Picking an eCommerce platform to sell online is a key moment for every business. There are plenty of pre-built solutions on the internet, some of which offer features that let you get online and start selling immediately. Chances are, if you're shopping for an ecommerce solution, you've heard of the larger ones like WooCommerce, Shopify, and BigCommerce.
But not all these platforms are great at protecting your business. And even worse, some will try to profit off your hard work beyond the money you’re spending for their solution. For example, some will actually steal information you worked hard to get, like customer data, and use it for their own goals.
If you aren’t careful, you could end up stuck with an eCommerce solution that doesn’t serve you anymore.
How can you protect yourself from this?
Issues with Most SaaS eCommerce Solutions
Picking a pre-built solution sounds great. You gain access to a powerful platform that can get you online and ready to sell quickly.
But there is a huge downside in going with someone else’s solution. You don’t really own your shop and the data it processes. The solution’s provider can pull the plug and close down your store any time they want. All of your [...]
Building a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is the fastest way to engage with the market and find out how it responds to your product. MVPs focus on getting the product ready as soon as possible, rather than offering a complete set of features.
Traditional product development — where you create a fully-featured product before shipping it — is virtually obsolete. That’s because with that approach, companies were running out of money before finishing their product. And many realized they wasted months on developing features nobody cares about.
With an MVP, you save money and let users guide your product development. You can rely on real-world data instead of untested assumptions.
But now that you have decided to go with an MVP, how do you actually go about developing it?
Planning for an MVP That Is Actually Minimal
MVPs follow the mantra “keep it simple”. If Word is Microsoft’s fully featured product, then Windows’ Block Notes is the MVP. Both software do the same thing in a nutshell: they allow you to write, create documents, and save files on your computer. But Word has a host of advanced features (many that the average user won’t ever use) that Block Notes doesn’t. Block Notes is straight to [...]
An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a product development philosophy based on fast market feedback. You build just enough of your product for it to perform its core functions, and then start selling it immediately.
This lets you engage the market way quicker than with traditional development where you only ship a product when totally completed. You can then use the market’s feedback to build the rest of your product or abandon it if there’s no interest.
According to a report from cbinsights.com, 38% of startups fail because they run out of money, and 35% fail because the market didn’t care about their product or service.
That’s because they burned money to create a product that the market doesn’t need. Costs burgeon when you waste time developing features for a product nobody wants.
And that’s what makes MVPs so valuable. If the MVP fails, you won’t waste years and thousands of dollars to create a dud. But if the MVP sees some success, then you know you are onto something.
5 Ways You can Save Money on an MVP
Spending money wisely goes a long way in the modern business climate, even if you have lots of funds.
An MVP lets you know if you should invest [...]
