As a product designer with over 5 years of experience in crypto, I’ve helped multiple founders to get their startups off the ground. In most cases, it all started with creating an MVP, which stands for minimum viable product. This stage is about delivering a website or app with a basic set of features that people will use and be ready to pay for. Early customers can provide you with valuable feedback, and, when combined with cold data, it will lay foundations for future product development.
When it comes to designing MVPs for cryptocurrency projects, most founders tend to commit some blunders that may further result in disappointing reactions from customers. While all of them are quite obvious to designers, crypto entrepreneurs can benefit from this knowledge to avoid wasting time, effort, and money on rebuilding their products.
In this piece, I have observed 5 common mistakes made by crypto startup founders at the MVP stage – providing each one with a detailed explanation of reasons, implications, and ways it can be prevented.
Mistake #1: Adding Functionality Before Your Startup Reaches the Product-Market Fit
Some founders believe they can bypass the MVP phase and launch a fully equipped product from the start. However, if you spend excessive time on overdevelopment, relying solely on your vision and without collecting crucial data, you will encounter significant challenges. There's a possibility that even a well-designed and refined product will ultimately prove to be ineffective.
Implications
Adding more and more extra features to your website or app can cause delays in design and development. Meanwhile, expanding product functionality without considering user feedback does not guarantee value for users. As a result, certain pages and functions may become unusable, requiring rebuilding and redesigning, which can put a significant burden on your budget.
This all together will lead to:
- Considerable financial losses due to wasting big sums of money on bringing irrelevant hypotheses to reality;
- Lost competition and giving way to other similar startups who will get ahead of you with the release of their products refined as per customer feedback.
What you should do instead
When you’re launching or testing your product, remember that less is more. Devote all your efforts to designing its core functionality and killer features – it’s minimal, but it will solve users’ problems and distinguish you from competitors. This, in turn, will help you optimize both design and development, while also saving costs.
When adding new features, take a data-driven approach instead of relying on fleeting assumptions. Roll out your MVP in the market to align your vision with the actual needs of real users.
Mistake #2: Ignoring UX and User Flow
There are founders who try to speed up the MVP-building process even more, neglecting the most important design components. And if your business plays between Web2 and Web3, this may end badly, since blockchain-based products still seem complicated to many. What you should always keep in mind is that top-notch user experience is paramount for onboarding users who are new to cryptocurrency.
Implications
First impressions are vital. If your product has a poor user experience and lacks clear guidance, it can drive customers away for good. If people struggle to understand or navigate your platform or app or feel confused by its features, even the innovative aspects of your MVP won't help. Instead, they'll go unnoticed, and potential customers will choose competing products that respect their user experiences.
As a result, the UX that is “assembled on the knee” will cause you to:
- Allocate additional resources to fix and improve your product. The longer you wait, the more challenging this will become;
- Experience difficulties in attracting new users and retaining ongoing ones. You’ll fail to get much traction from your customers, which means a loss of money and a decline in revenue.
What you should do instead
To win users in the crypto market, your product should be fast, intuitive, and easy to use even in its MVP phase. So focus on excelling UX and user flow – check the business logic of the project and simplify the interaction of the customer with it. If you lack budget and time, consider optimizing your UI development by giving up on animations and customized illustrations.
Mistake #3: Assigning Design Tasks to Developers
I see it time and time again, where founders ask developers to design their MVPs in order to showcase them as soon as possible. This probably makes sense if you’re at the stage of building an alpha version of your product; but is a poor decision when exposing your B2C-oriented startup to the users. Designers and developers are not interchangeable – they have different responsibilities, skills, and types of production sets. That’s why they should work in tandem to deliver a well-designed final product.
Implications
In most cases, your MVP will end up with an unattractive interface, poor UX, and limited user understanding. Don’t forget that the crypto market is already overcrowded, and your potential customers have plenty of alternatives to choose from. If you put developers in charge of a job they’re not intended to do, you run the risk of losing out to the more advanced competition. And accordingly, failing to convert a large portion of potential customers into paying users.
