Part 3: Your Solution
What solution are you presenting to your target market to solve their pain point? How does your solution address their problems?
I’m sure you’ve heard this before – “If you design for everyone, you design for no-one”. So, those pain points that we wrote down in the last post? Let’s bring them out again. And pick the ones that most resonate with you and your product. What is the pain point that is being solved?
We’re now moving on to getting clarity on your core product, it will all start making sense very soon.
While we do want our app to have all the latest features on the market – social logins, cryptos, instant messaging – these are what I like to call the “bells and whistles” of the product and not really the core of the product.
A core value proposition is important enough to a customer that they will indeed use your product even without any of these features.
Let’s take the example of the banking application on your phone – it may or may not have Fingerprint Scan Sign-in, however, you still use it right?
Likewise with the Presto cards – we may not like the overhead of carrying yet another extra card around all the time, however we still use them – they solve our pain of having to carry and tender exact change every time we need to pay.
You essentially focus your development / prototyping efforts into developing the minimum feature set required to offer this core solution and park every other feature. This is what we call as the “MVP” or your “Minimum Viable Product”. At the start you need the confidence to know people will really use and value your product, irrespective of what else it does or doesn’t offer.
Defining your MVP
The Minimum Viable Product, as the name suggests – is the base essential features required to test your idea. It could be a full-fledged mobile app, a simple facebook group, a landing page, or even a simple phone number where people could dial in to look for their requirements.
For the case of the pet-sitters & pet-owners we have been discussing in previous posts, a simple starting point would be a Facebook group to bring together pet lovers from a given city so they could post and connect with each other.
Not sure how this would help?
1. A lot of people are already on facebook, so the challenge of getting people to use your app/product is significantly lesser.
2. They now know about your product and are will start to resonate with the brand / group name & branding.
3. Three, you have your test audience ready – reading through the kind of posts going on on a daily basis will help you identify what the needs of the users are and how to convert this into features people would pay to use.
4. Your core value offering – connecting the 2 groups of people together is being met here – and you can see how well they interact with each other.
Trust us on this – defining your pain point & core value offering is essentially the make or break point for your product. If you are able to define your core value offering clearly, you are on the right track for your app development.
I’d like you to spend some time thinking back to what your pain points are, and what your core offering is – drop it on our Facebook Page or even email it in to us!
This is Part 3 of a 5-part series about prototyping your app. If you’ve just landed here, read part 2:
Note: I use the word “app” in broad sense to mean any product from a mobile app to a full-fledged web application, could even be a offline software or a physical product.
About the Author
Rashmi Bachani
Quora | Twitter | LinkedIn
Rashmi has a bit of startup experience, having been on the founding team of a couple and gets what the life and daily struggles of an entrepreneur are like. She believes in prototyping & testing your business idea before getting into production. Her thoughts? “Essentially at the start, you need the confidence to know this business will work, and that you can and should invest your money (and time) into it.”.
