes, you can still engage your audience and show their voices matter. For instance, you can let users vote on features on social media or other digital resources.

Major Takeaways on Post MVP Actions

Moving from an MVP to a full-scale product is a gradual process that requires preparation and patience. However, if you've successfully passed the development process, you already have the necessary skills to succeed. With careful planning and intelligent decision-making, the MVP will be the start of your exciting journey toward growth and scaling up to an MMP or even more full-fledged product version.

Does the process of going through the post MVP stage challenge you? We at Upsilon understand your pain points and are ready to lend a helping hand with expert MVP development services. Feel free to reach out to us to discuss your needs, and let's build great products together and help them grow until they meet all your objectives.