All popular apps like Uber, Instagram, and Spotify have one thing in common: each began life as a minimum viable product (MVP). By building these small but functional ideas of the apps, the developers tested the viability and assumptions of the concept. After releasing their minimum viable product, they got customer feedback and edited the function and features according to the reviews. Eventually, these apps gained popularity worldwide and became the powerhouses we know today.
Some of us have the idea of the next billion-dollar application at some point, like TikTok and Twitter. That’s where the MVP steps in. MVPs allow you to create a rapid and working version of your application without much difficulty and resources to test the reliability of your app idea among real users. MVP allows you to test the viability of your statement because there is no shortage of apps in the world.
If You Have an Idea and want to start from MVP app development, this blog will help you with the guidance you will need to launch your app.
What Is an MVP?
The minimum viable product or MVP is a naked version of your app with only essential features.
An MVP’s primary purpose is to test your app’s feasibility. The main goal of an MVP is to test the demand for your App with its actual users and how much your solution is helpful for its users. All the successful apps like Facebook and Airbnb started as MVPs because this model works.
Building an MVP successful app uses the iterative development approach. An MVP gets you customer feedback for the new feature you want to release in the upcoming version of your app. With each update, you can use this process multiple times to refine your apps’ features.
Successful MVP involves the process of design thinking, lean UX, and Agile development. You must develop an MVP as quickly and cheaply as possible to get these benefits. In this way, you will be able to save your resources if the app of your idea is a failure.
Characteristics of MVP:
If you want to call your MVP an MVP, it must have the following characteristics.
First, your MVP should contain all the core features for communicating your app’s main idea. This helps users to evaluate your app well by keeping the app Idea and mind and will give reliable and accurate feedback. For example, Spotify started as a desktop-only MVP, offering only basic music streaming services. Spotify MVP took four months to build.
Secondly, your MVP should provide value to its users. Even though this version is a rough and tough version of your App, it should deliver the core promise. Remember, the earlier version of your MVP could help retain your users if done right. Instacart is a good example of MVP grocery delivery.
Thirdly, your MVP must be cost-effective, so you should spend less time and resources building it.
Finally, MVP should help you build the foundation for your final app. This will enable you to get feedback, improve, and add features as time passes.
Importance of MVPs:
Till now, we are familiar with the concept of MVP, what it does, and how it works; the next question should be, why go to build an app with it? Following are some of the numerous benefits of MVP app Development.
Proving the Product feasibility
The utmost benefit of creating an MVP app is testing your App’s idea in the real world. Unfortunately, everyone thinks that their app idea will be a hit; on the other hand, some app ideas look best on paper, but the success is decided by its users.
The concept of MVPs became popular with Eric Reis, who agrees with this statement.
“We must learn what customers want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.”
Developers don’t do the research for the app they are creating if there is a need in the market for that particular app.
Most Common Reasons for App Failure:
Following are the stats of app failures:
- 42% did not research market needs.
- 17% did not frame relevant business models.
- 14% ambiguity in deciding the correct marketing strategy.
- 19% due to weak core product.
- 13% due to incorrect launch time.
Building an MVP app is a rapid, cheapest, and most effective solution to prevent such a situation. If you release the MVP version of your App in the market and users give you feedback, it is a good sign, which means that your App idea has potential. But if your app idea is unsuccessful, you got a good experience creating an MVP and did not use much of your resources in the project.
The cost of building an MVP app is around $15000 to $15000, and you can get the idea of creating a full app, which will be higher. MVP will tell you whether your App idea is viable and give you the feedback you will get to improve your app.
Receiving User Feedback:
MVPs will help you to get exceptional feedback from the users of your App idea, which will help you both quantitatively and qualityly.
This allows you to refine the area of your app, and you will fix the bug and troubleshoot errors with every updated version.
Following are some measuring scales you can use to get inside your MVP app:
- Word of mouth
- turn rate
- Sign up
- Engagement
- Better client evaluation based on feedback
- Percentage of active users
- Client acquisition cost
- Number of paying users
- Client lifetime value
Your MVP app’s fundamental idea is gaining real-world users’ attention if you discover that a bigger percentage of your users are active, which proves that you created the ideal MVP app.
Conversely, it’s not a good indicator for your app if your churn rate is quickly rising. Generate indicates that your MVP would not be able to get the user’s attention, which means that you might need help with your UI/UX design or work more on your core features.
Minimum Viable products will help you to get the valuable feedback you can get from your users. Most of the time, you will get new update ideas from the feedback you will be getting. And you can add all the features when you update your application.
Identifying Bugs:
It doesn’t matter how efficient your MVP app development team is; your app cannot be 100% bug-free.
Even a big company like Google released a holiday product with a catastrophic glitch in 2016. Let’s fix bugs as soon as possible post-launch. And MVP can help you to fix these bugs greatly.
To produce a more reliable and secure application, you locate critical problems as quickly as feasible and then address them. You will be able to keep more of your users if you do this, and you will also receive positive feedback, which will benefit your software’s development.
And MVP app can also help you to lower the cost of fixing your bugs. This deployment rules 1-10-100.
- $1- fee for preventing bad data at this level
- $10- fee for correcting existing problems at this level.
- $100- fee for fixing a problem after it causes a failure.
