From our experience at Ragebite, we’ve had the privilege to indulge with many founders and product owners across the board, at a time we had our share of experience launching a product such as Playbase.GG.

Before we continue, to give context to everything MVP is a minimum viable product or a version of a product that allows the founding team or product owner to collect the maximum of validated learning with the least minimum effort.

We’ve seen many common mistakes occur during this period while building an MVP and these steps had repercussions in the future.

Many founders and product owners choose this pathway:

• To build the whole product before launching it or not give a chance to their potential customers to give them feedback about their core solution.

• To not properly measure their runway for their product and they burned most of their budget while building the MVP.

• They failed to recognize patterns in user feedback and were too emotionally attached to the idea.

• They preferred to hire in-house teams to build the MVP and choose to spend too much time on vetting/onboarding team members instead of focusing on the actual task and avoiding this mistake by capitalizing through onboarding an agency or leveraging ready solutions.

• They choose to combat rounded problems and choose to have a wide offering at the start only to crash and burn as they’re not able to provide real value in any portion of their product.

• They choose to be impatient and expect results immediately instead of seeking success in smaller accomplishments and defining a pattern they need to build upon.

The result they got in return? They got a big dose of doubt, clouded judgment, lacking the will the continue, burning their runway, and losing momentum in their product (which is a big factor when launching a product as some markets evolve rapidly or somebody else can beat you to the finish line).

Steps required to take to launch your MVP

Now that we’ve identified the common mistakes that occur when placing your MVP on the market, while there are tons more factors let’s see what you need to have in mind on how to get a higher chance of actually giving value to your ICP (ideal customer profile) and growing the product to the next stage.

Step 1 — Team

Identify your co-founders and team members off the bat. You need to make sure that everyone has a part to play in it and to leave a contribution with their previous expertise. One more thing to be mindful of here is willpower and availability, if some of your key members are included in other projects then you can expect that most likely they will not be present 100% with their head.

Step 2 — Strategy

There are several factors you need to have in mind when developing your 90-day strategy to push forward an MVP.

• Identify the problem you’re solving

• Clarify your ideal customer

• Research the market and where you fit in it

• Developing the MVP, keep the unnecessary features away for future updates

• Launch strategy and building a community (following) around the product

• Feedback pipeline and information extraction

• Be ready to adapt and pivot quickly

Step 3 — Scope it out, tech debt, and development

Before developing your MVP you need to scope out the tech debt required to launch your MVP — what are the essentials you need to get the metrics that will help you in the future to move to the next stage?

Identify also how many users the solution should hold, nobody is expecting you to open up an enterprise package immediately or to be able to have tens of thousands of customers — but also be ready to scale fast as well. You do this by preventing potential case scenarios where you know where to turn if you get negative feedback or if you validate your idea successfully and are forced to scale.

• MVP development

  — Your MVP and its execution play an important part in how you transition next and what opportunities you have. It is important to know if the material and data you’re working with tech-wise are not familiar to you and if you can gain that expertise either through utilizing prevetted ready solutions or consulting someone considered an expert on the topic that could be an important role potentially. You’re investing your effort, time, and money every time you make a move with a product. Investors and your customers are able to recognize good or bad decision-making early on. The key to launching 10x faster is being able to scope your MVP, avoid common mistakes, and have a clear strategy for launching.

Recap and summary

The 90-day journey for some products is possible to be done even sooner with good execution that’s why it’s proper that you’re mindful of your early steps and decisions. A good product owner is able to establish great leadership, execute plans smoothly, and introduce changes naturally.

We here at Ragebite during our six-year work experience in building products for the esports, gaming, and web3 industry have gained the experience to allow us to build core solutions for products to help founders deliver 10x faster to the market.

If you play your cards right and leverage each opportunity carefully you might launch 10x faster to be able to scale or reiterate your idea.