Why You Should Choose WordPress for your Startup MVP

The concept of minimum viable product allows you to speed up the startup launch while preserving its values for the target audience and the direct owner. Also, this approach is a kind of an airbag, even if the idea does not find the right support in the market.

Understanding this idea opens up numerous benefits for virtually any area of business and for creating web projects in particular. In this article, we are going to talk about the effectiveness of the MVP concept in the field of information technology and online marketing.

The idea of Minimum Viable Product

Minimum viable product (MVP) is a primary product with a minimum set of basic functions, created with the least amount of time and money. The purpose of the MVP is to offer the main idea of the product to the audience before the full implementation of all functions and to gather all the necessary information for further development.

The theory of the minimum viable product was proposed in 2001 by Frank Robinson, co-founder and president of SyncDev. The idea was picked up quickly, and the biggest promoters were Steve Blank, the “godfather of Silicon Valley”, and Eric Ries, who later developed the concept of “Lean Startup”.

At the same time, Eric Ries notes that MVP provides an opportunity to abandon expensive marketing research and significant investment in the development of the first solution and reduce the possible losses in the event of a startup failure.

Basic principles and goals of MVP

Many of us do not fully understand the idea presented and define MVP as the cheapest and fastest solution of a product with reduced functionality, which is created for the fastest market entry. However, this is not entirely true. To fully understand the proposed concept, let’s consider the goals of creating an MVP.

• The accelerated acquisition of information necessary to create a solution (characteristics of the target audience, the need in the product, optimal price, the ways of interacting with the audience, etc.);
• Testing product hypotheses and ideas;
• Saving time on the development;
• Minimum costs while maintaining all the necessary characteristics;
• Quick product introduction that will solve at least one problem of the first users.

So it’s not just about saving money or speed. The most important thing for an effective MVP is a combination of all these points, which is worth talking about in more detail.

Launch speed + achievement of MVP analysis and testing goals

Yes, the speed of launch and financial savings are just one side of the issue that costs nothing without other goals. Moreover, this simplified approach is most often criticized by business and marketing experts. Indeed, an ill-conceived product can only tarnish the brand reputation and result in misinterpretation of its concept. That is why one should rely not on the cheapness and speed, but on the optimal resource consumption to achieve goals at the current stage and the ability to create hypotheses in the future.

Maximum value with minimum effort

This goal of MVP was proposed by Marcin Treder, the co-founder and CEO of UXPin. Here, special attention should be paid to the definition of “maximum value”. And for this purpose, we will turn to a very common example, with which experts clearly demonstrate the essence of the MVP and the already mentioned value.

So imagine that we are developing a car MVP. There may be a misconception that the smallest functionality of the car will be a wheel, steering wheel or engine, i.e. a certain part of the functionality, which is much faster and cheaper to market. However, you must:

• Provide the user with the basic value of the product;
• Get the basic value in the form of analytical data on the market, audience and needs.

The main value of a car is the ability to get faster from point A to point B. Neither the wheel, nor the steering wheel, nor the engine will help you do that. But a skate or a scooter will help, for example. This will be the simplified functionality, conditional MVP of the car. So always consider the “DNA” of your product to create a relevant offer that best reflects your idea.

Therefore, the minimum viable product is not just a beta version of the product for the fastest market entry. Instead, it is the least resource-intensive tool for validating the economic feasibility of a business idea, which is the basis of the final offer.

Relevance for online projects

The MVP approach is widely used in information technology and online marketing. And this is quite natural, because it is in these areas that it is easiest to trace the interest of the audience and its willingness to use and pay for your product.

The most vividly the value of MVP can be traced in terms of developing large-scale projects. Suppose you plan to create a global online service to address an important audience issue. Full development of the service from the beginning to the implementation of all functionality, design, methods of interaction can take 2 to 3 years, and if you set a goal to present a complex and multifunctional product without any bugs, the completion will take a decade. The fact is that no program will be 100% operational from the beginning, and the more complex the project is, the more bugs and the required improvements you will find.

But if you address the issue from the MVP perspective, you will develop basic functionality that can be offered to the audience as soon as in 3 to 6 months, and then gradually refine everything else, based on the user behavior, feedback, criticism and a lot of other data that you will collect with the help of MVP.

There are plenty of examples of such practices among successful projects.

Amazon developers are still improving the website and making 10,000 changes every day! So if Jeff Bezos aimed to release the perfect service with all the functionality at once, he would still fix bugs and make hypotheses about additional resource features.

Here is another example. The first version of the world-famous Groupon coupon search platform was a WordPress-based blog with a widget that sends coupons in PDF format by email.

Therefore, the idea of MVP is very important for business, and especially for a startup at the stage of developing an advertising website. This approach will allow you to create a website with minimal resources and start interacting with the audience and collecting the necessary data for further development much faster.

WordPress websites as the optimal solution for MVP

When it comes to websites as individual projects or as platforms for introducing another product, problems often arise due to the preparation period that is too long. We want to do everything perfectly, provide full functionality, and also write everything from scratch with a full team of developers, designers, marketing specialists… Sometimes, due to different views on the functionality and appearance of the project, everything is delayed indefinitely until the team burns out.

In such situations, we suggest considering the creation of a website on WordPress as the best solution allowing you to implement a web project much faster without losing the quality of any element. This CMS is perfect for startups. To make sure of this, let’s compare the goals of MVP with the capabilities of WordPress.

• Saving the development time. WordPress significantly benefits from the speed of the process before developing a website from scratch. You will be able to make money from the finished website on WordPress as early as in a few months from the first discussion with the developers.
• Minimum expenses. Save 30% and more when developing websites on WP. WP functionality is more than enough to get a working prototype and process the real feedback from the potential users.
• Ideas testing. In this regard, the advantage of WordPress is its flexibility and the ability to increase the website scale, add new functionality and new sections. So you can run the basic version of the website and gradually add to it.
• Data collection. WP allows you to connect metrics to gather all the necessary information on your audience, website traffic and its promotion. So you will have access to all the analytical data of the website visitors, be able to respond to feedback and analyze the needs of the audience.

Thus, developing a website on WordPress allows you to implement the main goals of MVP – to provide and get the maximum value with minimal effort. This not only optimizes the cost of starting your project, but also reduces the risks associated with a startup failure.

The projects WordPress is suitable for

In general, WordPress is a universal CMS, which can be used to develop websites of various types, including:

• Corporate sites
• Ecommerce sites
• Membership sites
• Blogs
• Directory sites
• Online communities
• Marketplaces
• Job portals
• Forums
• SAAS project (occasionally).

Yes, WordPress is suitable for the development of almost all website types, especially when it comes to MVP. The only exceptions are too cumbersome projects, which over time are likely to require more resources than WordPress can provide.

Implement your MVP with the WP-x team

We offer you not to procrastinate and start working on a website that will present your idea in a great way and allow you to develop the designed project and product. Write to us now and get a free consultation on WordPress website development.