We are living in a digital era where individuals and entrepreneurs dream of establishing a winning business with a great startup.
Undoubtedly, start-ups are one of the biggest buzzwords in this era, and they can revolutionize businesses if we add an effective web/mobile application.
A mobile application is the best tool to bring the services to the end-users; however, it is very important to have a fully functional application that can fulfill the requirements of the customers because that is a deciding factor for the success of the startup or enterprise.
The sole reason why many startups fail or do not reach the heights as per their plans is that the offerings made by them are based on their own assumptions and turn a blind eye to the user’s acceptance and reaction to such a platform.
It is not enough to have an app idea and expect it to be successful. Most startups and enterprises spend months or even years developing or improving their mobile or web applications, but not all of them are successful.
It is a fact that almost two-thirds of the applications in the App Store (iOS and Android) catalog get less than 1,000 downloads in their initial year, even after spending huge amounts on marketing and customer acquisitions.
The most common root cause is the lack of regular conversation with the audience about their requirements and liking or need for the product.
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— Eric Ries
Organizations sometimes release their products directly, but that may attract many risks. Many innovative ideas fail because organizations do not involve their target audience & fail to test the waters; they do not ask their potential customers about their requirements, accessibility, and convenience
To address these sorts of concerns, instead of releasing a full-featured mobile application, a startup business idea can opt for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) App approach.
An MVP approach can help your application counter potential future risks so that we can take adequate steps to mitigate them.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is indeed the smallest and least featureful version of the proposed application, which might have core functionalities that can help the customers assess and utilize the application.
We can also say that MVP is a miniaturized version of the app, which helps the application team collect validated learning about customers, their preferences, and requirements with the least effort.
Then, the app team can proceed with the development of the actual product with its full set of features after incorporating the feedback from the customers in a series of iterations.
MVP helps us in the design, development, testing, and delivery of the final product. It plays an extremely important role in web and mobile app development costs.
In today’s cut-throat competition, it is extremely important to release a product as a rapid pace and keep budgetary constraints in mind.
Developing an MVP prior to the final product helps us save both time and money, along with the following additional benefits.
An MVP application always focuses on the core idea and functions that it must fulfill. We implement a lean ideology to develop MVP applications so we can start building a product with a minimal budget in a given timeline.
We can certainly include some high-priority but minimum features; it will help us keep efforts and budgets in check. The MVP also allows us to test mobile applications with minimal risk.
It is a fact that development time is directly proportional to the app development cost; the more time, the higher the cost.
MVP offers less development, which helps us reduce the overall cost. At the same time, the moment we launch the MVP, we start getting feedback from the end-user, which can be used to make the necessary improvements in the application and release an updated version so quickly.
MVP gives us an opportunity to assess the situation of our product in quite an early phase of development.
It helps us understand if the proposed application will be successful and if we need to invest more budget on the further development of the application.
Here we get an opportunity to receive the opinion of the end-users at an early stage of application development. These opinions help us shape the final product and make course corrections if required.
It also enhances the user experience as users experience in the application at a later stage, which gives them a positive impression about the application developer.
This is certainly the most important advantage the MVP approach offers. It helps us avoid shelling most of our resources right away, on things that may not hit the chord with the customers.
As per numerous market research studies, the mobile application market is booming, however, there is a very small number of applications in the iOS app store or Android app store that are downloaded by customers.
The sizeable section of the application is not even considered for downloading and installation, due to several performances, user interface, and utility issues.
Hence, it is strongly recommended to develop an MVP, as it offers the easiest way to improve the mobile development approach.
An MVP application can help us understand whether the application is correct for our target audience and market. It helps us project our brand to the user’s incorrect way.
Application validation also helps us make an assessment of whether our application is unique to others and what USP is offering in comparison to its competitors.
All this information helps us make the right strategy to project our application and promote it further.
Here, we will talk about the process of developing an MVP application.
Thinking about the idea is not enough, because many times it happens that the idea is good but fails because it does not fit into what the market needs.
This is an initial step and it gives holistic feedback from the end-users, which helps us register the actual user requirements.
It is necessary to understand the target user’s needs before embarking on the MVP app development process.
We should conduct the surveys, as that helps us gather more information, and the more information we have, the more opportunities we have to succeed.
At the same time, it is also important to keep an eye on our competitors and their offerings, as that will help us understand the strong and weak points of our application.
Thus, it helps businesses validate the idea even before investing time in the development & design of an MVP app.