And again, getting disappointing data and negative feedback will lead to necessary changes, extra expenses, and extended timeframes.
What you should do instead
An experienced UX/UI designer or design team is an absolute must-have for creating high-quality MVPs for crypto startups. You can always turn to specialized agencies or hire freelancers to enhance your product design. They will ensure that your final MVP is easy to use, aligned with user needs, and features a clean, modern, and visually appealing interface.
Mistake #4: Bailing on Preparing a Design System (UI Kit)
Founders often prioritize immediate tasks and goals, leaving other matters for later. And once their product is ready to scale up, they encounter challenges that could be easily avoided if they had all necessary UI elements (such as primary and secondary buttons in different states and variants, modals, color palettes, fonts, etc.) and guidelines on how to implement them at hand. I’m talking about creating a full-fledged design system a.k.a. UI kit.
Implications
A comprehensive design system guarantees unified and attractive UI elements across different pages. Without it, developers may create multiple versions of the same button based on existing layouts. Building each UI component from scratch not only slows down the process but also leads to design inconsistencies and a mismatched interface style.
This will negatively impact user experience and impressions, making your product appear unfinished. Apart from that, you will run into:
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Long loading pages and elements, “trashed” code, and inaccuracies in the work of the website or app – as your startup scales out, the number of such inaccuracies will grow many times over;
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Increased costs on support, development, and design – if there are no rules set by the design system, each new UI component will have its own functions and specifics. This will make further maintenance of your product a real headache for every party involved.
What you should do instead
Create a detailed design system at the MVP phase as it will simplify long-term development and maintenance of your product. A flexible UI kit will save you costs and speed up the implementation of new features while preserving interface consistency. When assembling a timeless design system, keep in mind these two factors: the ease of extending and complying with its rules and the complexity of failing to respect them.
Mistake #5: Overlooking the Importance of Calculating Product Economics in Advance
The last but not least mistake I see founders make with surprising regularity is setting up tight budgets but spending resources in an uncontrolled way. It probably happens because they feel overly optimistic about turning their ideas into sustainable business models.
In fact, if you don’t allocate some extra money to unplanned expenses (trust me, you’ll face many of them throughout your project), it’s safe to consider that you didn’t calculate product economics at all. And then you’re literally tossing a coin, speculating on whether your startup will be profitable or unprofitable in the long term. Of course, if this “long term” will ever come.
Implications
Your project will close even before the launch because you are simply out of money. And you will find it much harder to raise new funds since investors won’t be lining up to back the project that is growing haphazardly and chaotically. At least who will be eager to support entrepreneurs who can’t handle finances?
What you should do instead
Give precedence to the complex assessment of your business model in terms of development and marketing expenses. Evaluate your product’s earning potential, also embracing the competitive environment and the needs of the target audience. If the numbers don’t add up, revise your business concept and find new ways of driving revenues or cutting costs.
Designing Your MVP Correctly
Building a successful startup requires collaboration, not just individual effort. It's wise to seek guidance from design experts to learn and grow. The recommendations in this article will help founders avoid costly mistakes and handle challenges confidently.
To wrap up – in the crypto world, great UX is one of the major competitive advantages that can take your product to the top of the industry. Meanwhile, getting help from crypto design agencies will be beneficial and pay off. You’ll gain access to the unique expertise and assistance of professionals who know how to bridge the gap between users and cutting-edge blockchain technology.
It's essential to prioritize doing everything well from the start, laying the foundation for future scaling of your MVP. Invest your time and money wisely, leveraging crucial aspects of product design for efficiency.
But we are all human and sometimes there are situations we simply can’t predict. So don’t be too hard on yourself – learn from your mistakes, test new hypotheses, and tweak your product, taking into account acquired feedback and users’ needs.
The featured image for this article was generated with Kadinsky 2.
Prompt: Startup building mistakes.