10 Questions to Ask Before Building Your Startup’s MVP

So you’ve got a brilliant business idea. You’ve told your friends, who all nod enthusiastically. You’ve imagined the TechCrunch headlines about your inevitable success. Now it’s time to build your MVP and get this rocket ship off the ground!

But wait.

Before you spend thousands of rands and countless hours developing your minimum viable product, there are critical questions you need to answer. These questions could mean the difference between building something people actually want and creating an expensive digital paperweight.

As someone who’s helped dozens of South African startups develop MVPs—and witnessed both spectacular successes and painful failures—I’ve compiled the 10 most important questions every founder should answer before writing a single line of code.

1. What Core Problem Are You Actually Solving?

This sounds obvious, but you’d be shocked how many founders can’t articulate this clearly.

‘We’re building a platform that uses AI to revolutionize the way people think about shopping’ is not a problem statement.

‘Small retailers waste 5-10 hours weekly managing inventory manually, leading to stockouts and lost sales’ is a problem statement.

The best way to clarify your core problem:

• Describe it in a single sentence
• Include who experiences the problem
• Quantify the impact when possible
• Explain when and how often it occurs
• Outline what happens if the problem isn’t solved

Without a clear, painful problem, your MVP is a solution searching for a problem—the most common startup killer I see.

2. Have You Validated Demand Without Building Anything?

Here’s a shocking concept: you can verify if people want your solution before building it.

Smart founders use these pre-MVP validation techniques:

• Create a landing page describing your concept and collect email sign-ups
• Run small ad campaigns to test click-through rates on different value propositions
• Conduct customer interviews focusing on willingness to pay
• Set up a ‘fake door’ test (where users can click to use a feature that doesn’t exist yet, measuring interest)
• Pre-sell to early adopters before building

‘We pre-sold our inventory management system to five small retailers before writing a line of code,’ explains Cape Town entrepreneur Thandi. ‘Those advance payments completely funded our MVP development.’

For more validation strategies, check out our comprehensive guide on validating your business idea.

3. What’s the Smallest Version That Delivers Real Value?

First-time founders almost always try to build too much.

Your MVP should not be a miniature version of your grand vision. It should be the absolute minimum required to deliver value and start the learning process.

Consider these successful ’embarrassingly simple’ MVPs:

• Dropbox started as a simple video demo
• Zappos began by purchasing shoes from retail stores and shipping them directly
• Buffer launched with a landing page and manually-sent social media posts

‘Our first version was just a WhatsApp group and a Google Form,’ admits logistics startup founder Mandla. ‘It was clunky, but it let us serve customers and learn what features actually mattered before investing in development.’

The more complex your MVP, the longer before you start learning from real users. And in startups, learning speed is everything.

4. How Will You Measure Success?

‘We’ll see if people like it’ is not a measurement plan.

Before building, define specific, quantifiable metrics that will tell you if your MVP is working. These typically include:

Metric Type	Examples	Why It Matters
Activation	Sign-up completion rate, first meaningful action	Shows if users understand your value
Engagement	Session frequency, feature usage, time in app	Indicates if you’re solving a real problem
Retention	Day 7/30 return rate, churn percentage	Reveals ongoing value and product-market fit
Referral	Net Promoter Score, organic sharing	Demonstrates enthusiasm for your solution
Revenue	Conversion rate, average transaction value	Validates willingness to pay

‘We set specific targets before launch: 40% of users would complete our onboarding flow, and 20% would return within 7 days,’ shares fintech founder Lerato. ‘When we hit only 15% and 5% respectively, we knew exactly where to focus improvements.’

Without clear success metrics, you’ll struggle to interpret user behavior and iterate effectively.

5. What Hypotheses Are You Testing?

Your MVP isn’t just a product—it’s a testing tool for your most critical business assumptions.

Effective founders explicitly identify their riskiest assumptions and design MVPs to test them. Common hypotheses include:

• Users will pay X amount for this solution
• The onboarding process can be simple enough for users to complete independently
• Our target audience experiences this problem frequently enough to use our solution regularly
• We can acquire customers profitably through specific channels

‘We had four explicit hypotheses for our first version,’ explains SaaS founder Thabo. ‘We were mostly wrong about three of them, but that clarity helped us pivot quickly to a much better version.’

For each hypothesis, define:

• What you’re testing specifically
• What results would validate or invalidate your assumption
• How you’ll collect the relevant data
• What actions you’ll take based on different outcomes

This structured approach transforms your MVP from a product launch into a learning engine.

6. How Will You Find Your First Users?

‘If we build it, they will come’ is the most expensive fallacy in startup history.

Before building your MVP, you should have a specific plan for getting your first 10, 100, and 1,000 users. This often looks different from your long-term acquisition strategy.

Effective initial user acquisition approaches include:

• Personal outreach to your network
• Community building in relevant online groups
• Partnerships with existing businesses
• Content creation addressing your target audience’s problems
• Manual recruitment of beta users

‘We literally went door-to-door to sign up our first 50 small business users,’ shares accounting app founder Zinhle. ‘It wasn’t scalable, but it gave us valuable initial feedback and reference customers.’

If you don’t know exactly how you’ll get your first users, you’re not ready to build. For practical customer acquisition strategies, see our guide on startup growth hacks that cost nothing.

7. What Technology Approach Balances Speed, Cost, and Scalability?

Choosing the right technical approach for your MVP involves critical tradeoffs.

