MVP Development — all you need to know before you start

Do you have an awesome idea for developing an app and can’t wait until it hits the market? The last step of this journey is the most exciting one, but still, you need a good start. Why? Because you need to test and verify your idea before building the final product. It will make your journey safer just like in real life — when you’re going on a long journey, it’s always better to have a map, read about the destination, and the people you’re going to meet before you go.

The best idea for getting well-prepared to launch your dream product and mitigating the risk of failure is to use MVP (Minimum Viable Product) app development. In this article, you will be guided through the process of MVP development and you will find the answers to the most important questions about this essential part of product development. Read on to boost your knowledge and choose the right direction.

MVP — what does it mean?

MVP has been around for years and has helped many startups to bring their idea into reality. When you plan to launch your product, MVP is part of planning ahead. Sometimes even the most beautiful and amazing ideas can go wrong in many different ways. Without proper analysis, your product can turn out to be uninteresting for your users or lack useful features.

MVP, which refers to the creation of a basic product, includes just enough features to gain first feedback from the early adopters. While creating it, you will have the opportunity to look at your idea from a different perspective. MVP is a usable product, even though it consists of features with minimal complexity.

MVP consists of three words:

• Minimum. It highlights the character of this product, which should include only a few basic, but important features and become just an early version of the final one. Minimalistic nature is a great way to see how your idea meets reality and what can be improved in the future.
• Viable. The product has to function as if in the real world
• Product. It’s self-explanatory.

Moreover, you don’t need to spend money on adding new features, which you are not sure will gain users’ interest. It’s a quick, money-saving method — there are a lot of advantages without building entire solutions.

MVP app development in real life — our case

Let’s see this in practice based on our example. Widziszwszystko.pl is one of the most significant companies in the Polish market in terms of delivering a GPS tracking system. To stay ahead of the competition, they aimed to create their own web application which would allow customers to log in from everywhere in the world.

Web application for Widziszwszystko.pl

We quickly delivered an MVP that was able to track vehicles in real-time and generate simple reports. The goal was not to provide the entire solution, but an app with basic features to get first impressions and feedback from their clients. A simple version of the app gained many positive comments, so it was the first step in planning further development. Now the final app is enriched with various features and has achieved high popularity — it tracks more than 22 K active drivers.

So how can you benefit from MVP development?

Choosing MVP solutions bring lots of advantages to your business, such as:

• identifying issues. It is easier to identify issues by testing your product in the real world. You can identify missing features, useless features, and even desirable ones that you had not thought of. Generating new ideas for other improvements are also valuable from a business perspective. Testing your product is a good method to confront your idea with reality, gather priceless feedback, and get prepared for launching the entire product to the market.
• gaining knowledge about your users. At the initial stage of the development process, you should check that you have the necessary knowledge about your target group. What do they really need? Is your product the best solution for them and does it help to solve problems in order to meet their needs? You can learn about your responders’ needs in order to deliver the best solution for them.
• test your idea. Sometimes even the best ideas turn out not to be the right fit for the market. While building an MVP you can verify your idea and make a decision about your next steps.
• predict profit. Gaining early feedback and impressions from your users helps in predicting the profitability of your product. You can also make wiser decisions and better plan your future development.
• find partners. Releasing the first version of your product is a great way to show it to the world, gain interest, and even draw attention from potential investors.

“MVP is a great solution to test how your innovative idea fits the market. I believe that gaining feedback from early adopters brings significant value because you build products to interest them and they decide on its success in the future. This is why MVP can help almost every type of business, from startups to mature companies.“ Karol, Co-Founder & CTO

How about the scope of work on MVP development?

Probably you are wondering about the actual scope of work during the creation of MVP and what it means to deliver a product with a minimum range of features. To give you a good understanding of this process, it is important to highlight that the final MVP product will be complete, not a partial version of the application. Unfortunately, sometimes it happens that by accelerating the project too much, it becomes chaotic and results in a malfunctioning product. This is why we focus on delivering reliable, intuitive, and well-designed applications from the beginning to the end.

Our process — how we approach MVP in Studio Software

We follow our proven process of MVP development and always put clients’ needs at the center of our work. Of course, the final way of cooperation depends on many factors. This is why we always analyze each project individually to choose the best strategy and methodology that fits our client. Our process is as follows:

• identifying clients’ needs through workshops. As we have mentioned before, the whole scope of work depends on the type of project and exact needs, but mostly we aim to verify the whole idea and set some goals. We start exploring and validating the product concept, to fully understand the initial idea and plan the partnership between ourselves and the client.
• developing MVP through the agile process. Once we set some goals, we can start working on creating the first version of your product. Our agile teams work in sprints to deliver effective results quickly. Every 2 weeks we analyze progress, gather feedback, and decide on the next steps.

We believe that transparency, flexibility, and crafting the process towards a common goal is key to make it successful.

Summary

Nowadays, winners are the companies who strive for innovation and outrun the competition. At the initial stage of building a product, creating MVP is a good start that brings exceptional value to your company. The implementation of this solution brings many different benefits and most importantly — allows you to collect feedback from your target group and decide on how well your product meets their needs. Developing an MVP is a quick, cost-saving method.

We focus on your needs during the whole process of development. Choose a partner who understands your goals and put your needs in the center — contact us to get more details.