How to develop a successful app? What is the best functionality for your business idea? What are the ways of saving time and money? How to determine a target audience? How to gain high ROI at minimum development costs? These and other questions arise when you are about to start a business. The best answer to them is to opt for building a minimum viable product. Any experienced and reliable MVP development company in the USA will consult you to implement MVP prior to developing a mature product. It allows you to collect feedback, adjust features and functions, and evolve into a successful complete product that stays ahead of the competition.
Where to start?
As soon as your company decides to build an MVP, you might start with the following:
- define the target users
- choose the marketing strategy
- map out the design and architecture
- pick a monetization strategy suitable for your product
So, these are the assumptions you make before developing a minimum viable product. However, none of them are valid until you test them through a series of target audience research, feedback collections, and feature check-ups. In other words, this procedure looks like estimate – build – estimate – adjust.
How to create?
As mentioned earlier, the development process of MVP does not start at a glance. The whole process is agile, though, and has some basic steps to follow.
#1 Estimating the problem
Any business idea should be aimed at solving some problem. In other words, when your product solves some issue, it motivates your target audience to opt for it. MVP is an easy way to validate this, as you may adjust to make your product meet customers’ needs.
#2 User flow
To put it simply, user flow is a journey you take your future users on. It is a crucial step to polish your product. For example, Uber is an example of a successful company that used MVP to test its product. Their user flow enables people to hire cars when they need them. And they have made it! Even if it sounds too obvious, defining your user flow is vital. Your product should serve its purpose and be unique.
#3 Main features
When you have defined the problem you are going to solve, and the flow your users are going to go through, you break down all the products into separate features that have to be implemented. When those features are defined, start prioritizing them. In this matter, you should focus precisely on necessary things and not be distracted by some features you just find compelling.
What are the benefits?
#1 Building confidence
Implementing MVP can be an option for your business when you lack enough funds to build a full product from scratch. Moreover, with this approach, you are able to build confidence and gain more traction prior to an official launch. It is much easier for you to pitch your business idea when potential investors or stakeholders can physically see or use your product. Investors’ buy-in has never been so likely and promising. What is more, with the MVP approach, you can present a solid ground for your products’ market value, faster reach desired revenue growth and reduce a lot of risks. These are all favorable factors for investors.
#2 Testing business concepts
As mentioned before, first of all, the key features have to be defined and tested. That is how you check out if that or another business concept gains popularity among your target audience. When you launch a heavy-feature product, testing a concept does not make any sense. However, with MVP, you define the most active users of your product, which features they choose most often, and how they interact with the product on the whole. You can not even imagine how much you may glean from users’ interactions. For example, the Instagram app was introduced with a GPS feature at the stage of MVP. You know the end of this story.
#3 Fulfilling the market needs
This benefit arises from the previous one in some way. What does it mean? There is a certain market demand that has to be addressed. Launching MVP for your product, you get an opportunity to test and validate the market demand. It is as simple as that! Customers do not need the same products in the market only if these products have other features and meet some other needs.
#4 Creating a monetization strategy
Any business strives to be profitable. In order to develop a stable income, your product monetization strategy has to be based on what customers are ready to pay for. MVP helps you identify the proper monetization strategy after a series of assumptions or adjustments while your target audience is using and giving feedback about your product. It significantly influences your business ROI and profit.
#5 Testing UI and UX
Another crucial benefit MVP implementation may bring is collecting data on users’ engagement with your product. The statistics are sad as over 50% of users give up on new developments in the first month. However, when users find the product helpful and usable, 90% of them keep it around. Powerful UX and UI are the tools in your hands to convey in a minimum viable product the purpose and flow.
#6 Investing smartly
MVP helps you grow your product until it becomes mature and successful. An iterative approach, spread-out cost, and reinvestment options. These and more features lead to intelligent investment, as with MVP, you start seeing only prospective sides that require more solutions, coding, and costs. That is why establishing MVP lead to investing smartly.
Conclusion
MVP development is a process that represents some kind of product testing through practice. Minimum Viable Product, when built by a reliable software partner, brings only benefits, saves a lot of your time, energy, and money, polishes your agile approach to product development, increases and even maximizes ROI, gains popularity for your product among the target audience and leverages all your business decisions.