The development cycle for any app targets to offer the most any developer can provide for their customer base. But sometimes, it’s the better choice to offer customers the basics of what they are looking for, which comes in the form of MVP.
Today, we’re discussing what an MVP is and a complete guide to developing an MVP with simple steps that all product owners should follow.
What is An MVP?
MVP can be considered an early development stage in any product development cycle. An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a product that has enough features to attract customers and use their feedback to validate a product idea.
In the software industry, one of the primary goals of an MVP is to gather user feedback and use the feedback to update and upgrade the product to suit everyone’s needs as quickly as possible.
Benefits of Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Many great apps that we know and frequently use today started their journey from being MVPs. Here are a few benefits of starting the viable product development cycle from an MVP stage.
- MVP Can Be Cost Effective
- Understanding of Customer’s Needs
- Verifying Market Demand
- Testing UX and Usability
- Opportunity To Get Investors or Crowdfunding
1. MVP Can Be Cost Effective
The purpose of an MVP is to get a product out of the door with core functionalities and fundamental features that can solve one problem at the most.
When focusing on your product solving only one problem, you spend less development time and resources during the development cycle, making the entire process cost-effective.
Trying to focus on multiple problem-solving with one single app can sometimes end up in an inflated budget, which can affect the development cycle to a great extent.
To keep your development costs within a safe threshold, targeting to launch an MVP is the best course of action.
2. Understand Customer Needs
You’ll receive valuable customer feedback when you release an MVP for your user base. It can help you learn about customers and their needs and include those features in your development cycle.
You can make much better plans and progress when you’re getting feedback from either initial customers or experienced users.
You can also post regular updates on your development progress to retain the interest of your current user base and future customers.
3. Verify Current Market Demand
An MVP helps you test the waters of the current market of the problem you are looking to solve. When you release your MVP for reviews and feedback, you can take a reasonable estimate of the users in the current market, like or dislike, and tweak your development accordingly.
Sometimes, there are apps in the market that serve the exact purpose you are trying to, only better, making your app the lesser demanded one.
That’s when you can develop a roadmap that can help you include additional features to create a better product for the same clientele.
4. Testing Out UX and Usability
With your MVP in the hands of your eager user base, the feedback that will help you the most is regarding UX (User experience) and usability.
People will always look for an app that is easy to use, and when they know their feedback can help create an app with high usability, they’ll be happy to help.
With all the received feedback, your UX design will constantly improve the usability of your app, making your future product more user-friendly.
5. Opportunities to Get Investors or Crowdfunding
Suppose you create an MVP with everything the current user base is looking for. In that case, there’s a high chance for you to attract opportunities to get investors or even get crowdfunding to speed up the development cycle.
When an app has great potential during the early stages, there will always be people who want the app to reach maximum efficiency and are ready to invest in it. Creating a great MVP secures funding for your future developments, making your early hard work all the more satisfying.
7 Simple Steps on How to Build Your MVP
If you’re convinced about creating a base product of your own, let’s look at all the steps you can take to develop and launch your MVP quickly.
Step #1: Perform a Detailed Target Market Research
Before you begin your development cycle, thorough market research is always a great idea. This research can help you determine your competitors.
When you do a competitor analysis and research similar business ideas, you get to know what you must do to stand out from the crowd.
Step #2: Define Target Customers
Now that you have researched data on your competitors and the current market, you can start defining your target customer base. There are quite a few factors to consider here:
- A user’s level of experience with technology related to your product
- The demographic of the user
- Employment and environment of the user
- Pain and gain points of the user
When you’ve figured all these out, you’ll need to focus on three main types of potential userbase:
- The Early Adopters: These users believe in being involved with apps at an early stage and providing valuable feedback. This feedback helps you develop additional functionality once the app passes the testing stage.
- The Evangelists: Most early adapters are experienced users with previous experience providing feedback and can be considered evangelists. This group of people is willing to stick to a product through all the stages of development, and their feedback can sometimes prove vital to the development cycle.
- The Investors: This particular group of people will test your product and provide you with additional funding for further development if your MVP checks all the right boxes.
Step #3: Create Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
A Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is the value you’re providing that no one else on the market is.
If you’re struggling to think up a great UVP, asking yourself a couple of questions can help you out, including:
- Why would my target audience buy my product?
- How does it benefit my target audience?
- What value is my product offering to the users that other products can’t?
As the name suggests, when you’re offering something that makes you stand out of the crowd, you get more eyes toward your MVP, whether they are regular users or investors.
When creating UVPs, your primary focus should always be addressing the one core feature/ pain point you can take care of more efficiently. Make sure your MVP takes care of the issue better than the competitors.
Focusing on crucial pain points and making them sound personal creates a great UVP that your potential clientele can’t avoid. Your USP comes later on.
Step #4: Build Your Hypothesis
A reasonable hypothesis is built on collected data. Since you already have market research data, it’s time to make a hypothesis based on said data. The data will validate the theory, eventually helping you decide if you will invest in your current idea.
When creating any hypothesis, the best part is that it can be tested and focused on a single thing, as your MVP should be.
When you build a hypothesis and run tests on your target demographic, the campaign’s feedback and the outcome will help you further validate your idea for the product.
Step #5: Refine The Feature List
Congratulations! You have decided to proceed with further development after successful hypothesis testing. Now, it’s time to set your priorities right with a detailed list of features.
You might be trying to build the app yourself, with your team, or working with a third-party software developer company.
