Do you ever wonder what some of the most successful apps around the world have in common? They all have undergone the process of MVP development to grow into powerful platforms, catering to the needs of millions of customers and providing solutions for a very specific set of identified problems.
Majority IT startups today turn to development of a minimum viable product before entering the market with a full-fledged new application. This helps them gain maximum insight into their target market with minimum investment.
Let’s dive into detail about what exactly is MVP development, why you need to invest in it, and how you can build an MVP that’s uber-successful.
What is MVP in Software Development?
MVP or Minimum Viable Product is a basic version of your product, equipped with core features that can be launched for your early adopters. Launching this version of your product helps collect valuable feedback from the early customers and get a deeper sense of your target market.
The lean startup methodology is based on the theory that launching and validating a fully-equipped product can be time consuming and an expensive affair for any startup; especially considering the uncertainty of its acceptance in the target market. When you build an MVP, your product has enough features to give your early adopters a feel of your product and collect valuable feedback, which can ultimately guide you through further development of your product.
In simple words, MVP development is a basic version of your product that checks the business viability of your product with minimum financial risk. MVP product development is especially important for new age businesses built around an agile methodology.
How long does it take to build an MVP?
The time taken to build an MVP can vary with the complexity of the project, but it typically takes about 90 days to build a working MVP through a professional MVP software development company.
How much does it cost to build an MVP?
Cost is also a factor that can vary with the complexity of the project. The cost of MVP development at VoxturrLabs starts at $25,000.
MVP vs Prototype vs Proof of Concept (POC)
Popular Examples of a Successful MVP Development
Instagram started out as a platform where users could take photos, edit them, and perform location check-ins. Then came the feature of sharing photos and the response was explosive! The founders identified the market gap where users wanted to be able to share their photos, and built a solution to bridge that gap.
Features like sharing, liking, commenting on photos were also added, which were really simple to use.
In no time, this MVP grew into one of the most widely used social media platforms, with 1.4b+ users across the globe, and growing!
Spotify
The founders of Spotify identified a huge market gap in the music industry – limitations on song streaming for people who loved listening to music. The first functionality with Spotify was to enable artists to stream music online.
An MVP of the platform was launched without wasting time and with little investment, Once the idea was validated by the market response and its early adopters, Spotify grew into becoming one of the most feature-loaded music platforms across the world.
Tesla
Tesla is a brilliant example of the benefits of MVP development. The journey of this product started off as a simple electric car that solved a very small problem for its users. With its initial release, Tesla was an electric car but it differentiated from competitors with its speed. Once it established itself as a no-compromise-electric-car, Tesla expanded its network of charging stations across regions to create an infrastructure that was electric vehicle friendly, gradually creating a relevant place in the automotive industry.
Don’t forget to circle back and read this exciting case study on Tesla Inc.
Airbnb
The founders of Airbnb validated their business idea with literally no capital investment. They validated their business idea by using their own apartment and created a market of online peer-to-peer rental housing. Their initial website was simple and minimalistic with pictures and details of their property and received a very positive response, almost immediately.
Everyone knows the story of Facebook! It started off as a basic platform that let people connect with others at their university. In no time, Facebook grew into one of the most popular social media platforms that helped people across the globe connect and engage with each other.
What is the Purpose of MVP Software Development?
MVP in software development refers to the most pared down and initial version of the software, loaded with its core features and functionalities. MVP development includes strategizing, designing, testing, and deploying the minimum viable product or software quickly and optimally, for its early adopters.
The purpose of MVP development is to –
- Validate product idea at an early stage
- Early customer feedback to improve the final product
- Enables focus on the core features of the product
- Reduces time-to-market and get an early-mover advantage
- Test the market before investing resources in a full-scale launch
- Acts as a proof of concept for potential investors
- Validate the business and revenue model
- Cost-effective approach to test a new market
- Optimize the time invested by the development team
- Find the right Product-Market-Fit
- Test and optimize customer acquisition and retention strategies
- Create a pool of customers or early adopters even before the product launch
Why is MVP Important for Businesses?
18% startups in the U.S fail within the first year, and 31% fail after 2 years.
(Source: Lending Tree)
Why do some product ideas work and some do not? One of the primary factors that drive the success of a product is the way it enters its target market. A successful product creates an outstanding market presence for itself and attracts the early adopters.
Another reason why businesses fail is because of a bad product idea and unmet customer needs. Valuable improvisation and constant evolution of your product can set it apart from the competition. However, the question arises: “How can you determine whether your product has the potential to succeed?”.
Even though shortage of cash is one of the leading causes for startup failure, 75% VC-funded businesses also fail.
This is where MVP product development comes in. Startups as well as established companies can benefit from MVP development. MVPs are designed to facilitate the creation of products that appeal to a business’ target audiences.
