It takes thousands of dollars, an expert team, and months to build a mobile app. As a mid-sized enterprise, you might not have this luxury. Also, you may fall in a precarious position if the app doesn’t pan out to be as expected or there’s no market demand for it.
MVP in app development can save you from this risk by letting you test your app idea with the target audience and understand customer needs and preferences before going all in. Also, you get to launch your app into the market faster, gather feedback from early adopters, or even raise funding.
In this blog, we’ll discuss what is MVP in app development, why you need it, how to build an MVP for your app idea from scratch, and the best MVP development practices.
What is MVP in App Development?
An MVP is a basic product version containing only the essential features needed to fulfill your primary goal. The idea is to validate your idea, test the market, and gather early feedback before you go all-in with your mobile app.
Why Do You Need an MVP in App Development?
You need an MVP in app development because:
- It can help you assess the market demand to see if your app idea would succeed or not.
- You can easily engage and entice your early users with your MVP by giving them features they need the most.
- By building an MVP for your product, you can launch it in the market faster and gain a competitive edge.
- An MVP can help you validate assumptions about your product through real market insights and user feedback.
- You can reach your target customers at a low time and cost by building an MVP.
How to Build an MVP for Your App Idea from the Scratch?
Here are a few steps to follow to build an MVP for your app idea from the ground up:
Step 1: Research the Market
Imagine spending thousands of dollars and six months on building something no one wanted. You might ask: who does that? Truth is many apps fall into this trap and fail to make a mark because there’s no market demand for their idea.
That’s why it’s essential to do thorough market research before you even start building an MVP on your mobile app idea. By doing so, you can find out:
- if there’s market demand for your product idea
- what users are like (their demographics, pain-points, requirements)
You can conduct market research through various means, such as research studies, blogs, surveys, interviews, etc.
Step 2: Brainstorm Around Your Product Idea
Once you’ve figured out there’s demand for your product idea and what type of audience you’re catering to, you can start brainstorming to analyze how you would make it unique.
In the brainstorming phase, you define what core problem your MVP will solve and how it aligns with the requirements of your target audience. The idea is to establish a common understanding of the problem and come up with the best possible solution.
Step 3: Plan the User Journey
The next step in MVP development is to put yourself in users’ shoes and map out their journey on your product. For example, if you’re building an online shopping app, think from users’ perspective and ask: How would I use the product? What are the steps I would go through?
It would give you a perspective on in which sequence you want to build the MVP on your product idea.
Step 4: Prioritize the Features of Your MVP
If you start creating a list of features based on the user journey map mentioned in the previous step, you would end up with an extensive list. However, you don’t need to put in all of them in the first version. Instead, you only need to include the ones without which your MVP can’t function. That’s where prioritizing MVP features comes into play.
To prioritize MVP features, you first need to categorize them into core features and add-on features. Then, you need to ensure that you include all the core features in the MVP. On the other hand, you can keep on adding the add-on features in subsequent iterations.
Here are a few ways to prioritize MVP features:
- MoSCoW Matrix: Divide features into Must-haves, Should-haves, Could-haves, and Won’t haves. Prioritize the must-haves, keep should-haves and could-haves for later, and chuck out won’t haves.
- Feature Priority Matrix: Evaluate features based on effort, risk, and impact.
- Story Mapping: Group features according to user journey.
Step 5: Develop and Launch the MVP
Once you’ve mapped out the user journey and prioritized MVP features, you can start developing it. Many approaches exist for this. You can hire remote developers, outsource to an MVP development company, or build the MVP in-house. Based on your budget, requirements, and expertise – you can choose the one that best suits you.
Also, once the MVP is ready, launch it into the market to test the waters. But before that, actively promote the MVP launch. It would ensure that enough users use it and offer valuable feedback. You can run social media campaigns and paid promotions for this.
Step 6: Measure, Learn, Improvise
It is a crucial step in MVP development as it plays a critical role in deciding whether your MVP is a hit or a miss. When you measure the success of your MVP, you learn about the gaps between it and customers’ requirements. Then you try bridging that gap in the subsequent versions.
But if you don’t measure the success of your MVP, you miss out on these learning and never improvise your MVP. So, measuring your MVP’s success is crucial.
Here’s how you can measure the success of your MVP:
- Collect feedback from early adopters. It would tell what they liked about your MVP and what could be better.
- Check the engagement level on your MVP, the time adopters spent on it, their journey, and how many clicks they made. It would tell if your MVP could engage them or not.
- Calculate the number of people who signed up for your app. More sign ups mean your MVP was successful.
- Check for daily and monthly active users on your MVP. It would show you the engagement level.
- Track the churn rate (number of customers who stop using a product over a specific period) to find out if your MVP is keeping users engaged.
Best MVP Development Practices
1. Go for Minimalism
Minimalism is the key behind most successful MVPs. When the MVP is simple and only usable to potential customers, receiving feedback on it becomes easier.
For example, if you’re building a text editor, its MVP should only allow you to type, format, and save the text. You can add additional features like adding images, choosing fonts later on.
The key to building a minimal MVP is to deliver one feature that addresses the core problem well. Then as you iterate the MVP further, you can keep adding new features in the list.
2. Don’t Let Perfection Hold You Back
Perfection is often the biggest enemy of productivity. Especially while building an MVP, being a perfectionist means delaying the time-to-market and losing the competitive edge. So, keep your desire for perfection on the back burner and get your MVP out there as soon as possible. The sooner you receive the feedback, the sooner you can iterate or pivot based on the market requirements. Otherwise, years would pass, but your product would never see the light of the day.
3. Set a Timeframe for MVP Development
A time frame ensures you remain on track with the development of your MVP. Without it, you may keep planning, developing, and modifying your MVP and it may never see the light of the day. So, set clear deadlines and stick to them.
4. Work with an MVP Development Partner if You’re Facing Problems
Developing an MVP can be challenging, especially if you don’t have the right experience and expertise. If you also face the same problem, it’s wise to partner with an MVP development services provider. Having worked on projects similar to yours, they have enough experience and expertise to build the right MVP for your product idea. Also, with an MVP partner:
- You get a rich talent pool with experienced professionals excelling in planning, Ui/UX design, product development, testing, and launch. This way, you have greater chances of building a successful MVP with them.
- You get real business insights as an MVP development agency works with many businesses. They know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to MVP development. This way, you can prevent yourself from spending your hard-earned money and time on something that’s not feasible.
- You can focus on core areas, such as how to grow your MVP into a fully-fledged product while leaving the MVP development partner with the development responsibility.
However, choosing an MVP is not easy as not all MVP development agencies are equal. The right agency can set the foundation for success, while a wrong one can lead you to significant financial loss. To ensure this doesn’t happen keep the following things in mind before finalizing an MVP development partner:
- Check out their official website. Do they have a rich portfolio, customer testimonials, and other trust signals? Also, when was the last time it was updated?
- Interview their previous clients. What do they have to say?
Is the MVP development partner ready to sign an NDA? If they’re not, you can’t trust them whether they would not use your information in another project.
