POC vs. Prototype vs. MVP: What’s Best for Your Startup?

Some key principles of Agile and Lean Startup are learning fast and shipping often. These principles are great advice as they reduce the risk of product teams overinvesting in products and services that are still not validated.

However, how can you live up to these principles before shipping your first versions? This article will review several approaches embracing lean and agile in the first steps of your journey to product-market fit.

What is a Proof of Concept (POC)?

A Proof of Concept is a demonstration of the feasibility of a product or part of a product. PoC is part of the project discovery phase before you move to developing a final product. It’s used to validate that the riskiest parts of a product can be implemented.

Why PoC Matters for Startups?

Many of us have heard that 90% of all startups, or one in five, fail, and this usually occurs in their early stages. By creating a PoC, startups prove there are no technical blockers to implementing the product they would like to pitch. A PoC is not a shippable artifact, so the team can focus entirely on proving its feasibility and not spend cycles thinking about the user interface, non-functional requirements, etc. This is liberating and allows extreme focus on addressing the technical risks.

Core Elements of a Strong PoC

1. Clear Objective and Hypothesis

A PoC should have a well-defined objective that addresses specific assumptions. This will help keep the scope in check and ensure that the PoC spends less time and effort than necessary.

2. Technical Feasibility Validation

The PoC should focus entirely on technical feasibility. Adding other objectives, such as usability testing or problem validation, will increase the scope and add more risk to the project.

3. Minimal Viable Scope

Reduce the scope of the PoC to the minimum possible set that will validate the initial hypothesis and remove everything else that is non-essential.

4. Test Criteria

Starting from the initial objective, define the passing criteria for your PoC even before starting working on it. These criteria should answer the following questions: What does it mean for the PoC to be successful? By measuring those, you will clearly define what has been done for the PoC and know when to move on.

What is a Prototype?

A prototype is an illustrative example of your future product that can be partially functional or non-functional. The purpose of the prototype is to represent a given interaction with the product and test the users’ reactions and expectations.

Benefits of a Prototype

By building a prototype, you can test a certain assumption that you are making while still designing or developing your product. These assumptions might be:

• User experience and usability: users understand how to interact with the product and can find their way to extract value from the product
• Feature prioritization: understand the relative importance of different features to better prioritize the execution and possibly reduce the scope of the MVP
• Technical feasibility: In some cases, the product's feasibility is questionable from a technical point of view; some prototypes aim to validate that the technical design can support the expected load and other non-functional requirements.

Methods and Tools to Build a Prototype

There are multiple approaches to building a prototype depending on the phase of the product, your confidence in it, and the type of assumptions you want to test with the prototype.

Wireframes

The most basic way to create a prototype is to have wireframes - an image or set of images that illustrate screens, pages, or features for the product with just black lines.

Wireframes are great to map out the structure of your product, navigation, and content positioning.

Some tools you can use to build wireframes are Figma, Balsamiq, and Miro.

Low-fidelity Clickable Prototypes

To build on top of wireframes, you can create interactions between the different states that are mapped out. This can illustrate key interactions like purchasing and registering for your product. With this prototype, you can test user flows and general usability. To prepare such a prototype, you can use your wireframes in Figma or InVision.

High-Fidelity Prototypes

The next phase is to create detailed designs that present the visual look and feel by adding branding, colors, and typography. This way, you can capture feedback about visual appeal and aesthetics.

HTML/CSS Front-End Prototype

Moving away from images and static artifacts, our prototypes evolve into clickable, simplified versions of the actual product. In most cases, no functionality works behind the scenes, and the results of users’ interactions are predefined and hardcoded.

Functional Prototypes with No-Code Tools

Prototypes can be built without development using point-and-click, no-code, or low-code tools. These are great for quickly prototyping more sophisticated parts of your product to test the complete user flow and gauge customers' responses to the proposed solution.

Some no-code tools that can help with producing functional prototypes are Bubble, Adalo, or Webflow.

Depending on the complexity of your product, you can decide to use one or multiple of these techniques to accelerate learning and reduce the risks related to launching the MVP.

Understanding Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for Startups

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the minimum set of functionalities you can package to solve a customer's problem. It is the first version of the actual product that you ship to target customers.

