Why You Need an MVP Before Starting Custom Software Development
This article was initially published on Codica Blog.
Do you have an idea of a completely brilliant web solution with lots of features and you want to proceed to full-featured development? Wait a bit!
Isn’t it a perfect time to validate your hypotheses and ideas? Such well-known brands as Foursquare, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, and others prove it is. They all started as Minimum Viable Products.
In this article, we will tell you why launching an MVP first is an efficient and beneficial way to develop and deliver your startup.
What is an MVP?
MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is an early product version that solves at least one potential user’s problem and allows you to test your business hypothesis quickly.
When you have the idea of a product or service, you don’t know whether it’s worth any investment. And here’s where an MVP will help you avoid any unnecessary spending of time and money, and create a basic product, which can further be improved.
Below you can see the essence of the approach.
According to Wikipedia, a minimum viable product is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and to provide feedback for future product development.
Let’s now explore the key reasons to implement the MVP approach for testing hypotheses and discuss the advantages it can offer to your startup.
Why you should start with an MVP
1. Clear focus
With the help of the MVP approach, you can easily define your value proposition. To specify the most required features for your MVP, you need to have a clear understanding of the core objective of the project. When you know what pain points it can solve, you will be able to provide users with the highest value. Also, this strategy will allow you to cut off features that are not that necessary.
Instagram stands for a good example. Today, everybody knows it as a popular photo and video sharing social network. However, it was initially started as a GPS-based application.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram, were building a project with lots of features including checking into locations, making plans, publishing images, and so on. However, soon they understood that most of the existing functionality made their application too difficult for users. For this reason, they turned to focus on one particular function instead — photo sharing.
Below you can see the first version of Instagram that was called Burbn.
When the application became popular all over the world, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger built new functionality like stories, direct messages, etc.
2. Cost efficiency
Since you need only the very basic functionality for a minimum viable product, developers will need less time to complete it by contract to building a fully-fledged product. As a result, the price of a ready solution will be less expensive.
Early adopters provide immediate feedback on your product, so you can add new features one by one. This way, you reduce the development costs compared to building a full-featured application.
By following the agile project management methodology during software development, you can keep costs down at every stage of your MVP development.
3. Attracting investors
The article by Forbes provides expert tips from investors who deal with startups looking for funding. They define the most crucial aspects of obtaining the required financial aid.
Thus, some investors say they expect to see the initial interest from users. The matter is that startups providing early involvement from customers have more chances to attract investors and get funding.
In this regard, you need to prove the feasibility of your business idea to obtain funding. With the MVP approach, you launch a product quickly and wait for customers’ feedback. If it is positive, you can present your MVP to investors with ease, convinced in the relevance of your offering.
4. Quick launch
As articulated earlier, it will not take long to build an MVP. Define the primary features required for solving a particular problem and release it. Such a quick launch will help you not only scale your business properly but also test your marketing strategy and sales channels.
The fact is that the faster you launch an MVP, the sooner you achieve valuable experience.
Furthermore, the quick launch gives you an opportunity to validate your promotion strategy and sales channels earlier as well. The importance of marketing should not be ignored. Keep in mind that even the most brilliant product will not succeed without effective promotion activities.
5. Feedback from early adopters
Finally, we made it to the main aim of MVP development which is getting feedback from the first users. The early adopters will help you improve your product by expressing their opinion as for the desired changes, new functions or updates. Besides, if users like your product, they can even create a community around it.
Sometimes it can happen that the initial target group you are concentrated on does not find your product valuable. Don’t get upset. Try to provide your MVP to several various target groups to find customers who will definitely enjoy your product.
How Codica can help you with MVP development
At Codica, each project that we develop for our clients goes through all stages of custom software development life cycle — from business idea validation to MVP implementation and scaling.
The main stages of custom software development are as follows:
At the initial stage of building an MVP, our team discusses business requirements with clients and explains how they can be met with custom software development.
After that, prototypes and UI are created based on the preferences of the target audience and project goals. Thus, our customers get an intuitive and visually appealing custom app that will be appreciated by their end-users.
Then our qualified software developers proceed to MVP development sticking to the latest industry standards. That allows us to provide our clients with a secure, scalable, and maintainable solution, on time and on budget.
We thoroughly test each product we develop to make sure that our clients will receive high quality, reliable and efficient solutions.
Finally, we monitor the software products after they have been deployed and quickly fix any issues that may arise.
Feel free to take a look at some of the examples of custom web solutions that we have created for our customers.
Conclusion
As you can see, a minimum viable product benefits your business both in the long and short term. It helps you identify your unique value proposition, reduce the cost of custom software development, get the necessary funding and launch the product quickly to receive feedback from early adopters.
With the help of this approach, you can:
- Focus on your unique value proposition;
- Reduce the cost of custom software development and testing;
- Obtain the necessary funding;
- Launch the product quickly to get feedback from early adopters.
MVP approach is not about building a perfect product. Your main aim is to develop a project with very basic functionality and get feedback from early adopters for further improvement.
Codica knows everything about successful MVP development. If you have a project idea, contact us, and let’s discuss how we can bring it to life.
This article was initially published on Codica Blog.
