An MVP website or landing page is an efficient way to quickly test a business hypothesis, and WordPress is one of the best platforms for building MVPs. In this post, we explain why.
In the business world, a good idea is worth its weight in gold. If you find the right idea and it “resonates” with your target audience, you can make a lot of money. However, building a business is no easy task.
How do you know that people will actually buy what you want to sell? You need to do thorough market research, consider how you will advertise the product, learn all you can about other businesses in your niche and do many other essential things that can significantly cut into your budget later on.
It’s one thing if all these efforts yield some positive results. It’s another thing if they were all for naught. Few people have shown interest in your offer. You can’t afford to make a loss. The money is wasted, the dream is dead.
What if instead of investing so much time and finance into a full business based on an idea, you could simply test that idea first with minimal investment? Positive momentum? Proceed with building a larger business. Negative? Give up on the idea and think about the next one.
Today we’ll discuss a method that enables this kind of testing and explain why WordPress (WP) is the best platform to put this approach into practice. If you have enough skills, you can create an MVP website yourself. Alternatively, you can entrust this to a professional WordPress agency to help you customise your website quickly.
Create an MVP website and get the best tool to measure audience response quickly and cost-effectively
You can find many definitions of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) on the internet. Regardless of how they are formulated, they all convey the meaning of this concept almost identically.
An MVP is a scaled-down variation of a larger product with sufficient functionality to test a business idea. It is very important to understand that the main purpose of an MVP is to allow the idea creator to find out if it is of interest to potential customers without spending a fortune.
Consider the famous example of Amazon, which started as a book-selling website but later added almost every other product under the sun, such as electronics, food, toys, jewellery and so on.
When you create an MVP website, you achieve an optimal balance between feasibility (finding out if the idea has resonated with a user group) and the number of features that allow a business owner to confirm or reject a hypothesis (e.g. “children aged 5 to 7 will want to play with this toy”).
You don’t have to add every little thing to an MVP. Only add the features that will allow the audience to use the product effectively. It’s important to draw a clear line between the absolutely necessary features and the features that are not essential for testing purposes. Then, when you see that people want to buy your product or services, you can do another iteration and add more features.
For example, do you need to integrate a payment gateway into your MVP so you can receive money from customers? Of course you do. Do you need a feature that allows users to share photos of flats reserved through your app if you’re in the property business? You may need that later, but it’s just a “nice to have” addition saved for later.
However, you should remember that when you build an MVP website or create an MVP landing page, you get a working product from the start. Each iteration simply adds something new if the idea proves to have value and the company (startup) continues to grow.
What are the benefits of creating an MVP website to test a business hypothesis?
Let’s summarise the main benefits you get when you create an MVP landing page or build an MVP website:
- You can test your idea and gather valuable data on user reactions that you can apply to your overall marketing strategy, all without having to dig deep into your pockets or worry too much about failure.</li
- You can get your product to market much faster than the conventional approach allows. This is particularly important for highly competitive niches where every second counts.</li
- An MVP is an excellent way to attract other entrepreneurs who may want to invest money in the product you have launched.</li
WordPress: The best platform for building MVPs
After you have an idea and have defined the features that your future MVP should have, the next step is to choose how you want to build your MVP website. You basically have two options: Have a solution developed from scratch or build on a ready-made system.
When it comes to MVPs, the “carte blanche” approach should be avoided. You need a running website in hours, not days, weeks or months. It’s smarter to take the second route: Create an MVP website or create an MVP landing page based on an existing platform.
Although the market offers a variety of such systems, nothing can compete with WordPress.
Here are 3 main reasons why you should choose this platform for your MVP:
Reason #1: It offers all the core functionalities to manage your website efficiently
There is absolutely no need to reinvent the wheel. All the essential features a website should have can be found in WP. Manage users and user roles, edit content in any way you want (edit text, add images, etc.), add and retrieve product information in an integrated database, and perform all other basic actions. You don’t need to be a tech expert to master the WP features.
Reason #2: You can create an MVP website in a matter of days or even hours
At the time of writing, the official WP website offers over 59,000 plugins for all purposes. You can choose from these to implement the core features of your MVP. Do you need a customised form? Choose this plugin, for example. Want to integrate a payment processor into your website? Use this one. The possibilities are endless.
Building a user interface for the MVP is also a matter of choosing a theme from over 9,000 themes (at the time of writing). Simply replace the dummy content with your own and off you go.
All this allows you to launch your MVP in just a few days or even hours, depending on the number of features you want it to have.
Reason #3: You can keep using WordPress after your hypothesis is confirmed
WordPress has evolved from a simple blog system to a platform for deploying almost all existing types of websites, including really large enterprise solutions. This means that once you’ve received proof of validity, you can rebuild the MVP to accommodate your new requirements, rather than choosing a different platform or having everything developed from scratch.
Although this requires some major changes, the main content and data does not need to be migrated elsewhere – saving time and money.
By choosing WordPress for your MVP, a business (startup) can significantly reduce risk, keep budget spend at a minimal level and reduce the time it takes to realise an idea in a real business environment.
An MVP doesn’t have to be poor quality
One thing to note: An MVP is not synonymous with poor quality. It’s just a normal e-commerce website designed to attract visitors and convert them into customers. It should have a pleasant look and feel and load quickly. The only difference is a smaller number of features.
If you want to give your MVP all the features it needs, you could add multiple plugins that may not be compatible with each other. This will slow down your website and complicate the visitors’ experience when using it.
Another challenge an MVP creator might face is that default themes can look very similar. Therefore, there is a risk of the MVP getting lost among many similar websites.
To overcome these problems, you can contact the WordPress Agency development team.