According to this rule, it will be 100 times costlier to fix an error in the final product of your app once it’s launched. MVPs give a fortunate edge here, which means this is not the final version of the application you’ll be undertaking. This gives you the luxury of fixing your bugs being cost-effective.
Types of MVP:
Let’s move on to our next topic, the types of MVPs. Low Fidelity and high fidelity are the types of MVPS.
Low Fidelity:
Low Fidelity MVPs are considered fake MVPs. Low-fidelity MVPS don’t do anything in the background and are being used to test the demand in their potential market. A fictitious website for a premium subscription service might be developed for illustration’s sake. You will be redirected to a blank page, and nothing will happen. You must do this test before making your MVP available to the market. This will give you an idea of whether real-time users like your application.
High Fidelity:
High Fidelity is the MVPs is the kind of MVP we are interested in. This is the real and substantial version of the app, but it is limited. Its main purpose is to check its usability among real uses.
High Fidelity MVP consists of further sub-categories, which we will discuss below.
- Single Feature MVP
- Concierge MVP
- Wizard of Oz MVP
- Piecemeal MVP
Single Feature MVP
Single feature MVP is just what its name indicates. It only consists of one feature you want to examine among your users.
Out of the four types of MPP, you can set up this mob faster because you will be focusing all your energy on one feature. This will also be the easiest for users to comprehend the feature.
You will be developing a single feature MVP only if you are confident enough to know about the core features of your app. For example, the single feature MVP of Uber was developed with its only driver locating element. The founders of Uber knew the app’s core feature they would be selling to their users: the ability to book a ride from their homes by locating a driver nearby using smartphones.
Hence, their MVP worked on one thing, which allows people to enter their address in the app, connecting them with the nearest car driver and taking them to the person’s location.
The MVP of Uber was highly focused on the core idea, which helped it get valuable feedback from its users in the real world. Eventually, they work on the feedback their users give and release the updated version of Uber and the developments they made in recent years, Making today’s Uber we know.
Single-feature MVPs like Uber help their developers build a strong foundation for their MVP app development.
Concierge MVP
Humans completely run this type of MVP. This category of MVP is beneficial if you want to test the advanced features of your app but don’t want to devote your time and resources to declare them complete. For example, suppose you are testing a dating app. In that case, Matches are being made manually by the human in the background if you want to avoid developing the matching algorithm in your mob.
The most popular app that started as a concierge MVP is Airbnb.
The founders of Airbnb used their own houses as a listing to test their app. Then, they developed a website to see how many users would be interested. By doing this, they got their first three paying customers, which gave them the confidence that their app idea was great.
Today’s version of Airbnb, which we are using, is run by artificial Intelligence and machine learning in the background without any manual health of humans. But it would not be possible for them to make this app idea successful if they didn’t manually post the least thing about their own house.
The popular benefit of concierge MVP is its cost-effectiveness and readiness. As we have discussed, it only took a few dollars to set up their sample website in the example of Airbnb. However, in the concierge MVP, you should be willing to put more effort into developing your app’s back end.
Please ensure that the work human is doing in the back end should be the same as you have envisioned for the final version of your app.
Wizard of Oz MVP
This type of MVP is almost the same as the concierge MVP, which means the human is working at the app’s back end, but the user does not know about it.
A popular example of a wizard of MVP is the earlier version of the website for Zappos, which was an online shoe store.
Zappos was working exactly like an E-commerce store, according to the people. People place orders to buy shoes online, which will be delivered to their doorsteps in the next few days. However, the users needed to learn that the humans worked at the backend without an automation or inventory system. Everything was getting done manually by the founder of Zappos.
Like any other business, they place photos of shoes from a local Store on their website. When someone orders that shoe, the website’s founder will go to the local shop, buy the shoes, and ship them to the customer’s address. This way founder of Zappos got the validation for the idea of its MVP application.
Piecemeal MVP
As its name indicates, the piecemeal MVPs are developed using existing tools, such as services and products, to build an app for testing without the hassle of creating it from scratch.
The benefit you will get using the piece-meal MVP is the speed of your app. You can also create an advanced MVP with all the existing tools without wasting too much time and resources.
It will be cost-effective depending on the tools you will be choosing. A classic example of piecemeal MVP is a GROUPON. The initial version of the website was made on WordPress. When people start to buy their makeshift site, they create a file maker to create the PDF, which will be sent automatically to users through an Apple mail script. Although it was a disarranged version of MVP, it offered more automation than a concierge or Wizard of Oz MVP.
Planning to build an MVP:
We cannot deny the fact that creating an MVP version of your app idea is the crucial step of app development success. With it, you will be risking your app functionality to win, and the assumptions about your app prove wrong, which means that you will be wasting a lot of substantial money, time, and effort to build the app from scratch again. The core takeaway of the blog is that you should be aware that MVP allows you to start smaller and quicker and will surely build your app based on the valuable feedback you will get from real-time users. This will ultimately result in a polished and versatile version of your app.
The truth is that developing an MVP is difficult, sometimes more often than the final app.
The biggest hassle in developing an MVP is finding a balance between maintaining value and development time. It is also difficult to categorize the features to add based on the insightful feedback you’ll get from your real-time users, as people can imagine.
If you need additional help and direction, please contact Celect Studios. They can provide you with insight into the MVP development process.
