Startups, stop building your app MVP in the least MVP way possible.

Anyone who’s set foot in the startup world (which seems to be most people these days) likely recognizes the term MVP.

In this context, MVP does not refer to the most valuable player in last week’s hockey match.

No, in the world of tech startups, MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product.

Specifically, an MVP is a startup’s idea brought to life in a barebones way that executes on its core concept, but doesn’t include many bells and whistles.

The ‘big idea’ of a product is there, functional, and enough to sell-in initial users, customers, and perhaps investors. An MVP is meant to get you validating a functioning version of your product idea as quickly as possible.

At the MVP/building stage, most companies don’t have massive funding.

For this reason, cost becomes a factor as well, and it’s why the behavior of many new app-based businesses really confuses me:

If you had invented a physical product, let’s say a toy, and wanted to create an example or prototype of your idea cheaply, you wouldn’t immediately go hire a product design consultancy for tens of thousands of dollars to draft design blueprints, and then go drop six-figures having Hasbro produce the first batch of your toys.

Hell no.

You would use the materials you have, or find companies that can work quickly and cheaply to create the first version of your toy.

So, why on earth do startups run out and hire (read: take on fulltime salary obligations) of native iOS and Android programmers right off the bat?

Or, if they don’t, why do those same startups still reach out to slow, expensive development firms that will charge them $50,000 just to get their core ideas off the ground?

In the startup world, where working with the resources you have and cutting costs is essential to surviving long enough to see your vision through, why do startups treat their apps differently from every other component of their business?

Independent app development shops, low-code app development platforms, and more all provide opportunities for companies to get their app projects off the ground more quickly and more affordably.

Do new companies just not know about these options? Do they have a poor impression of them?

If I decided that our company needed a landing page for a marketing campaign and that we wanted to get it up and running as quickly as possible to not miss out on a holiday or current event, even if I couldn’t code, I would go make that page myself using Instapage, Unbounce, or any one of a number of tools designed to quickly accomplish landing page creation.

What I would specifically not do is tell my boss that we needed to pay a designer to design a page, then send it to a web agency to get made, and then in 2–4 weeks hopefully start our campaign.

And yet, that’s exactly what startups do: They hire developers to slowly and expensively develop an app MVP (expensive and slow are directly at odds with the whole idea of an MVP!!!).

The equation becomes that much more complicated for startups when a business decides to code separate native versions of their app for Android and iOS (when this programming can be executed at the same time with many cross-platform development tools, significantly reducing cost and lead time, and yielding the exact same result — again, do people just not know this?).

Hybrid, cross-platform development and low-code development environments are hitting maturity, and it’s just silly to drain the little cash a budding startup has on app development, especially when it comes to an MVP.

Or don’t you agree?

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