What is the MVP Software Development: Why and How to Build the MVP
Before delving into details, let’s make it clear what MVP software development is. MVP stands for a minimum viable product. This is a version of a product with minimum yet essential features enough to cater to early customers. MVP software development is a kind of experiment to test the potential of your product to solve users’ pains and validate your business idea at reduced cost and sustainable risk. MVP software development was adopted by Instagram, Airbnb, and Tesla.
In this article, we’re uncovering the basics of MVP software development namely the benefits and essential stages.
Top Benefits of MVP Software Development
The main point of Mvp software development is to prevent your team from building a product with zero value. Take a look a all direct benefits you earn from initiating software building with a minimum viable product.
Develop with Minimized Risks
The launch of a minimum viable product is a great opportunity to verify whether the software you’re building is the right solution for your target audience. MVP software development makes the entire team more confident about a product’s capacities and empowers them to experiment more and iterate on the best ideas.
Attract Investors
MVP is a sample of what is expected to become a future ground-breaking product. This is, by far, the best way to attract investors – people who will be sponsoring your software development and promotion. The thing is, investors are more likely to get money into a product when they actually see what they’re investing in.
Keep Focus and Minimize Development Time
Knowing whether the core functions work well to keep the audience will prevent you from building an overly complicated product. This will empower you to release a product within fastest timeframes since less time will be spent on development of features with little if not zero use.
Save the Budget
Not only Mvp software development can reduce the building time, but also save the lion’s share of the budget. By building a minimum viable product, you validate a business idea before investing money into functionality that may not work.
By the way, if budget is a concern, we suggest keeping in mind the location of a development team. Consider engaging Ukrainian dedicated developers as the best way to attract talented programmers for a fairly reasonable cost.
Clarity of Growth Strategy
Evaluation of what has worked and what hasn’t opens the room for growth potential. Leveraging users’ feedback gives a clarity vision on what features should be refined in the future.
How to Build MVP Software: Essential Steps
Here are the 5 steps required for smooth MVP software development.
State Your Problem
At the earliest stage, you need to make sure the product you’re building resonates with users’ needs. Identify and write down the success criteria of your project and make them measurable. Analyze your competitors and research market size. You should be confident that people are ready to spend on your product and that their number is going to increase.
Map out the User Journey
Mapping out user journey is a process of looking at your product from the perspective of your potential customers. Identify their pain points and determine what actions they need to take to achieve their goal. This is how you will be able to distinguish points where you can add the greatest value.
Decide on Functionality to Build
At this stage, plan the functionality to enrich the software with and divide them into “must have” and “great to have”. Make sure this functionality is connected to the product’s overall goal. Start getting feedback – this will help you validate that you included all the “must-have” features.
Create Prototype
Many confuse Mvp software development with prototyping using the two terms interchangeably. These are the two separate processes each playing a vital role. Prototype is an attempt to visualize a solution while MVP is a product itself with core functionality.
Keep Contributing
Having MVP built is in fact not the end of the development process. Never stop gathering feedback and implementing updates. This is only how you know you’ve built a long-lasting product.
MVP Software Development with Expert Voypost
In the world of fast-burning companies, MVP may define the future of your startup. Thus, the necessity of engaging vetted developers goes without saying. We are Voypost – an experienced team of MVP software developers founded and headed by Nikita Sviridenko – Solution Architect with 12-year experience in software development. With us, you don’t have to be an expert in digital development as we will suggest the most sustainable solutions for your startup. Don’t hesitate to contact us to get more information regarding your particular case.