Two important aspects of the MVP need to work together: keeping it minimal and valuable. Of all the first versions that you can ship, the MVP has the fewest features and still solves a significant problem for the target customers.

Shipping an MVP is a great approach, but it can still take multiple months of work to achieve. How can you reduce the risk during that period and still get early validation from potential customers before launching your first version? This is where prototypes come in handy. Using prototypes, you can make more informed decisions based on data from real potential customers.

Key Characteristics of MVP

• Customer Value: A well-scoped MVP is tailored to the customer's identified needs and focuses on their most pressing problems. Based on the conducted customer interviews, you have discovered which are the most important problems for your buyer persona and focus explicitly on tackling those.
• Minimal: When starting a new product, it’s tempting to start adding nice-to-have features and cool extras but they are only pushing further the moment you get real-world feedback.
• Flexible: The first version of your product is built with many assumptions. Instead of making big, hard decisions, prioritize flexibility and agility to prepare for the upcoming changes driven by reactions of your customers.

Proof of Concept vs Prototype vs MVP: Understanding the Key Differences and Similarities

What do they have in common?

All three concepts focus on derisking certain aspects of the journey from an idea to a product-market fit by embracing an iterative approach. The emphasis is on making the most efficient use of time, resources, and talent while validating core assumptions.

How do they differ?

There are many aspects by which PoC, Prototypes, and MVP differ. The differences come mainly from the focus and objective of each of those activities. From the smallest scope and effort, the PoC, to the biggest one, the MVP, the level of complexity, the target audience, and the strategy to execute differ significantly.

The PoC is the earliest validation that the product you envision building is even possible. The PoC is not dependent on customers’ feedback as it’s never shown to them. The prototype is the first time you expose the idea for your product to potential customers to test for problem-solution fit. You can think about the PoC vs Prototype as Internal vs External validation.

The biggest difference when comparing prototypes and proof of concepts vs MVP is that the MVP is a version of the product that can be monetized while the other two are created purely with research purpose.

Expert Tips on Picking the Best Approach for a Startup

Depending on your startup, you might have to use all the techniques or just ship an MVP. Skipping the MVP is not advised, as this means you will increase the chance of investing in product development without having the proper validation.

When to Build a PoC?

If there is a technical challenge in the product you build, planning a PoC is a great step to mitigate that risk. The challenge might be of different types like:

• Core Technology Feasibility: For example, can Generative AI create accurate instructions for filling out a tax statement?
• Scalability: for example, how many simultaneous users can be served with a single instance of AI model deployed on-premise.
• Integration with External Systems: for example, validate that APIs exposed for submitting a tax statement to the national revenue agencies are enough to serve the use case you are targeting.

Keep in mind that PoC is throwaway work, and it’s developed with the mindset that it won’t be used in production. This allows for speed and efficiency, but it also means that the implementation must be redone after the PoC is completed.

When to Use a Prototype?

A prototype is a great alternative for validating different aspects of your product's user experience before actually building it. Prototypes are often built on top of artifacts that your team creates as part of the product development process.

In that sense, the investment needed to create a prototype might be negligible compared to receiving early user feedback. The earlier you discover problems in your product, the easier and cheaper they are to fix.

On the other hand, creating HTML/CSS or no-code-based prototypes might not require significant work to achieve the realistic feeling needed. A cost-benefit analysis is needed to assess whether skipping straight to the MVP wouldn’t be more efficient.

Wrap-Up

If you follow the Agile and Lean Startup principles, the first version of your product should always be the MVP—the minimum version that can solve a significant customer problem.

The PoC and the prototypes are great additional techniques for reducing the risk associated with building your MVP and allowing you to follow an iterative and flexible approach to scoping and designing your problem.

Regardless of which of these techniques you plan to use, you must build on the foundation of validated customer-problem fit. This means you have identified the customer segment, problem, and unique value proposition you want to start with.

The Icanpreneur platform provides a step-by-step approach backed by proven methodologies and AI technologies to help you move from an idea to a product-market fit. If you still have low confidence in your buyer persona, their problems, or the value proposition that would resonate with them - jump on Icanpreneur and supercharge your entrepreneurial journey.

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