MVP Development Guide: Build a Successful MVP in Mobile App Development

If you are venturing into the mobile development world, Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a term you must be familiar with before anything else in the industry. An MVP helps in validating your idea while planning to develop your mobile product. Moreover, an MVP development offers guidance on the app features that you need to include in your mobile product to achieve success. 

Many startups and businesses don’t fail because their ideas for products are imperfect but because they don’t entirely meet customers’ expectations. The MVP provides an effective way to determine whether your product will suit the market and also how to improve the product to make it pull the market.

Thus, let’s discuss how to create a successful MVP that allows you to achieve your future product faster and meet your target audience’s needs while minimizing costs on mobile app development.

MVP Development Guide: Build a Successful MVP

    What is MVP?

    Why Build An MVP? (Purpose of an MVP)

        Benefits of MVP Product Development in the Business World

   How to Build a Minimum Viable Product?

    Step 1: Market Research

    Step 2. Focus on Value Addition

    Step 3. Outline the User Flow

    Step 4. List All the Features

    Step 5: Create Your MVP

   Step 6: Launch your MVP

5 Common Mistakes to Avoid in MVP Development

MVP Case Studies (Examples)

Final Thoughts/Conclusion (50 words)

What is MVP? 

A Minimal Viable Product (MVP) refers to a minimal form of your future product that is tested on the market. It is a development strategy that enables your team of developers to validate or invalidate product assumptions. Besides, it also allows your team to learn how the target users experience and react to the core functionality of your product.

Building an MVP offers an excellent approach that provides insight into the proper allocation of resources to satisfy the overall business objectives. Creating an MVP involves an iterative process designed to determine the perfect product functionality and the users’ pain points to address the customer’s needs over time.

When it comes to mobile app development, an MVP represents a development method that allows you only to develop the core functionalities that help satisfy early adopters and solve a certain problem or needs of the target customers. Therefore, MVP development is a basic model of your future product that helps you meet the primary business objectives you aim to achieve.

Why Build An MVP? (Purpose of an MVP) 

As mentioned above, the main objective of building an MVP is to help develop a product that offers immediate value and quick solutions while reducing the development costs. Beginning your product development process with an MVP allows you to understand more about the market you are targeting and your end-user while testing your assumptions.

Moreover, an MVP lays a foundation for future development iterations and defines the sequential steps to follow in the project. That is whether to continue with the development path or entirely change direction. An MVP can also help in winning stakeholder buy-in by showcasing business potential.

Benefits of MVP Product Development in the Business World 

The aim of building an MVP is to complete a project on developing a future product quickly based on your idea while minimizing costs. It represents an approach that allows you to collect feedback from the end-users for the product to enable you to use it in future iterations. Here we look at the key benefits of MVP product development in the business world.

1. Improve focus on the core objectives

Starting your product development with an MVP allows you to focus on one idea, a lean startup concept that helps build your future product with minimal costs. With the high priority on one idea and minimum features, you can quickly minimize the cost of MVP.

2. Gather Feedback and user intelligence

The MVP provides the ability to find and gather the end-users’ opinions and expectations of the final product.

3. Early Testing Opportunity

Starting product development with an MVP enables you to determine whether your idea is viable before investing your entire money into the process. An MVP allows you to test the app with minimal risk.

4. Reduces time taken in developing your app

The MVP allows you to quickly develop your future app, which helps minimize the costs of app development. It also ensures that the app is launched to users faster, and you are able to get the feedback in less time. This will enable you to improve your app if necessary or release its updated version quickly.

5. Allows Market Validation

Building an MVP helps you determine whether your future product is perfect for the target market. A good MVP should present the future product to its users well and show them how it is different from other projects in its category.

How to Build a Minimum Viable Product?

Most people, especially in the mobile app development industry, know what MVP is and its benefits. However, the real issue lies in understanding the steps that are involved in its development process. The following are the key steps used in building an MVP:

Step 1: Market Research

The first step should be conducting market research to ensure that the idea fits into your target market’s needs before embarking on an MVP development process. This should include conducting surveys to ensure that you have more information about the end-user needs to increase the chances of its success. Moreover, you also remember to study your competitors to see what they are offering in order to work how you can make your future product unique.

According to a survey by CB Insights, 42% of startups’ failure is due to lack of market need. This shows that if your future product fails to offer a solution to the intended problem, the target customers will not consider it while finding a solution.

Step 2. Focus on Value Addition

When building an MVP, you should ideate on what your future product offers its target users and what they stand to gain if they opt for your product. Moreover, it is also important to ensure that you are clear on the product’s essential estimations. First, list the essential estimations and build an MVP based on them to ensure that the product adds value to the end-users.

Step 3. Outline the User Flow

When designing the app, ensure that you do it in a way that favors the users. In a nutshell, you need to look at the future product from the perspective of the end-users. Mapping out the user flow helps you avoid missing any essential need or thing while thinking about user satisfaction and your future product. This involves checking the goals of the end-users and laying out the procedure stages clearly while defining the features in each stage.

