What does your audience need? Do you need to build a fancy product with extensive capabilities or did you completely overshoot and miss the core value your audience needs? As always with the lean approach, the answer lies in testing – you need to find out what your customers need and what exactly works for them. So how do you do that? You build an MVP – a minimal viable product, a topic Valentina Gredler is an expert on.
Valentina on MVPs
My name is Valentina – I have been a Growth Hacker for more than 4 years now as well as being a mentor for the ELEVATE program.
Affectionately called Vali by colleagues, Valentina has worked with start-ups on every project imaginable. Over the past few years she has incorporated various growth hacks, has done online and offline marketing as well as worked with PR: Always with the businesses’ growth as her absolute goal. Now, as a mentor for ELEVATE, she does not only help founders with marketing but also with business evaluation and strategic decisions.
During her workshop for Batch 3 she helped our start-ups with creating their own MVP as well as showing them ways to get people to test it.
Vali, why is creating an MVP so important?
Testing out your business hypotheses is crucial – not only do many start-ups develop irrelevant products, many fail to see what their core audience need. Testing the MVP enables you to verify your hypothesis as well as finding the concrete needs of your audience.
Which brings us back to the Lean approach: You build your MVP, test it and measure the outcome – then you implement what you learned.
This lean approach is Valentina’s absolute mantra and also number 1 tip to share:
Believe in data and not your or anybody’s gut feeling.
In her opinion this is also what makes ELEVATE stand out from other accelerator programs:
We help start-ups hands on with evaluation, business modelling, marketing and IT – Also we remind them to keep on track and stay true to the lean start-up mantra.
