Developing an MVP for startups is the first step towards a long glorious journey and the gateway for you to test out the current market and decide whether to take your development cycle to the next stage.
Today, we’ll discuss ten benefits of MVP that you can and should build to make the most of your upcoming startup.
What is a Minimum Viable Product For Startups?
A Minimum Viable Product is a product that has limited functionalities and presents an idea in a basic form in front of an eager audience who are looking for a similar product. An MVP for startups can help you gather a large audience with minimal effort.
The MVP can be something other than a physical or technological prototype. It can be a concept that carries a few essential functions to solve the core problems of the user base.
What Is the Purpose of an MVP?
Creating a product with minimal features might sound counterintuitive for startup founders. Your MVP is not supposed to have all the features you can dream of; that’s the true form of an MVP.
This can also raise the question: Why do you need MVP?
You can define the true purpose of an MVP by the three points below:
- Avoid spending money on something the market doesn’t want
- Analyze market needs to gain differentiation
- Allows you to validate your idea
Avoid Spending Money
If you go through months of development effort only to build an app that no one needs in the first place, it counts as a complete loss on your end.
When your approach is to build an MVP first, you get to minimize development costs. With minimal cost and effort, you get to understand the exact needs of targeted users from feedback.
Analyzing The Target Market Needs
When you gather feedback from the market audience using an MVP, you understand the offerings and shortcomings of your product a lot better.
When you compare these data to competitor research you performed, you can realize the path you need to take to outperform your competitors in terms of features.
Validate Your Startup Idea
Before the app development process begins, there’s always a detailed hypothesis of a product. As we mentioned, you can also consider a concept as an MVP, which an audience can validate.
When presenting your MVP hypothesis in front of your target audience, gaining positive feedback validates your idea. It also confirms that you can move from the concept phase to the development phase.
10 Core Benefits of a Minimum Viable Product
Launching a Minimum Viable Product for startups has quite a few benefits. To keep the discussion brief, we will be discussing 10 of them.
1. Test Out Business Concepts
When you build an MVP, it’s easier to test the current market with basic functionalities with minimal effort. An MVP is a product with only basic features that take less time and resources to build, so testing the market with an MVP is much easier.
You can also create multiple MVP concepts and then release them all to determine the version that people find more appealing.
When you’re sure that a concept is well-received among the masses, it validates the idea for further development.
2. Exploit Cost-Efficiency
MVPs are products that require little money, time, and other resources to develop. Most organizations or individuals need more money to develop, polish, and present a complete product at the startup phase.
The cost of working with an MVP is significantly less because the concept phase can even be a paper prototype. That way, the entrepreneur can attract potential customers in a cost-efficient manner.
3. Get Investors and Crowdfunding
Most startups rely on crowdfunding or an investor buy-in for funding. When you create an MVP that can convince investors of its potential, you can secure funding for further development to turn your MVP into a full-fledged product.
Another benefit of an MVP is that you can test an MVP with audiences before moving to secure investors. When you modify an MVP multiple times to bring out maximum efficiency, you have a strong sales pitch to convince the investors by using your tested MVP for funding.
4. Understand Customer Needs
The best way to validate any MVP is always public opinion. When you’re releasing your MVP for collecting customer feedback, you aren’t only getting to know the ups and downs of your product. Still, you also know what the customer wants/ expects from you.
When you understand the needs of the many and target to supply the current demand, you get more eyes on your product for being highly relevant.
5. Substantiate Market Demand
The first goal of an MVP is to test the market to see what works and what doesn’t. With a well-designed MVP, you can test product-market fit for your product.
Sometimes, the customer may want what you are offering. Other times, the customers may wish for a modified version of your offer with different benefits.
When it’s the first, your MVP gets validated for further development. You can easily modify the current product and introduce the changes via frequent updates when it’s the latter.
Posting updates on all social media about the MVP update patches to keep the audience interested can work wonders for you in this case.