Step 4. List All the Features

In this stage, prioritize all the features you would like to incorporate into your future product before starting the MVP development process. Ensure you list the MVP features for each stage. You should also remember to cross-check with the list of MVP features once you complete the building process.

Step 5: Create Your MVP

Once you list all the features that you wish to include, study the market and the competitors, you can now start building your MVP. Remember, the MVP development should be able to meet the needs of the customers fully rather than being a lower quality of the end product. The MVP should be engaging, suitable, and easy for users to use.

Step 6: Launch your MVP

After launching the MVP, you should review the client’s reaction thoroughly to understand their opinion on the release. The feedback enables you to determine the competitiveness and acceptability of the product in your target market.

5 Common Mistakes to Avoid in MVP Development

An MVP helps you develop your future product faster at a lower budget while prioritizing the needs of the end-users in your target market. However, to get the best from your MVP you need to avoid some common pitfalls that can even lead to a business failure.

1. Picking the Wrong Problem

The first step before spending any time or money in developing your future product should be determining if the product offers any solution to your target customers or not. Once you identify the problem that your product needs to solve, you start building your MVP.

2. Failure to Include the Prototype Phase

Skipping the prototype phase and ending into the development process straightaway can lead to a disaster as you will not have defined the requirements. The prototype phase sets the stage for the evolution of the idea from your unique concept to a successful service or product.

3. Targeting the Wrong Target

Once you complete developing the MVP prototype, you need to validate it by testing it and gathering feedback and comments from your target users. However, you should remember that not every person is your target user. For instance, you should not seek the opinion of your relatives or friends on the product unless they are potential customers.

4. Adopting Inappropriate Development Method

One of the common reasons startups fail to complete their projects is jumping into an MVP development process directly without learning more about the right development method.

5. Misunderstanding Quantitative and Qualitative Feedback

Quantitative and qualitative feedback represent two ways developers gather data from the target users during testing. Neglecting or relying on any of them can hinder you from reaching an accurate conclusion. In this case, you can hire the services of a professional from any MVP development company. 

MVP Case Studies (Examples)

Building an MVP (Minimal Value Product) has become one of the surest ways for startups to efficiently and quickly meet the needs of their users. There are many success stories of building an MVP, but we will focus on the top 3 case studies.

1. Airbnb

Airbnb has one of the most successful MVP examples. In 20007, two former schoolmates and roommates Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, moved to San Francisco with a plan to start a business. Since they could not afford the rent for their apartment, they decided to offer cheap accommodation to attendees of a conference nearby. Opening up their apartment for the attendees solved their problem with rent and also solved the problem of the attendees who had failed to get hotel bookings.

The two roommates took pictures of the apartment, posted them on Craigslist, and found three paying guests within a short time. After realizing there is an excellent market for accommodation, they decided to build an MVP to validate their assumptions that people would be in need of their product, which they named AirBed&Breakfast (Airbnb).

Currently, the product is valued at $18B, and it started from scratch with building an MVP to find a solution to a simple problem. From this case study, we learn that the step that they took to build a functional MVP played a key role in their success.

2. Uber

Another successful MVP story touches on two guys who wanted to address the problem of the cost of black car services. With the idea, they decided to create a simple MVP to validate their simple theory. They noted that people could not afford a black car service and they didn’t like to use taxis. Therefore, they decided to come up with an excellent idea that would bridge the gap and offer a practical solution to this problem.

The idea gave birth to Uber (originally dubbed UberCab), which is now used globally. Initially, their simple MVP enabled people to ask for black car services in San Francisco through an SMS or an iPhone app. The company has now spread to different parts of the world, with a net worth of over $75.5 billion by 2019. In this case, we can learn that starting to learn while focusing on the core feature allows you to test the idea at a low cost in a small niche.

3. Facebook

It is hard to talk about successful MVP stories without mentioning Facebook. In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook’s MVP while in his dorm room in Harvard. The idea was to develop a universal directory that would connect students exclusively, but it became very popular in a few months and expanded to YALE, Columbia, and Stanford colleges. By 2005, they had expanded to many prestigious universities in Australia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, United Kingdom, and New Zealand and over 2500 high schools across the globe.

In 2006, it purchased its domain name (facebook.com) for $200k and made its services accessible to the public. Today, it owns WhatsApp and Instagram and is also the most popular platform.  

Final Thoughts

Building an MVP has become one of the basic processes for startups as most businesses try quick and efficient ways to reach their target users. The MVP development helps businesses and startups stay ahead of their competition in terms of innovation and offers them an opportunity to test their ideas without spending the entire resources and time. We believe that our guide will help you build a successful MVP and enlighten you on the pitfalls to avoid throughout the development process. Moreover, you can also hire  a professional from a top MVP development company to ensure that you get a quality product.