Startup MVP Development: Step-by-Step Guide & Tips

An MVP is a safe and effective approach to delivering a startup project, increasing its chances of success. Creating a minimum viable product (MVP) makes your startup application development more gradual and steady so that you move from one development stage to another with confidence.

An MVP inspires trust in investors and stakeholders, allowing you to get the first/additional investment round. What's more, it allows you to get in touch with your TA and better learn what their expectations and needs really are.

However, organizing a smooth startup MVP design process takes some skill and knowledge. That's why we, as a software development company for startups, decided to share our best MVP design advice and tips. They will help you to launch your own MVP successfully and manifest your business ideas into the right app features more easily.

What is a minimum viable product (MVP)

A minimum viable product is the simplest version of your product that provides enough value to early adopters. It helps you launch quickly, gather feedback, and improve the product based on real user input.

MVP is sometimes referred to as a prototype, although the two are not synonymous. A prototype is typically a preliminary model used to test core user flows and the software’s layout. In contrast, an MVP is a functional version of the product built with just enough features to satisfy early users and gather feedback. Creating a wireframe is often the first step in the MVP design process, bridging the gap between a prototype and a working product.

Agile methodologies like Scrum are effective for managing MVP development, enabling flexibility and fast iterations. In this case, a software requirements specification (SRS) document guides the MVP creation process, ensuring alignment among all stakeholders.

Interesting fact: The concept of the MVP was first introduced as part of the Lean Startup methodology, focusing on building, testing, and improving products with minimal resources.

Why startups choose MVP development paradigm

A minimum viable product (MVP) is the earliest shippable software version. An MVP contains only the essential feature set needed to appeal to the target audience.

To make the most of your MVP, you should keep in mind what exact benefits you can gain from it. Thus, let's quickly go over MVP's positive impact on your project.

You can collect early feedback

The MVP process follows basic steps including discovering customer pain points and iterating based on feedback. User intelligence (feedback) is a crucial factor in your startup software development, especially at the initial stages. What's more, the MVP process helps uncover real customer pain points and guides you through iterative improvement based on actual user experience.

Why early feedback matter

Feedback from early adopters helps identify areas that need improvement and aspects that work well. This kind of input is especially valuable during the early stages of your startup’s product design, where every decision can shape the future of your app.

Instead of investing heavily in a complex product from the start, building an MVP allows you to release the simplest version, gather insights, and make informed decisions. User opinion is essential for refining the product and making it more appealing to the target market. Instead of guessing what the user persona wants, you're hearing it directly from them.

To make the most of this, it's important to set up a feedback loop — a system that allows your team to continuously collect, analyze, and iterate on user feedback. This loop keeps your development focused and helps prioritize features that truly matter to your audience.

With early market entry and a smart feedback strategy, an MVP gives you the chance to fine-tune your product and move closer to your ultimate business goal — launching something people actually love.

Faster time to market

Usually, startups fail because of the late product idea presentation. Such projects either get outrun by their competitors or wallow in tons of unnecessary tasks. But the end is common for both cases, startup fades.

On the contrary, with the MVP development process, startups focus on the essentials first which accelerates app creation. The faster you create your MVP, the less money you'll pay. Also, an early release gives you the chance to gather user feedback earlier and use it to upgrade your product.

Apart from the robust release, MVP gives you the opportunity to test if your new product solves users' problems effectively or needs some reconsideration. Knowing where your product's pain points are early, you can "adjust" your working app and expand its functionality upon a stable ground of proven feasibility.

Moderate budget

A minimum viable product requires significantly fewer financial resources than creating a full-scale solution. Mainly because you won't hire a large team for a long time to build it. Besides, a minimal viable product keeps you away from unexpected budget expenses, allowing you to invest your money only into the necessary features for your app.  

The topic of MVP costs is covered in more detail below.

Increased development efficiency

Having user feedback and service value statistics you can manage the transformation of a minimum viable product into a fully-fledged app more effectively. With that, you can reduce mistakes to a minimum which will result in a better new product, lower development costs, and faster time to market.

How to create your startup MVP step-by-step

The MVP development process typically includes steps such as market research, defining core features, designing, prototyping, and launching the product. But let's go a little more in-depth.

