While you might have seen diverse out-of-the-box businesses coming up in place these days, starting a new business is not as easy as it may sound. The Internet age is not just about the easy access to information available online, but about the startups. Given the global success of diverse startup companies, it is not hard to believe that we live in a start-up driven world.
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If you also have a business idea that you want to develop into a fully-fledged idea, you must know about MVP – Minimum Viable Product.
As per Eric Ries, who coined this term in his famous book, ‘The Lean Startup,’ MVP is the minimum, most simplified version of a product or service that you can use to collect the data based on user behavior.
In other words, an MVP of a startup idea is what validates its value in the real world amongst the real customers.
In general, the businesses do not invest further in an idea whose MVP turns out to be a big failure amongst the targeted audience. That’s why they first create an MVP to check its viability in the market, do A/B testing or iterations to add features based on user interactions and improve it gradually.
At this point, you might be having this question in mind:
“How much should I invest in an MVP? What should it be based on?”
The most straightforward answer to it is – you need not invest a considerable amount in developing the MVP of your business idea. The first version of your business should come up at a relatively low cost. One of the best ways to start with is to have a WordPress website built to showcase your idea to a specific audience group.
Let’s start with why you should use WordPress to launch your MVP. Later on, we will dig into how you can use WordPress to launch your MVP.
The most exciting part of building a startup is the uncertainty that lies in the very fact whether it will work or not. Many people think it is not easy to scale a startup and get access to Venture Capital (VC) funding. That’s true because not all startup ideas are worth giving the expenses and time. In the eyes of every startup founder, his idea is a great one. It is where the step of validating it through an MVP comes in between to clear the doubts and assumptions. On the other hand, a well-built MVP also becomes the stepping-stone of success for many business ideas by opening up ways for product or service improvement.
That’s the simplest summary of all successful as well as failed startups.
If you are wondering how WordPress can help you realize your dream of establishing a startup, let’s talk about that step-by-step here.
Before you can start to build your website you first need a domain name and a Webhost to host your domain. You have to come up with a catchy domain name that matches your product and easy for marketing. There are plenty for tips on the internet for coming up with a domain name for your startup.
You need a chap and best hosting especially to save your budget. There are several hosting providers who have very affordable hosting plans for a WordPress site. You choose from our list of recommended WordPress hosting providers. Then you have to install WordPress on your domain. See here to get a domain, hosting and installing WordPress in 5 minutes.
Next step in a MVP launch is to give it a shape and appearance. In other words, you need to get your idea transformed into a website design that you can place in front of your targeted consumers.
However, website designing isn’t a simple process. It involves the stages of theme color selection, page wireframe creation, PSD creation, followed by its front-end development.
One way to skip most of these steps of website designing is to opt for the most similar WordPress theme that fits well into your business idea and you can import the demo site and customize it for your MVP.
WordPress themes with pre-designed templates save you time and money that otherwise would be spent on web designing
If you think your MVP can be summed up in a one-page WordPress website, select from the diverse options of one-page themes or landing-page themes available online. Otherwise, you can go for a fully functional, multi-page theme for your MVP.
Installing a WordPress theme and importing demo content is also very easy, see here to know-how.
Next to the design aspect of your MVP, you need to think about the product/service selling aspect of it. No matter to which industry your startup belongs, it is crucial to have something available for sale to the end-users in the MVP. With the selling features, you will get to know more about the market demand, consumer behavior, and competition to your business.
With an MVP based on WordPress, creating a website that sells is easy. It comes with the powerful WooCommerce plugin to add significant features required to sell products on your site. No matter what kind of products you want to sell, a WooCommerce can help you with that. You can see how to install and setup WooCommerce here.
Similarly, you can sell digital downloadable products as a part of your MVP. To generate revenue, you can integrate your WordPress website with multiple payment gateways, be it Stripe, PayPal, or others.
As said above, one of the essential aspects of an MVP website is to allow the users to share their feedback or queries in a simplified manner. Many startup founders make the mistake of only presenting what they have in mind through the MVP and not giving ways to the users to share feedback.
With a WordPress website meant for your MVP, you can choose to add contact forms in it. This will help you gather user responses to the product/service you have launched in the market.
For instance, you can add a form to ask the user about their reviews about your product or a specific ‘Contact Us’ page to allow users to share their thoughts and queries. The contact form can also work as a customer support interface for the users to your startup.
Talking about the functional possibility, there are many different contact form plugins to be used to add the forms into a WordPress website. These include Ninja Forms, Gravity Forms, WPForms and many others.
It is mostly unpredictable to gauge the user response for your MVP launched in the market. You can only estimate the response to some extent. To do that, you need more in-depth insights into user behavior. For instance, they can be about how many users visit your MVP website per day or over a period of time, for how long they stay on it, at which section they spend the maximum time, from which region they are coming, and so on.
To get all these insights, it is crucial to integrate Google Analytics – one of the most popular web analytics service. You can do this with the help of MonsterInsights – a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. This plugin is easy to set up in just a few clicks for universal website tracking features. Also, you will get to see the website analytics right into your WordPress dashboard.
Another crucial aspect of launching your MVP website is to make sure it has been optimized for search engines. In other words, the basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) elements should exist in it to make it visible across the web for certain specific search strings.
For instance, if you are launching an interactive game meant for kids, the website should come up in the first few search results when a user searches for keywords like ‘Online Games for Kids’ or ‘Interactive Game for Kids Online.’ Making your website reach the top results of a search is a long-term process that depends on many factors. However, you can get the basics done right with the help of SEO plugins for WordPress, such as All in SEO or Yoast SEO.
With these plugins integrated into your website, you can optimize it in terms of keywords, meta tags, meta descriptions, content, ALT tags, and similar other SEO parameters.
Having a startup idea and building on it does mean a lot for the founders. It feels exciting to build a business on a creative line of thought, something that did not exist before. However, it is equally important to test and validate the idea in the form of an MVP.
With a WordPress website for your MVP, you can perform product validation, market the products or services online, attract potential customers, gather feedback and improve your business further. There is just no need to make the beginning complicated when there is a simple way out to get things started.
Did you like this article? How did you create your MVP launch website? What tools are you using for your startup? Tell us in the comments section.
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