Complete Guide on Minimum Viable Product

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Complete Guide on Minimum Viable Product
What is the most common way to start with mobile
app development? Research ? Design ? Development
? Testing ? Deployment ? Maintenance/ Upgrading
This is standard practice when it comes to
developing applications. However, over time,
businesses have changed their ways of building
applications. One of these changed ways is
creating a Minimum Viable Product. There are more
than six billion mobile devices in the world
which are estimated to
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increase by 2026. This is a huge number when we
think about the number of mobile users and the
number of applications. The mobile apps market is
also extremely competitive, and if you are
thinking of developing an application, you need
to have a USP which helps you stand out. Over
the years, users needs have changed immensely,
and to keep up with these changing needs,
businesses need to de?ne the new model. Hence,
MVP came into play. This app development model
helps startups and middle and large scale
companies develop applications with
purpose. What is the Minimum Viable
Product? Minimum Viable Product acronym as MVP is
a basic launchable product that can work for
early adopters. It is a basic app with needed
features that de?ne its value proposition. The
major aim of building MVP products is to attract
early adopters, understand the market, and make
an application that ful?lls user needs. Once you
launch the MVP product, the next step is to take
user feedback and re-iterate the app by ?xing
bugs and adding new features.
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Going further, lets see the bene?ts of MVP
products Bene?ts of MVP Products Focus on the
Main Objective Here, the main focus is to de?ne
the core objective of the application. You just
need to focus on one idea and solve it. The
purpose of the MVP model is to build the right
product with a minimum budget. Having a high
priority but minimum features can reduce the
cost of the products. Early Testing
Opportunities When you develop an MVP product,
one of the major bene?ts is that you can test it
with the users. It helps you know whether the
application ful?lls the needs, is it helping
users, are features working perfectly, and more.
Early testing helps you to make the application
better with each iteration. Gathering
Feedback When you provide the application to
early testers, you get their feedback which
helps you to make the application better. Each
feedback will help you to make the application
better by adding needed features and removing
unwanted ones.
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Understanding the Market When you research the
market and develop an application according to
its needs, you know the market better and are
able to solve real-world problems. When you
launch the MVP product and invite early testers,
you realize what the people think of your
product and ways you can make it better. Less
Development Time MVP products take less time to
develop an application which means less
development cost. This helps businesses to
develop applications faster and save
money. Budget Friendly MVP apps are
budget-friendly as it does not take much
investment to develop basic app features. When
you start with mobile app development, starting
with MVP will help you know the market and
users. Next up, lets discuss the MVP
development process MVP Development
Process Start with Market Research
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The ?rst step you need to do is to carry out
market research. Understand the market and your
users needs. When you do market research, you
understand the recent market trends, things your
customers need, know your competitors, and
understand how they are solving the problems.
These things will help you to de?ne the needs of
the market. The ?rst step is to conduct various
surveys to know the markets problems or the
current need of the market. This will help you
to solve real-world problems. One of the major
reasons why startups fail is the lack of
research. So, make sure to invest more time in
research to understand the market and users
better. Setting up User Persona Understanding
and de?ning your users persona is important. It
will help you understand the product from the
users perspective and provide them with a
better experience with your apps ?rst
iteration. Building a user persona starts from
the ?rst step users opening the application to
the last step, i.e., purchasing the products.
De?ne the users ?ow and address the actions
users need to take to meet the end goal.
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• Following are the things you need to consider
  when creating a user persona
• Identify the Users
• Here you need to de?ne who will use your
  application, in other words, your target
  audience. For example if you are developing an
  airplane ticket booking application, you have a
  large user base. Your audience will be end
  customers who will be booking an application,
  ?ight companies who will tie-up with you and
  share the schedule of their planes. Your target
  audience will provide you more clarity on what
  kind of application you need to develop, so it
  helps them and makes the ticket booking process
  simpler.
• Identify Users Activities
• Here, you will need to de?ne the users
  activities, their touchpoints will help you make
  the application better. Know how users interact
  with the application and reach the last stage,
  i.e., paying for the ticket booking.
• Once you know the users activities and study
  them, you