It’s alarming how little consideration is given to the time and money that is spent on creating a software product and improving it for top-rated functionality. With MVP software development, you can create a product that is loaded with the core features to attract the early adopters right away. With the continual feedback and refinement of the concept, you can be confident that the product will improve over time.
This approach increases your chances of getting your concept accepted before you invest more resources in it. Even if our clients start with a small budget, MVP development helps them succeed because every penny counts.
7 Key Benefits of MVP Software Development
Building an MVP in software development has a multitude of benefits for your development team, your marketing team, and the overall business.
MVP development ensures you don’t end up creating something that may have a market, but has no revenue-generating demand.
Let’s take a look at the 7 key benefits of MVP software development –
- Helps you identify your value proposition
You can identify and define your value proposition, focussing and investing your time and money on the core selling feature of your product, instead of building too much with no saleable value.
- Collects valuable market feedback
Deploying an MVP helps you gather valuable feedback from your early adopters, about the features they like, the features they don’t like, and the features they would want. Based on the response, you can plan further development of your product.
- Validates your business idea
MVP development gives you an excellent opportunity to validate your product idea and see if it meets the needs of your target market. With much lesser room for erroneous decision-making, MVP building pushes the development team in the right direction.
- Optimizes development time
Building a pared down version eliminates the need to spend unnecessary time on developing functionalities that are not needed. Moreover, timely customer feedback enables the development team to undertake further development & upgrades quickly and effectively.
- Optimizes financial resources
Building a minimum viable product is one of the best ways to launch a new product in any market. MVP development not only saves time, but saves tremendous amounts of money that would otherwise be spent on a product or features that may or may not be accepted in the target market.
- Better future & growth planning
MVP software development provides a good insight into what is working for your customer base and what is not, equipping you to make well-informed decisions about further development and growth of the product, improving the odds of a successful product.
- Helps find more investors & fundraising opportunities
Launching an MVP gives potential investors a sneak peek into the uniqueness and selling points of your product, grabbing quality attention and interest. This serves as an excellent chance to raise more capital to grow your business.
Key Benefit Explained – Optimized Development Time & Financial Resources
MVP software development benefits a new business or a new product line in a number of ways. One of the key benefits being, significant cost and time savings!
Lowers Development Cost
Product development process is complex and requires a team of developers, designers, engineers, users, and technology experts, resulting in higher product launch costs. MVP development, when outsourced, lowers the development cost by enabling a quicker and cost-effective initial release of the product, without hiring a full-fledged team. Moreover, when you build MVP, you can gather valuable customer feedback and make necessary modifications before investing 100% resources for a full-scale release.
Faster Time to Market
MVP software development enables a much faster time to market with its quick initial release of the core functionalities and early customer feedback for further iterations. MVP product development provides the benefit of an early validation of your product in the market and provides a faster proof of concept, which helps with effective fundraising for further development of the product and growth of the business.
Quick Product Validation
When you build mvp for your business, you gain an edge over your competitors by releasing a basic version of your product with its core features for your early adopters. This early testing of your product in the target market and early customer feedback, gives you a much better understanding of which product features stand out for your target customers and which ones need improvement.
Key Benefit Explained – Valuable Customer Feedback
MVP product development benefits a new business or a new product line with quick response and valuable feedback from its early adopters in the market.
Early Customer Engagement
Early adoption of the product after its initial release enables early customer engagement and helps recognize the pain points and the necessary areas of improvement. This enables the developers to implement the crucial changes before a full-scale release of the product. Moreover, early customer engagement after MVP development of your product helps establish an early relationship with the target audience and have a strong brand presence within the market once launched.
Valuable Customer Feedback
By releasing a basic version of your product with core functionalities, your development team can assess and evaluate how your product is being really used in the market. You can encourage customers to provide valuable feedback through surveys, focus groups, or interviews. Your development team can also track the usage of the initial version of your product through a wide range of metrics, reports, and so on. This enables implementation of improvements that add real value to the product and enhance its usability in the market.
Product Improvement & Evolution
Early feedback and understanding the real pain points of your early adopters helps your team get a deep sense of what your customers really want. MVP software development provides a clear roadmap to your developers on what improvements your product needs, how they need to be prioritized, and how it needs to evolve to stay future-ready and market-ready.
Key Benefit Explained – Future Growth & Planning
Flexibility is one of the best benefits from MVP development for a new business or a new product line, with potential to redesign the whole trajectory of a business.
Ability to Pivot
When you build MVP of a product, you have the benefit of having the ability to pivot and make changes easily and quickly. Based on the early adoption response and feedback, your product team can tweak the product features and their priorities, for maximum impact, presence, and acceptance. Since an MVP is the initial version of a product with its core features, it’s easier for developers to implement modifications to the product before a full-scale market launch.
Lower Failure Risk
The whole purpose of MVP software development is assessing the response and acceptance of your product among the early adopters. With the process being highly strategic and methodical, product development and its full-scale launch carries a predetermined rate of potential success. With the final product being derived out of an early feedback and customer response, the risk of product failure is very low, when compared to other new products that are launched without MVP development.
