Launching an MVP is a huge step toward validating your idea, engaging real customers, and proving your business model to investors. To make this vision a reality, you need the right team behind you. Whether you are a founder setting out to build v1, or an established company considering a new technology initiative, thinking through the right approach to bring in the necessary expertise is a big one.
In this blog, we’ll explore what to avoid when vetting potential partners and weighing your options, which could include bringing on a consultancy, freelancer, or hiring a new team member full-time.
1. Downplaying the importance of Product Market Fit
Going into designing and developing an MVP with any open questions on where you fit in the market is a huge risk. We suggest starting all new technology initiatives, with upfront discovery work that uses targeted user research and design-thinking to plan the most impactful first version.
Bringing on a partner that isn’t aligned with this thinking, or isn’t adequately a part of the exercises that got you to your decision is risky in that things may get lost in translation and they won’t be able to keep your underlying strategy in mind in their role. Our suggestion – Bring whomever you choose into this work with you in some capacity so they feel bought in but also have a sound understanding before bringing the mvp to life.
2. Focusing solely on price or speed
You have a lot of options when looking for MVP support - contractors, freelancers, hiring a full time employee, or bringing on an agency. Agency offerings and skill sets vary quite a bit by themselves. When comparing options, if you are only looking at cost or how quickly your project would be done, you will miss other key considerations. You should expect a higher cost associated with a more senior individual with deeper experience, so going cheaper isn’t always the best option especially if it compromises the quality of your codebase and the ability to deliver within your requirements, and timeline. Moving too quickly is another sign of potentially compromised quality. For example, using AI to write the majority of the code could help you move more quickly, but code written by AI may be resilient to change and will be harder to evolve as you scale. Speed, Cost, and Quality should all be considered equally.
3. Minimizing relevant experience
You should bring in someone who has experience working with companies at your stage, and has effectively helped them reach goals that are parallel to yours. We suggest making sure that includes startup experience (early Stage , Series A, Series B), and experience creating custom software solutions using agile design and development. Other skill sets that will be important to you at this phase include the ability to foster quick feedback cycles with target audiences, gather and synthesize feedback effectively into a product strategy, and use those insights to inform rapid iterations.
4. Skip setting expectations
Remember all those nightmare group projects in school? This sounds simple, but not being clear about how you expect to communicate and work together can cause challenges down the line. Having clear expectations on communication tools, working styles, and how you expect to stay in sync on status, risks, and questions - will save you headaches once you get started.
This is likely a substantial investment for you - don’t waste your time, or the time you are paying for because of poor communication. This is why we have a sound process for collaboration with our clients, including standing meetings, sharing tools like Slack, and upfront definitions of roles and responsibilities for all parties involved.
5. Ignoring scalability and growth concerns
Slight caveat for this one; if your MVP is primarily a testing tool, and you expect it to be rebuilt down the line, weighing the importance of building for scalability from a software perspective might not be a critical consideration. If you expect your MVP to be foundational software, that evolves with more features, whomever you bring in to help should have experience planning and executing that type of architecture. Having a plan for scaling also applies to your business, and product team. Your MVP team may also have the potential to become your longer term partner or product team. If that’s a goal for you, that should also be an experience you look for and a part of the partnership setup. Good things to think about include: What happens after launch? How are you going to capture and plan future releases? How do you communicate MVP effectiveness to investors?
Bringing on the right partner should ingest your team with diverse, expert skills, mitigate risks, and help increase your likelihood of success. If you found this blog useful, and are looking for more specifics on hiring a team vs. hiring an agency, check out our other blog.
We are here to help get you to the next level and welcome a conversation where we can share our best practices and learnings in more detail.
