Types of Minimum Viable Products [Series]: The Single Feature Application

If you’re familiar with the seven different types of minimum viable products, you’re probably wondering which type is best for your startup.

A single-feature MVP is one of the most common types of ways to test the viability of your business idea.

What is a Single-Feature Application MVP?

As with all minimum viable products, a single-feature application MVP is designed around allowing your brand to put something into the market without needing substantial upfront investment.

What do you do to create it?

• Develop an app that solves a single, specific problem your customers have.
• The feature you provide should be core to your unique value proposition.

Said differently, you want to gather as much feedback as you can about the thing that makes your business different from your competition.

And instead of taking a lot of time and money to develop an app with every bell and whistle available, you can avoid all that with a single-feature MVP.

The goal? Figure out whether your potential customers care enough about your value proposition. By keeping a narrow focus on a single key feature or solution at launch, you can keep application development to a minimum, ensure functionality, and offer something that provides clear value to a buyer.

The catch: You need to determine what that core feature will be by conducting customer research. Before doing anything else, you’ll need to be an expert in who your customer is, and the biggest pain points they experience.

Pros of Launching a Single Feature MVP

• By focusing on a single feature, you can minimize expenses and time spent creating an application.
• You will get to your customers faster so that you can spend more time gathering first-hand feedback from potential customers
• You’ll have an opportunity (if it makes sense) to generate revenue if the application is valuable
• A single feature MVP is essentially a functioning application, so you will be able to develop on top of it in the future.

Cons of Launching a Single Feature MVP

• A single feature MVP requires you to build a functioning app, which requires technical expertise (vs. creating a landing page or email campaign).
• Since you focus on only a single feature, if the feature is not as helpful or desirable as you hypothesized, your app can fail to attract the needed attention. This is why customer research is so critical to an MVP’s success.

Examples of Single Feature MVPs

These are perhaps the most famous examples of applications that started as single feature MVPs:

Spotify: Spotify began as a small startup in Sweden that aimed to solve the growing piracy problem the music industry was facing at the time. The first Spotify prototype was up and running in under five months and launched as a beta streaming service in 2007. The only feature that people were able to use: stream single songs.

As time went on and the subscriber base grew, Spotify carefully chose apps to partner with, features to add, and cross-platform support to roll out. Features were added that quickly became essentials, like song sharing, playlist creation, and offline mode. Since then, Spotify has grown into “the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service,” with more than365 million users across nearly 180 global markets.

Uber: The Uber app you know today allows for food delivery, package delivery, passenger services, and more. But Uber started as a simple texting message and email service that connected users to a handful of cars in New York and San Francisco. The first iteration of Uber was a single feature minimum viable product that sought to answer the question, “What if you could request a ride from your phone?” To deliver this feature, the app’s founders initially relied on private drivers and a small select audience of users.

As time went on, Uber expanded the functionality of its applications and the variety of driving opportunities. Each step forward was built on the data and feedback they were getting in the current iteration of the app. Eventually, the company would make itself into a comprehensive driving and delivery service interacting with millions of people and thousands of businesses each year.

Instagram: Instagram initially launched as a location-sharing application back in 2010. The first version of the app would allow you to take photos and geotag them to a particular location. Almost immediately, Instagram was hit with thousands of users, and they were able to take the feedback and desires of this audience to direct the growth and development of the app further.

Over the years Instagram has added several social features, video hosting, messaging, and much more. With each addition, Instagram has added to the value, versatility, and overall user-base of their app, ultimately leading to the app’s $1 billion acquisition by Facebook.

A Final Note on Single Feature MVPs

When creating a single feature minimum viable product, you need to be laser-focused on offering a remarkable primary feature first. This feature will allow your potential customers to understand the value of your product immediately, and this will form the basis of the audience you need to start gathering feedback. Getting this feedback is the point of any MVP and how you can successfully continue to grow and develop it into a complete product.