A lot of entrepreneurs and individuals dream to establish winning businesses with faultless startup app ideas. Even after spending several months or years developing and enhancing their final product. But, sometimes things don’t work out as planned.
This is a result of not properly communicating with their potential customers and launching their final product hoping that users will automatically get onboard. This has led to the early demise of a lot of products and businesses.
Minimum Viable Product is a light version of the planned project to test it in a real-life environment. It gives room for receiving actual feedback for a solution without major financial contributions. In lay-mans terms, it is a development technique in which a new product is developed with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters.
Benefits of starting with an MVP
Starting with an MVP will definitely improve a product’s chance of success if properly implemented. It gives room for more product exploration and customer insights that will eventually lead to developing a product that meets all the expectations of your customers and addresses their pain points. Major benefits of starting with an MVP:
1. Saves time and money:
When it comes to mobile app development, these are critically important resources that need to be maximally utilized. In a situation where users aren’t downloading your app or you are struggling to onboard them, it can be quite disappointing and sad after spending a lot of money and time just to watch your product fail in your very presence. But by building MVP you will be able to avoid wasting resources. You can get feedback that can help you make certain changes that will lead your app to be a perfect fit for your customers.
2. Foster relationships with customers:
Basically, it will give you an opportunity to directly interface with your customers and build a relationship with them. When you get feedback from them and they see that you implement, it makes them see your product as credible and reliable. They would always want to use your product because they know all their pain points will be addressed. In this case, they are usually your early adopters.
3. Focus on major business functions:
Gives you room to test all your major business functions and analyze the most viable ones. By testing all business functions as a whole, your product team can shift focus to improve the weakest function. You can ensure that all aspects of the business are performing well before scaling.
4. Focus on major business functions:
You built the product because it can solve specific problems. So building a product with extensive features may complicate the initial user experience for early users. In this case, MVP will help you easily make necessary adjustments if a feature needs any rework.
Examples of companies that started with an MVP app
Spotify
Spotify MVP developers stuck to the main function: online music streaming. After learning closed Windows app beta-testing results developers managed to secure deals with big record labels and gain substantial investments for their startup project. Today with 60 million current users Spotify is worth $8.4 billion.
Airbnb
Service offering short-time rent to travelers started with its owners renting their apartment to a few participants of the San-Francisco design conference. They made photos of the place to create MVP in the form of a simple website and soon were welcoming the guests. This way startup owners managed to check whether their idea of the short-term rental would appeal to users.
Zuckerberg built a basic model of his product that contained only the required functionalities needed to fulfill its goal. Many of Facebook’s current functionalities weren’t included in the first release. The application was released to a small group of early adopters (users) in order to test the application and gain feedback.This led facebook to understand customer expectations and insights which they eventually implemented. Now Facebook has over 1.3 billion active monthly users
Instagram, formerly known as Burbn, a location-based app. one of its functionality – photo sharing was users favorite at the time. When they discovered this, they removed all other features from Burbn apart from photo-sharing then made sharing, liking and commenting on the pictures a simple process. They incorporated filters and renamed the app to Instagram
Uber
All that Uber did in its first version of the mobile app was to connect drivers with customers plus the ability to accept payments. It seems primitive. However, this is exactly what allowed Uber to quickly enter the market, receive feedback, and gradually create a multi-billion dollar business. Today Uber has a much more complex application with hundreds of features.
From these success stories, it is clear that the concept behind the development of an MVP app is to put your product in the market and collect user feedback so you can build, measure, learn and repeat the cycle.
Don’t wait to have the perfect product, or till you have all the money in the world. Start with an MVP app and watch your app grow to become a very relevant app in the app ecosystem.
