Categories
Building a powerful mobile app loaded with advanced features involves a lot of twists and turns. When you focus to satisfy user expectations, you need to take every step in the development process cautiously. For an app startup with little prior experience in product design and development, the challenge gets even bigger, Can an app get the expected outcome with the implementation of an app idea and is it going to serve your app objective? When you are uncertain about these aspects, opting for the MVP tool development approach is the right thing to do.
The app built first as an MVP project starting with the elementary components will help a startup take measured steps and build the product incrementally over time. The principle is to start small and stick to the basics while developing the app based on audience feedback through multiple updates.
No doubt, the MVP development brought an audience-validated development approach for the app startups across niches. It also prevented app makers from making frequent mistakes and engaging in course correction.
Let’s understand here what exactly MVP development stands for and how it benefits startups to build and release a successful product.
Table of Contents
What is MVP development?
MVP refers to Minimum Viable Product, a development approach based on audience validation of the app features and user experience. The idea of MVP is to build a basic product with the elementary features that best describe the core value proposition of the app. That means all the “not so important” and “nice to have” features and user experience attributes will be dropped from an MVP version.
Now how this basic app with key features function and satisfy its audience can be measured and based upon user feedback, further changes and value additions can be planned. Based upon user feedback, incremental changes, additions and alterations will be incorporated in the app to improve the app output and ultimate user experience. Often startup mobile app ideas lack practical market insights. An MVP development approach can reveal these shortcomings.
Now coming to the immediate benefits, the MVP approach will help a startup to release a product faster and with a lesser initial budget. Besides, it will prevent making course corrections and consequent drainage of resources and time. Lastly, an MVP approach is likely to achieve more user satisfaction and engagement as the app user experience remains fully validated by feedback.
How MVP helps startup app projects?
As it is well known, startups lack resources and prior experience. These shortcomings often result in delayed development and unsatisfactory results. An unsatisfactory result needs to be worked upon again and again resulting in more drainage of resources and development time.
App development startups in many countries drive the bandwagon of innovations. An app development Ireland company catering to on-demand service demand, can make a humble beginning as a local business and emerge as a global brand. The incremental development approach of MVP offers such ambitious startups a morale boost to start small and grow.
MVP comes as the ideal approach to help startups mitigate these shortcomings in the most efficient manner. Here we are going to explain some of the ways the MVP approach helps startup app projects.
Lowering initial development cost
Thanks to the MVP approach, a startup can build a basic app with core features involving lesser app development costs and reduced time. All you need is to stick to the core app idea, value proposition and the feature that describes the app best. Since you drop all the secondary features and attributes, you can build it fast and by spending a low budget.
Validating the app through user feedback
Every startup faces uncertainty about how its target audience will accept the product and how it will fare competitively. Despite carrying out all the audience and market research a startup is bound to face this uncertainty.
Since you cannot be sure of user appreciation before building and releasing a product, it is practical to launch a basic app, get feedback and then improve it further with changes and value additions. This will at least prevent rebuilding and course correction involving the wastage of a lot of resources.
Address the security glitches
Security issues and threats are common to most apps these days. Particularly a new app can be a soft target for security and data breaching attacks. Since a startup has little knowledge of the fast-evolving security challenges, a fully-fledged app release can make the project open to security attacks.
In contrast, an MVP app can just be released to evaluate the security threats and glitches, so that they can be fixed in the following updates. MVP approach helps test the troubled ground of app security and take measures incrementally to address the same.
Setting new market expectations
Any startup working on a new and unique app idea will particularly benefit from the MVP development approach. You can just present your unique MVP tool app to the audience and create buzz and set expectations.
Once you have measured the water, you are ready to set your voyage and make a successful entry into the market. An MVP app offers the right development approach to achieve this.
Taking over competition
For any app startup, it is challenging to take on the competition from the established app of the same niche. If after releasing the app it is found to be too generic in comparison to what other apps offer, your chances of gaining traction is doomed. This is where the MVP tool approach helps.
Instead of releasing a fully-fledged app, release a basic MVP version and see how it features against the other competitor apps. Now based upon user feedback and competitive finding of other apps, you can make improvements.
MVP success stories
Last but not the least inspiring fact for startups considering MVP development are the success stories of big brands with this approach. MVP tool is not just a concept embraced by small budget startup apps. It is equally appreciated by major brands such as Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram and many others.
Instagram brought out an MVP tool app that only allows image sharing with some filters. And then over time, the app continued to incorporate a lot of new features. The success story is quite impressive to point out the effectiveness of MVP development.
Airbnb started its journey as a solution to provide low budget accommodations to people visiting San Francisco for a conference. Started as a basic website with images of a few accommodations in the city, it grew up to become the most popular hospitality app. Starting small and humble to improve and grow over time, this MVP principle is best exemplified by the Airbnb success story.
Conclusion
So, it is evident that startups across all business niches will find MVP more effective for their app projects. To make this approach play an even more effective role, adhere to the best practices of MVP development. Make a priority list of app features for MVP and subsequent updates. Make sure you have prepared a meticulous Product Requirement Document (PRD) after finalising the MVP development plan.
Read more: 5 Crucial Things to Consider when Designing a Logo
