5 Reasons Why Your MVP Might Not Work

Abhishek Patnaik
4 min readJul 18, 2021

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90% of startups fail due to a lack of planning on an MVP version. Certainly, all ideas are worth coming to market but they don't really hit the benchmark because of a bad MVP version.

Creating an MVP depends on many factors like

  1. time duration to complete the MVP: The deadlines or time duration to set MVP affects a project deeply. I have seen project managers, CEO fall prey to this loophole. They tend to set unachievable deadlines for the team which results in a lack of research, competitor analysis, and bad planning.
  2. Resources: A startup always has a problem with resources, so it's very necessary to plan your MVP depending upon the resources. By resources we mean: developers, computational limitations, financial earnings.
  3. User Basic requirements: There are some basic sets of features we decide to provide to users initially. We cant go with all features so we decide on a limited set of features to provide to users. These features are decided based upon the target niche, their demographics, psychographic, competitors, and many more.

Here are Top 5 reason why your might fail.

  1. Lack of planning: Planning is important in nearly everything we do. Even a Family Trip cant be successful without a proper plan. You see, how important planning is right !! This becomes more and more crucial when it comes to building an MVP version.
    There are lots of things that need to take into consideration while planning.
  2. Pulling too many eggs into a plate: Often pulling too many features into a single go leads to brutal fallback. There's a saying you can either build 100 features and close them all at once or build a few and evolve them.
  3. Trying to leap a mountain with a single jump: Are you the one who wants to achieve overnight success? Congrats, you are not alone. Startups need a lot of patience. No one gains overnight success. You would have heard stories of apps gaining success overnight, but less do we know about the failures the founders would have gone through.
  4. Oops!! You missed users feedback: User feedbacks are very important as they help in shaping the right future of an app. User feedback stays at the top priority in any startup. With time we have experienced that founders, entrepreneurs with great goals tend to neglect user feedback at some places.
  5. Unprofessional team: MVP comes with high risk and responsibility. Team really needs to be focused with work. It might include staying awake for hours. Following are signs of a unprofessional team:

a. Taking deadlines lightly

b. Executing stuffs without a proper plan or discussion

c. Poor quality of work

d. Having a high EGO

e. Not learning from there mistakes

Well being unprofessional also conveys the same for managers. Managers sometimes fail to bring out the right message to there team members. Being toxic doesn’t mean you are a good manager. Taking right decision at right time is what managers are meant to do.

I can do 10 things and end no where, or try one thing and take it to places.

Its not always a good idea to put legs onto two boats together. In real life we sink if try to do so. Same happens in startups we tend to drawn when we have too many things, but nothing makes sense.

Knowing your Customers more than there Family does

It is very necessary to know your niche before you start building anything. I have always loved the concept of understanding my ideal buyer persona.

Just an short example for the same, We at CrawlQ narrowed down the tool, just to make sure that it was relevant for our niche. Initially CrawlQ had the following features:

  1. Market Research
  2. Competitor Analysis
  3. Topic Modeling
  4. Content Automation
  5. SEO

We at CrawlQ promise to be a content automation tool. Being a startup we were not able to focus on soo many features. So we thought of “UNHAND” few features.

Given limitations in resources and time, it was very difficult for us to focus on so many things. We thought of sticking only with Market research and content automation. We started adding more value to it by adding new updates, improving UX UI, making it more and more usable for content automation.

Users loved our tool more after that.

Now the question is, Why did we do so?

We focused on our “Niche”. We knew our ideal buyer persona were B2b SaaS founders, Entrepreneur, Solopreneurs.

This comes with a risk of wrong interpretation, But there’s no fun without risk.

Risk is fated part of life, be it a business or normal life. Risk will always be there. But to build a MVP product with right decision and aspects will always boast your sales by 10 times. This method also helps in lesser failure rate.

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhishekpatnaik77

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Abhishek Patnaik
Abhishek Patnaik

Written by Abhishek Patnaik

I build product with passion. Follow me for product related blogs.

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