6. Test Usability and User Interface
User experience (UX) is the most important thing you should focus on in the case of MVP development. No matter how useful your app is, no one will stick around an app longer than a week if said app has a clustered UI.
By collecting feedback data with an MVP, you can make UX and UI design your primary focus. That way, you can ensure every user has a smooth experience logging in to use your product.
7. Minimize Risks
Another pro of building an MVP is to minimize risks. Any large-scale application that is completely polished and ready to handle all sorts of customer demands takes years to develop and optimize. So pushing a complete application out the door from the beginning can be a substantial financial risk.
With an MVP, there are multiple stages for you to optimize your costs and approaches to make the best of what you have. It makes launching an MVP the safest option from a financial perspective.
8. Focus On Core Features
When you build the MVP, you get to focus on core features. It can be a huge advantage in appealing to potential users.
When you’re focusing the entire development effort on one solution to a problem, you get more opportunities to ensure complete functionality.
Suppose your MVP is serving its core purpose up to perfection. In that case, retaining pre-existing users’ attention is easier while gaining the newer ones’ curiosity.
9. Build A Monetization Strategy
Any product you plan to release should have one form of monetization or another that makes the project profitable. With an MVP, you can test different monetization ideas.
Develop multiple methods of monetization within the app (i.e., in-app purchase), and then launch these methods one after the other to gather public opinion.
Keep track of the methods the user base prefers. Continue integrating that monetization model within your MVP for a profitable strategy.
10. Faster Release and Updates
Customers lose interest when waiting too long for a product’s final release. This applies to almost every product for any industry.
The attention span of every individual is minimal, so business organizations must come up with constant engagement ideas.
When you switch to MVP release instead of a complete product release, you get to frequently release product updates and patches for the MVP. But how to keep your users engaged?
You can talk about how the new update will benefit others and share the roadmap of your future updates with the user base over social media to keep their interest up.
Partnering up with a good software agency gives you the additional advantage of releasing the MVP faster than your competitors.
How Much Does It Cost to Build a Mobile App MVP?
This question can be tough to answer, and the answer will vary from one individual to another. The same approach will only work for one person. Some can get away with just a paper/ digital prototype. In contrast, others have to launch a functional MVP or a perfect product to start getting attention.
Considering all the different development scenarios, determining the final cost can take a lot of work. The preliminary costing can start at a minimum of $10k.
If that’s different from your expected budget, we at Impala have you covered! With us, you can start your dream project with as little as $5k. At the same time, our experienced development team ensures you have a great MVP developed and launched in no time!
When Should You Build an MVP?
An MVP starts as early as a concept. But the idea needs to be built into a specific shape or form to be fully marketable. That’s where the question arises: When should you build an MVP?
MVP may sound underwhelming for a launch since the features leave more to be desired. But this is a wise choice since you dedicate your full attention to perfecting one component at a time.
So when you launch the product, it receives massive success even with minimal functionalities, considering the concept was well-received.
First comes the research of the concept, and once you’ve done your fair share of research and received enough feedback to validate, you start building your MVP further.
To Wrap It All Up
MVP aims to bring your product idea to the limelight for the target audience to be interested in and become real users/ clients afterward. A concept can get a curious audience, but a fully built MVP can attract investors.
Are you convinced to build your MVP but need to know how or where to begin? Our dev team at Impala Intech has your back. Happy building!
FAQs
The primary advantage of developing an MVP is to test the viability and feasibility of a product idea/ startup idea.
By testing the market with an MVP, a startup founder can decide if they should invest further in the product. This way, a lot of unnecessary costs are reduced.
If an MVP has a successful launch that gathers enough attention from targeted users, it validates the idea.
An MVP is an initial version of a product with minimal functionality. On the other hand, a prototype is an interactive version of the software without any working code behind it.
If the MVP gains enough traction after launch which attracts customers and investors alike, the business can count it as a success. They also track multiple metrics throughout a certain time to determine the level of success.