We need to understand what value our MVP application can offer to its users. We need to know why would they buy your product? These are extremely important questions, as they will help us shape the application so that it fulfills user expectations.
We should also be clear about the essential estimations of our applications. We must define the value, then outline them in the design phase and build the application based on that only.
This step comes under the app design process, We must strive hard to design the application in such a way that it remains convenient to the end-users.
We must look and assess the application from the end user’s perspective, right from the login screen till the final process, such as making online payments or committing any important transaction.
We must keep in mind the User Flow, which is indeed an important aspect, and this should not be missed at any cost.
We must define the user flow during the design stage. We must explain the steps needed to reach the main objective and our focus should remain on the fulfillment of the core tasks.
All the core tasks and their flowcharts should be clearly defined and laid out, as that will help us define the features of the application.
In this step, we must list all the features we want to incorporate into our MVP product before we start developing it.
Once the app development process is finished, we should cross-check the features added with the list we prepared before, This will give us an idea of the direction we are moving in to build an MVP app.
Once we have the list of features, we should go ahead and prioritize them in phase 1 & phase 2 releases, and we must be ready to ask the question, What do my users want?
Am I offering them something beneficial? Will this application add any value to them? etc.
Based on our assessment, we should categorize all the remaining MVP features on the basis of their priority, and choose from low, medium, or high priority.
Once we are done with priority and organization of all the features, we can define their scope for the first version of the product and proceed with the development of an MVP.
We can also create an MVP prototype if we want to visualize the future product. It will give us a better visual interpretation of our product.
As this could be a completely new ball game for you, you can always hire the best mobile app development company that has such experience and help you define the features to be considered in MVP and further phases.
Once we get the feature information and market needs, we can proceed with the MVP development.
We must always keep in mind that an MVP should never be a lower quality version of its final product, and it should still fulfill the customer’s requirements.
It must be easy to use, engaging, secure, and suitable for end-users.
First, we have to define the scope of work and then should move the product to the development phase.
Past development completion, we have to initiate product testing to understand its flaws and that should follow with a course correction.
Quality Assurance engineers should make efforts to improve the quality of the product and they are the ones who conducts the first stage of testing.
We must review everything thoroughly and collect the client’s reaction to the release. On the basis of their feedback, we can determine the competitiveness and acceptability of our MVP in the market.
Though there are several methods to get a real picture of the future success of our product, here are the most common, proven, and effective ways to measure the success of a developed MVP app.
Though traffic and the number of downloads are useful metrics to measure success, another way to measure success is by interviewing potential customers.
We can start listing the issues or suggestions of our customers, or probable issues they are facing or might face in the future, and ask them about their experience with the application so that we can improvise the application in the next release.
Engagement helps organizations improve the user experience based on their feedback. It also enables us to track the current as well as the future value of the product.
It is the most common way to gauge the user’s interest. Interest could be converted into revenue, based on the results of measuring the interest of end-users in our product.
The number of launch rates and downloads from the marketplace shows the trends of users’ interest in our app. As we are updating the application on the basis of user feedback and interests, it will help us generate more interest in our application.
This is another important metric to measure the success of our MVP app. Initially, many users can download and use our application, but in the long run, it is important to have a greater number of active users.
We must study the behavior of the user and regularly check the ratings of the active users, as they are the users who are using our application frequently.
We must know the cost of getting a customer on board. This helps us assess if our marketing efforts are effective and working, or if we need to make any changes.
CAC = Funds spent on traction medium / number . of customers acquired via the medium.
We must use the appropriate metrics to know the average revenue per user and keep a check on products that indeed bring revenue.
ARPU= Total income for the day and age/Number of active users
It tells us how much time a user spends on the app before uninstalling or stopping using it.
CLV= (Profit per User *Duration of App usage) – Acquisition cost.
It reveals the percentage of people who have uninstalled or stopped using your app. Churn = Number of churns per week or month / Number of users at the beginning of the week or month.
As we know, the development of the MVP product is the first target version of our product, which helps us consume less effort, time, and app development costs. But what comes next after MVP?
As we are building an MVP app, this means we should not be prolonging the development stage.
It is always better to postpone the additional features and incorporate them once the MVP becomes a success. We can prioritize such features and build them at a later stage.
Most startups believe in working on a full-scale product only once their initial MVP product is ready and validated by the customers.
MVP helps us recognize the major bugs in the product, and that helps us releasing a 100% bug-free product.
We will be developing the full-scale product on the basis of the feedback on MVP product; hence, it is important to assess the reliability of our MVP.
We need to work on application Scalability simultaneously with MVP product development.