Ability to Experiment
MVP product development maximizes the ability to experiment with different features in the product. The process of developing an MVP provides access to early adopter feedback and valuable user metrics. On the basis of these responses and level of product acceptance in the market, developers can add or remove certain features, followed by further testing and validating of the MVP. This significantly lowers the risk of introducing features that may be experimental or unique for the market.
How to Build A Successful MVP – 6 Winning Steps + Bonus
Step 1 – Business or Product Idea
Identify if there’s a need for your product in the market and if it’s capable of fulfilling the needs of your target customers. This helps define a long-term and measurable business goal.
- Define the problem statement
- Check if your product has the capability to solve that problem
Step 2 – Market Research & Competition Analysis
Identify your competitors’ offerings and market gaps. Calculate your target market size and analyze your target customer base. To build a successful MVP, establish if your product has the potential to generate enough revenue for your business to grow and survive.
Step 3 – Customer Roadmap & Pain Points
MVP software development is a user-centric process, where you analyze and identify the desires, goals & needs of your target customers. Identify your customer’s pain points and establish whether you’re building a product that’ll solve these problems and add value to the lives of your customers.
Step 4 – Prototype
A prototype is built to aid in better visualization of the product, whereas an MVP is a working product equipped with core functionalities for your customer base. Building a prototype is an extra yet valuable step that gives a sense of direction to the team and adds confidence towards the development process.
Step 5 – Value Proposition & Core Features
Define your value proposition and establish the core features that would be part of your minimum viable product. Choose functionalities that would add value for your customers, cater to their pain points, and align with your overall goals. Timely launch and quick development based on feedback will put you on the path to success.
Step 6 – Iterate
MVP software development and launch is not the final step of your product development process. After initial deployment, keep collecting customer feedback and adding upgrades to your product, to build something that is truly user-centric.
Bonus tips for creating a super successful MVP –
- Get a professional MVP consultation before you start with the process
- Ensure your MVP aligns with your business objectives and goals
- Try A/B testing for valuable and comparative user feedback
- Measure, collect, and analyze all data
What To Do After Building an MVP?
The first things to do after you’ve built your MVP is to deploy it, start collecting feedback, and analyze the gathered data. The decisions you take after this point would depend on the feedback and data you receive. Multiple modifications to bring your product closer to perfection is normal at this point of your product development cycle.
Choose Award-Winning MVP Software Development Services at VoxturrLabs
MVP in software development is on the path to becoming a groundbreaking step. This one simple process is beneficial for both, the business as well as the customers.
Building an MVP is not just about building something that will generate revenue and bring profits. Building an MVP is also about building something that will change the lives of your customers!
Whether you’re a startup, an SME, or an enterprise level business, MVP software development has the potential to give you results that are no less than revolutionary.
Also read, MVP Development for Startups: An Expert Guide
MVP development requires experienced developers with a fast release schedule, which means it is strongly advisable to outsource it. Creating an in-house development team can be a time consuming and expensive process, especially for a venture which may or may not be successful.
As an MVP software development company, we have had a high success rate from workshop to launch. Since we were founded, we have built exceptional projects and worked with cutting edge technologies. By leveraging our experience and expertise, we pair you with top-tier developers who help you through your vision.
VoxturrLabs delivers products that are secure, scalable, marketing-ready, and timely. We strive to develop the best products possible with our user-centric approach. As a company, we put a lot of emphasis on developing the features to meet the expectations of your early adopters, while maximizing their ROI.
FAQs for MVP Software Development
1. What is MVP development?
MVP product development is the process of creating a minimum viable product, equipped with a minimum set of core features, enough to validate early-adopters’ demand and get valuable customer feedback, for further product development. This is one of the most efficient ways to test product viability.
2. Why should startups outsource MVP Development?
Outsourcing MVP software development is a great way to gain expertise and experience from experts. Further, it saves time and money that would otherwise be spent on research, consultations, and decisions.
3. What is the MVP development process?
- Business Analysis
- Marketing Strategy
- Strategic Planning
- Prototype Designing
- Product Development
- Product Evolution
4. How long does MVP development take?
The time taken for MVP software development depends on complexity of the product, team size, and availability of other resources. The time taken may range from a few weeks to months for building an MVP.
5. Why is MVP Development Important?
With an MVP, you can discover what markets need, get feedback, and learn about risks before launching the entire product. A product’s effectiveness is determined by its initial user responses and feedback.
6. Are MVPs only for startups?
MVP development can be done for any business size, ranging from startups, small & medium sized businesses, established businesses, or an enterprise, to launching a new line of business or a new product line.
7. What do you mean by MVP in Product Development?
A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a new product introduction technique that delivers enough features to gain consumer attention. After the initial product runs its course and provides feedback to customers, the final version is released.