Approach	Pros	Cons	Best For
No-code/low-code platforms	Fastest to market, lowest initial cost	Limited customization, potential scaling issues	Validating core concepts quickly
Custom development	Full control, better scaling potential	Higher cost, longer timeline	Complex or unique functionality
Hybrid approach	Balance of speed and customization	Requires careful architecture	Most typical MVPs

‘We built our first version in Bubble in just three weeks for R30,000,’ shares marketplace founder Kagiso. ‘It had limitations, but let us validate our concept before investing R350,000 in custom development for V2.’

Your technology decisions should be guided by:

• How quickly you need to validate your idea
• Your available budget
• The complexity of your core functionality
• Your scaling requirements if successful
• Available technical resources

For more guidance on technology choices, explore our detailed analysis of how to build an MVP on a budget.

8. What Will Your Version 2.0 Look Like?

While focusing on your MVP, you should also have a clear vision for what comes next.

This isn’t about building V2 features into your MVP (a common mistake). Rather, it’s about:

• Understanding your MVP’s deliberate limitations
• Having a hypothesis about what users will request next
• Planning how you’ll gather feedback to inform V2 priorities
• Considering how technical choices in V1 will impact V2 development

‘We built our MVP knowing certain limitations would frustrate users,’ admits fintech founder Bandile. ‘But we also built in feedback mechanisms to capture those frustrations, which guided our next development sprint perfectly.’

Without this forward-looking perspective, you risk building an MVP that becomes a technical dead end rather than the first step in an evolution.

9. How Will You Handle Technical Debt?

Every MVP accumulates technical debt—shortcuts and compromises made to get to market quickly.

Smart founders plan for this reality:

• They explicitly recognize where they’re taking shortcuts
• They document technical debt as it’s created
• They allocate future resources for addressing critical issues
• They distinguish between acceptable long-term debt and critical items

‘We maintained a ‘debt register’ from day one,’ explains healthtech founder Thandi. ‘This helped us prioritize which corners we could cut temporarily versus which shortcuts would cause major problems later.’

Without this awareness, technical debt can accumulate silently until it cripples your ability to iterate quickly—the very advantage startups need most.

Learn from others’ mistakes by reading our guide on top software development mistakes startups make.

10. What Resources Will You Need Beyond Development?

Building your MVP is just one piece of the launch puzzle.

Before committing to development, ensure you’ve planned for:

• Design resources for user interface and experience
• Content creation for onboarding and instruction
• Customer support processes and tools
• Analytics implementation for tracking key metrics
• Legal requirements including terms of service and privacy policies
• Marketing materials and launch assets

‘We budgeted appropriately for development but completely overlooked the design and content resources needed,’ shares e-commerce founder Nomsa. ‘The resulting poor user experience undermined our otherwise solid technical implementation.’

A common pattern I see: startups spend 90% of their budget on development and then launch with inadequate supporting resources, severely limiting their MVP’s effectiveness.

Bonus Question: Should You Even Build a Custom MVP?

Before diving into development, consider whether building custom software is actually necessary at your stage.

Many successful startups began with creative ‘no-code’ approaches:

• Using existing platforms with slight customizations
• Combining multiple off-the-shelf tools through integrations
• Creating ‘manual MVPs’ where founders perform functions that will later be automated
• Adapting white-label solutions for quick market entry

‘We started by creating a custom Shopify store with some clever workflows,’ explains retailer Lesedi. ‘This let us validate our unique retail concept for R15,000 instead of R200,000 for a custom platform. Once proven, we raised funding for our proprietary system.’

Don’t build what you can borrow, buy, or piece together from existing tools.

The MVP Planning Framework

To tie these questions together, I recommend using this simple framework:

1. Problem Definition:

   • Who has the problem?
   • Why is it painful?
   • How are they solving it today?

2. Solution Hypothesis:

   • What is the simplest solution that addresses the core problem?
   • What features are truly essential vs. nice-to-have?
   • How will users experience immediate value?

3. Validation Plan:

   • What specific hypotheses are we testing?
   • What metrics will indicate success?
   • What user feedback mechanisms will we implement?

4. Resources Required:

   • What development approach makes most sense?
   • What non-development resources do we need?
   • What is our realistic timeline and budget?

5. Go-to-Market Strategy:

   • How will we acquire our first users?
   • What support will they need to be successful?
   • How will we iterate based on early feedback?

Conclusion: The Questions That Save You R300,000

These questions might seem basic, but I’ve seen them save startups hundreds of thousands of rands in wasted development costs.

The most expensive MVP is one that perfectly executes the wrong idea. By thoroughly answering these questions before development, you dramatically increase your chances of building something people actually want and are willing to pay for.

Remember: your MVP isn’t about building a perfect product. It’s about creating the minimum experiment that lets you start learning from real users as quickly as possible.

As startup sage Eric Ries puts it: ‘The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.’

Or as we say more plainly in South Africa: ‘Don’t build a Mercedes when you can learn what you need with a bicycle.’

---

Ready to build your MVP the right way?

Take your next steps with confidence:

1. Enter the Next Disruptor competition for a chance to receive 10 weeks of expert development support. Apply before the deadline.

2. Download our ‘MVP Planning Canvas’ to work through these 10 questions methodically for your specific startup idea.

3. Book a free MVP strategy session with our team to review your concept and help you define the right scope for your first version.

Don’t waste resources building the wrong product. Answer these questions first.

---

What critical question would you add to this list based on your MVP experience?

Contact us to discuss our services now!