Your primary objective should be to create a detailed list of all the features you wish to implement in the app further down the line with MVP feature prioritization.
Once you’ve listed all the possibilities, start shortening your list only to keep the vital features that can function on the bare minimum. Then it can be released for public consumption much more quickly.
Step #6: Build & Launch Your MVP
Once all the minimum feature criteria are set, it’s finally time to build your MVP. But how to maintain the ideal medium stage?
Target to keep the app in a stage with limited functionality. However, keep fixing all the bugs constantly so the user base has easy access and the user journey is more fluent than before.
When the MVP serves its fundamental purpose while being highly accessible, it can be considered a launch success.
Step #7: Build, Measure, Learn
Now that you’ve successfully launched your MVP, it’s time to stick to the constant cycle of BML (Build, Measure, Learn).
You’ve already built your MVP. Now, measure the data you gain from the user engagement, and improvise based on user feedback.
Once you feel you’re ready to offer a better version of the MVP, start building again to implement the rest of the essential features until it becomes the full-fledged product you envisioned.
How to Measure the Success of Your MVP
You can measure the success of your Minimum Viable Product by tracking the metrics given below.
- Sign Ups
- Acquisition Rate
- Percentage Of Active Users
- Customer Acquisition Cost
- Churn Rate
Once you’ve successfully launched your MVP, keep an eye on these vital metrics and act accordingly.
1. Sign Ups
Suppose you have users signing up for either a newsletter about future updates and related news or using your app. In that case, you will have a reasonable estimate of your current user base.
If a customer is signed up, there’s a high chance for that customer to develop an increased interest in the product, increasing your overall revenue.
2. Acquisition Rate
Acquisition rate measures the number of potential clients who come across your website/ product within a set time range.
For example: Let’s say you’re giving away free trials for your software for a certain period, and people can claim it by signing up. You can measure the AR based on your visitors’ number and bounce rate.
3. Percentage of Active Users
Let’s say you had a grand launch, and the download range of your app was better than expected. But this doesn’t conclude that your MVP was an absolute triumph.
It’s an excellent practice for you to continuously study user behavior by checking the ratings and frequency of active users.
Suppose you have a grand launch but steadily lose most of your user flow after a certain period. In that case, your MVP can be considered a failure even with a grand launch.
4. Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) refers to the total amount of money you spend acquiring one customer over your business lifespan.
Let’s say you spent $100 to acquire ten customers. But at the end of the day, only one of those customers was profitable, making your cost per customer $10.
But if you spent $10k to acquire 100 customers, where 50 became profitable, your CAC would drop to $50.
5. Churn Rate
A low churn rate should be the goal of any developer. Churn is the number that indicates the number of users leaving your system. A higher churn rate suggests the inadequacy of your service, which leaves your user base dissatisfied and decreases your average revenue per user.
It could be anything from unsolved bugs to bad UI and a lack of overall quality. When your churn rate is high, it’s a red flag for other potential customers and a loss for you in the long run.
What Are the Most Common MVP Examples?
Here are a few common examples that started as MVPs and are now a part of our daily lives.
- AirBnB
- Amazon
- Pebble
- Uber
1. Airbnb
AirBNB started as an MVP back in 2007. Two men from San Francisco began their business by putting up the upper floor of their house for rent during a conference. To launch their MVP, they just put the pictures of their home on the landing page and added options for contacting for rent.
And today, AirBnB has become a multi-million-dollar business, with $887 million in profit over the first quarter of 2021
2. Amazon
The multi-billion-dollar company we know and love today started its journey as a simple bookstore.
Back in the ’90s, Books were in high demand, and Jeff Bezos saw great potential in the rapidly growing industry that was e-commerce.
Bezos started his dream company as a bookstore. His MVP was a simple website that would distribute books at a low price online after buying them from distributors.
After continuous iterations, Amazon is now the world’s largest e-commerce organization.
3. Pebble
The MVP of Pebble paved the way for smartwatches. Pebble is still considered to have performed one of the most efficient fundraisers, raising an astounding $10,000,000.
The project was later out of business and joined Fitbit. To this day, Pebble is an excellent example of why a well-developed MVP is so effective.
4. X
X (former Twitter) started its journey as an insider app for the company Odeo. X was a microblogging solution made public later based on a unanimous decision.
X has set a standard for building an accessible social media website.
5. Uber
Uber’s landing page is the most minimalistic, right after AirBNB’s landing page. All Uber’s prior version did was connect cab drivers to iPhone users in San Francisco and then allow the passenger to pay with a credit card.
Nowadays, most of us can only think of heading outside by calling an Uber first.
To Wrap It All Up
The research before building and launching your MVP can be pretty cumbersome.
But if you’re passionate about a unique idea that you need to share with the entire world, why not go for it right away with our MVP development services?
FAQs
Building an MVP can take anywhere between $30,000 and $120,000. The expenses depend on the development cycle and the business model of your target market
The process of creating an MVP can take around three to four months. The development cycle, set of features, design complexion, and human resources involved with the development can cause fluctuation in this estimate
Building an MVP helps you validate your product idea, reduce development costs, and minimize the risk of building a product that nobody wants
Identify the features that are essential for solving your users’ primary pain points. Focus on functionalities that deliver the most value with the least amount of effort
Measure success by tracking key metrics such as user engagement, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction. Analyze feedback and iterate to address any areas for improvement