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• will know how to make the application better and
  make users interact with the application to make
  a purchase.
• Identify the Story Endings
• Each user will have an end goal, booking a
  ticket. Identify what things are working to make
  the users book the ?ight tickets.
• Selecting Technologies
• The next step is to select the technologies you
  use. There are plenty of options available when
  you want to develop an application. But, the
  ?rst thing you need to have is clarity that you
  are going to develop an MVP or a fully
  functional application. If you are going with
  the former one, i.e., MVP product, choose the
  ?exible and scalable technology. MVP apps will
  constantly be changing, and it will be easy for
  your developers to make relevant changes.
• You should always choose the technology your team
  is comfortable with. You need to know the type
  of architecture you will use. Here is the brief
  about two types of architecture

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• Microservices
• Microservices architecture carries excellent
  bene?ts for MVP development as they are
  available in small modules which communicate
  with each other and users. Using modular builds,
  you can decompose an application into different,
  more minor services. This makes it easier to
  understand, develop, test, and make changes in
  the architecture. Due to functioning modules,
  multiple autonomous teams can work on
  development simultaneously, which makes the
  development fast.
• Monolithic Architecture
• Monolithic architecture helps develop a
  minimalistic MVP if you plan to develop using a
  small team, and scalability is not the priority.
  It is faster to develop and uses lower hardware
  requirements. The developed application will be
  self-contained and work independently. Later, if
  scalability becomes important and your team
  expands, you can move to microservices.

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• Developing Features
• Choosing features is crucial you need to carry
  out market research and know your users
  necessary features. Here, you will need to
  verify your concept before moving to product
  development. When developing any application
  following are the typical steps
• De?ne product requirements
• Assign development tasks
• Decide the features, development, and testing
• Release the product
• Product updates and maintenance

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This is a continuous and ongoing process for
mobile app development. You will reiterate the
process based on your user feedback and their
needs. One of the best examples of this is the
app named Burbn. It was a location-based
iPhone-only app that allows users to check-in,
earn points to hang out with their friends, and
share their pictures. Unfortunately, after the
initial release, the application was not working
correctly, and users were just sharing pictures.
So the team decided to remove all the
unnecessary features and keep the photo-sharing
option. And this application today is
Instagram. We all know the success of
Instagram, and the number of users it has, the
number of images, Reels, and Stories shared
every day, and the amount of data generated
every second. The key takeaway here is to know
your users, understand their needs, and
re-iterate accordingly. Testing In this phase,
you will need to do user testing and usability
testing. The testing phase helps you know whether
your app
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• will be used and how users can use your
  application. These two things will give you more
  clarity on your application. Generally, before
  releasing any application, it is expected that
  it is complete. But thats not the case with MVP
  products the initial release is incomplete it
  is expected to at least work ?awlessly on any
  device. So, in MVP products, your aim while
  testing should be to make it ?awless.
• Collecting Data
• The main aim of MVP products is to collect user
  feedback, analyze them, and take necessary
  actions in the subsequent iterations. Once your
  application is stable, your next step is to set
  up the necessary tools to collect users
  feedback. Different measures you need to take to
  understand your users better, like demographic
  and behavioral data.
• Note Data collection must be done with users
  consent.
• There are three ways you can collect the data
  from the users
• Third-party collection services
• There are many ready-to-use tools like Google
  Analytics, Crazy Egg, Hotjar, etc., which can
  help you collect useful

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• data for your apps. You can also gather data from
  the App Store and Play Store for your
  applications.
• Note Due to EU laws, you wont use these tools
  to their full potential in European Union.
• Built-in custom data collection
• You can integrate monitoring features, measure
  and analyze any element of your product at this
  stage. You can also keep track of which software
  features people are using, where and when they
  are using them. This will help you to know more
  about your users and make the app better.
• Surveys
• Email and pop-up surveys are a common way to
  collect information about user satisfaction and
  recommendations. You can use them to get answers
  and cannot ?nd them by just monitoring behavior.
  Remember to not bug your customers all the time
  with emails and surveys.