It is a common phenomenon that startups get overwhelmed with the rapid user acquisition the moment the MVP product is released, as there is a probability of huge signups or start rolling in.
It is important to keep in mind that whatever problem you have chosen to host your product is scalable for new users. But make sure that you are ready to handle the full-fledged traffic after the release of the MVP product.
It takes just 250 milliseconds to distract your users from your product to a competitor’s. No one likes a slow product and forgets about paying for it.
Any sort of delay could act as a detractor for the end customers and may result in potential customer loss.
It is important to track the performance of the MVP product before moving to the full-scale product and take appropriate steps to improve the performance.
We need to find the market and target audience of our MVP. We can engage the market partner and gather constructive feedback.
We can take help of renowned influencers, who can help us getting the views of the customers.
We need to ensure that our agile, minimum viable product is presented as a viable and worthy product.
The vision of the future product might be intriguing to prospects today. But it is also important to satisfy the customers who are using our product today.
In this step, we need to prioritize the backlogs and respond to the data proactively. The backlog should list all the features and we should plan and break them down into small chunks, called user stories.
We can use Scrum, where these user stories could be re-prioritized before the launch of every production sprint.
We must adjust your resources and efforts to accommodate business intelligence in a better way.
Using this method, we can develop the important features in every sprint; it does not matter how many times we have changed it since we have developed an agile, minimum viable product.
In order to launch the full-scale product in the market, we must stick to scrum’s production sprint. The moment we accumulate the data, we need to assess the feedback and prioritize the features.
We have to work on the feedback of the existing customers and at the same time, we have to develop additional capabilities and features for the new audiences as well.
We must stick to this process and by doing this, we will be able to improve the software products in ways that provide the most value.
We can implement the production sprint to convert the MVP into a full-scale product.
Once we are finished with the development activities, we can launch the full-scale product. We must ensure that the launch information is shared with all the stakeholders and end customers.
We must ensure that our technical teams are available 24 hours a day to provide adequate support for any potential issue.
Groupon is one of the most famous websites in recent times. I don’t know if you are aware, but Groupon was started as a simple WordPress blog, and its team members used to offer some daily discounts, concert vouchers, gift certificates, sale offers, movie tickets, and other details in the Chicago area.
Groupon used to send the PDF coupons to the customers who signed up with them. But now look at the scale they have achieved. Their website and app are still not full-scale products, but they fulfill the requirements of the target audience in the best and easiest possible way.
Drew Houston thought of the idea of Dropbox and he released the entire product when he came up with the idea in 2007. He only released a simple video, where he explained the core features of his product and some basic functionalities.
It was a simple video on the Digg platform and his target audience was very limited, with few early adopters of technology.
You will not believe it, but this simple video helped him increase the beta sign-up from just 5000 to an astounding 75,000 overnight.
The major reason was user interest since file organization was an important and tough task for most people and Dropbox did address the concern.
Upon receiving the user feedback and a massive number of sigh-ups, Dropbox scaled their application up to a level where they can cater to more than 1 million users, that too in less than 10 months.
Though the interface of their application was still quite basic, it was addressing the requirements of their end-users, and that’s what matters.
We are pretty sure that you are excited enough to start your first MVP development journey.
Please remember the golden rule: it does not have to be perfect; all you need to do is follow the described steps and strategies to build an MVP for your product and then launch it to cater to the target audience.
MVP development could be called an approach or a method that helps you discover a lot about your target customers with the help of a working product, without spending valuable time, effort, and funds.
All you need to do is define your vision, plan your business hypothesis carefully, identify the main MVP features, know your target audience, and develop it.
So if you are looking to convert your business idea into an online startup, please feel free to contact us to hire a mobile app development company that not only codes but also thinks and has a team of business analysts and consultants who know plenty of business domains and can guide you in the right direction.
Hence, in order to know how we can help you validate your idea, help you build an MVP and take it to a fully scalable product.
Jeeto11
The app quickly earned over 1,000 downloads within two months of launch, and users have responded positively. ARKA Softwares boasted experienced resources who were happy to share their knowledge with the internal team.
Archithrones
While the development is ongoing, the client is pleased with the work thus far, which has met expectations. ARKA Softwares puts the needs of the client first, remaining open to feedback on their work. Their team is adaptable, responsive, and hard-working.
Service Provider
I started my project with Arka Softwares because it is a reputed company. And when I started working with them for my project, I found out that they have everything essential for my work. The app is still under development and but quite confident and it will turn out to be the best.
