4. Consider the landscape of tools in your industry

One of the keys to a successful MVP is reducing time to market. Capitalizing on existing tools can dramatically reduce the scope of work and effort required to launch your product.

When selecting a programming language and other back-end technologies, first identify the best open source tools available in your industry and use their tech stack as a guide.  Your ability to build and quickly revise your product depends on having access to a large ecosystem of tools, tooling and talent.

Note: If you are launching with only a simple native mobile application you should use a back-end provider like Parse or StackMob instead of developing your own. Don’t rely just on market share, look for recent development on Github from a wide variety of contributors and a large number of StackOverflow questions. The best tools have a vibrant and enthusiastic developer community around them. In the ecommerce space, for example, Magento is the biggest player with 25% market share and an installed base of 250,000 websites. Spree is a newer platform with an installed base of only 5,000 websites. However, it has over 500 active contributors, ranking it in the top 50 open source projects worldwide. Spree is a very likely a better choice if you are starting a new ecommerce project, and since it is written in Ruby that would influence your choice of back-end programming language.