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Launch This is the last step. Here your MVP
product is ready to launch, and users can use
it. Remember, this is just the ?rst step. You
need to iterate the entire development process
depending on the feedback you receive from your
users. Going further, lets discuss the cost of
developing MVP products Cost of Developing MVP
Products There are three ways you can develop
your MVP products, lets discuss them in
brief In house Development When planning to
start with in-house development, you need to
consider plenty of things. First, you need to
identify people with unique and different skill
sets who can handle pressure and develop
applications. There are pros and cons of in-house
development as well. You will be responsible for
everything from picking the team, assigning
tasks, ensuring they are done perfectly, timely
deliveries, etc.
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Here, the development cost is higher as you will
need to invest a lot in hiring people, building
the infrastructure, setting up servers,
marketing, and plenty of other things. Outsourced
Development You can outsource your development
to other IT companies like us to help you
develop an MVP product from scratch. Established
IT companies have a dedicated team of developers,
researchers, designers, marketers, testers,
system administrators, and sales who can help
you with the entire development process. The
major bene?ts of hiring IT companies are timely
deliveries and industry-level work. You dont
need to worry about any technicalities as the
companies will help you with everything. They
will also help you with deployment and further
updates and maintenance of the
applications. Freelance Development Many
freelance developers can help you with developing
an application. But, there are some loopholes
here as freelance developers lack experience and
will not provide you the complete
infrastructure. You will have to deploy the MVP
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product, get feedback from users, understand
them, and reach out to them to make the changes.
This entire process includes many back and
forth, and there are chances of
miscommunication, resulting in the delay of
release and making the process
complex. Considering all the factors and
depending on your requirements, you can decide
where and how you want to develop an
application. In my opinion, the best solution is
to hire an IT company that can help you with app
development and provide the needed
infrastructure and resources. If you are looking
for an IT company that can help you with
ecommerce mobile app development, you can reach
out to us. Get in Touch with Us Things to Avoid
While Building MVP Products While starting with
mobile app development, below are some of the
common mistakes which everyone makes. So, lets
see them in brief Lack of Understanding Market
Demand
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• Instead of directly starting with development,
  the ?rst step is to understand the markets
  demand. Then, ?nd the answer to certain
  questions like
• Who is this product for?
• What problem are you trying to solve?
• Is your solution helping in solving the problem?
• Once you ?nd the answers to these questions and
  have the clarity of mind to know what you want
  to do and create, you can easily ?nd the
  solution.
• Skipping Prototyping
• Prototyping the product is the most important
  thing. It gives you insights into how the
  product will turn up, how users will interact,
  use and understand it easily, etc. Skipping this
  step is not at all a good idea. It is a vital
  part of product development that helps in
  turning the idea into a reality. A prototype is
  the bridge between an idea and turning it into a
  reality as it focuses on the How part of the
  product.

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No Clarity on Target Audience Once you create a
prototype model, your next step is to allow
users to try it. Here, you need to understand who
your audience is. Dont get feedback on your
product from friends or relatives who are not
your target audience. This will end up having
the wrong feedback from the wrong audience, and
your product might not see the light of the day
at all. So, make sure you have clarity on your
target audience. Unorganized Development
Process You need to have an organized
methodology to develop an application. Working
without proper methodology is very likely to
burn you out and make you drop the development
halfway. Here, you can follow the different
development practices like the Waterfall model,
Agile model, etc. Agile model is the most
preferred model currently because it is easy to
iterate the product and have the team on the same
page. Not only this, it even helps businesses to
make qualitative products.
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• Lack of Qualitative and Quantitative Products
• Qualitative and quantitative feedback are two
  ways to collect data from your users. You need
  to rely on both ways and value them to an
  accurate conclusion. Both of these methods have a
  vital role to play and can help to make the
  right decision.
• Qualitative Feedback It consists of
  user-friendliness of the features of the
  products or services. It directly assesses the
  usability of the system by helping developers to
  analyze the speci?c problems UI elements.
• Quantitative Feedback It pinpoints whether the
  tasks were easy or dif?cult to perform. It also
  checks the usability of the design and such.
• Example
• All the successful products started as MVP
  products initially and got better with each
  passing day on users feedback.
• Facebook
• Facebook did an MVP testing that connects schools
  and colleges with messaging and sharing things
  with friends

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online. In the early days, Facebook was a basic
model MVP that had all the necessary
functionality to get users to use it. The
application launched to a certain number of users
and got plenty of feedback. We all know today
how huge Facebook has become. Twitter Today
Twitter is the second most popular social media
platform, followed by Facebook. It was started as
a platform for internal communication, and later
on, looking at the potential of the platform, it
was launched. Conclusion Developing an MVP has
become a need of an hour. It gives you plenty of
opportunities to understand the market, know
about users needs, and de?ne ways to solve
them. Initially, it would be dif?cult to keep up
with the changing demands of the users, but you
will understand your users needs over time. If
you plan to build the minimum viable product, you
can reach out to us we have helped many
companies build their MVP, turn their ideas into
reality, and develop full-?edged applications.
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