The CB insights startup research has shown that the number 1 reason for startup failure is a lack of market need. Thus, market discovery is where you should start developing your minimum viable product.

Find a niche for your product

This is the first and foremost step towards the launch of your project. A precisely defined niche is half of your project's success because all the further development will evolve around the market field you will enter. You can start with simple questions like these:

• What value does my product bring?
• What problems does it solve?
• Where I can offer it?

Know your target audience (TA)

You should identify your typical user and understand how your minimum viable product will help such a person too. In other words, you need to match the value of your product with the person that seeks to get it. Reading market research and public surveys can help you out with that big time.

Consider the cost of MVP development

When planning your MVP, it’s essential to understand the potential costs early on. MVP development isn't one-size-fits-all — your budget will depend heavily on the type of product, its complexity, and how quickly you need it built.

Generally, the cost of MVP development can range from $40,000 to over $300,000, depending on what you're building and how complex it is. This initial investment often represents 10% to 50% of the total software development cost, so it's a critical part of your budget planning.

Although the final cost can vary, here are some typical examples:

1) Mobile MVPs can cost between $40,000 and $120,000 to develop

2) Web portal MVPs typically cost between $80,000 and $160,000 to develop

3) SaaS MVPs usually have development costs ranging from $120,000 to $300,000

4) Development time also varies widely — from as little as 2 weeks to as much as 8 months, depending on the scope and resources.

Remember that several key factors influence MVP development costs:

• Type of software (mobile app, web portal, SaaS, etc.)
• Complexity of the features and integrations
• Project timeline and required speed
• Size and experience level of the engineering team.

Learn from your competitors

Analyzing the competition gives you a clear understanding of the current industry state and where it is heading. At this preparation stage, you can learn what the workflow, web/mobile application features, and business models of your potential competitors are. After you've found out all these metrics, check out the popularity and magnitude of each competitor to learn which models and features bring them the most credibility.

In addition, you can take from your competitors' mistakes and use this knowledge to avoid similar situations.

Choose the vital features for your MVP

Now we have clearly formulated business roles and the TA picture with all their aspirations on the table. That means it's time to project this information onto your startup minimum viable product in the form of helpful and easy-to-use features.

Transforming your business and client's needs into the features for your MVP is tricky. You should understand how your product ideas will work in your app, choose the tech stack to make them work, and tell developers what exactly you want to get in your MVP.

If you have no proper understanding of that process, it's better to hire an Advisor or Business Analyst (BA) specialist to assist you with this task. A great BA specialist is a master transformer of your business ideas into the app functionalities, which serves as a middleman between you and the developer team. Some start-uppers try to cut down on such specialists, but it results in poor feature selection, project delays, and large expenses on app rebuilding.

But there are a few major steps you should know about the feature selection regardless of whether you doing it with a professional or by yourself.

• Prioritize the features of your MVP and categorize them by high, mid, and low priority. Then, choose the features of high priority for your MVP.
• Make a user behavior mapping to understand their journey and arrange features and UI elements accordingly.

Create your MVP

After the feature selection, you are starting to develop a bare-bones representation of your business idea. Here, you have a few options for how you will build your application depending on your team's peculiarities and development expertise.

You have the proper development skills and the team to deliver a decent MVP

It's quite a widespread situation when startuppers have programming skills themselves. At least it was when startup culture was on the rise. Such teams rarely need to call any developer reinforcements for their MVP development. If it is your case, just do the coding now.

You hire the in-house developers, QA & BA specialists by yourself

Hiring in-house developers and other team members can take a lot of time and does not guarantee great results. This strategy is preferable when your project is on its feet financially and operationally. If your project is in the initial stages (like MVP development) it's a luxury to spend days skimming through CVs, interviewing candidates, onboarding them, supplying, and managing. However, you can build a team that will probably continue to contribute to your project for years to come.

All in all, this is a working method for MVP design process organization. But here you should decide if you can afford to postpone your project and to put effort into the hiring campaign instead of starting the creation process with a professional software development agency.

Outsourcing MVP development to a startup software development company

Startup software development companies save the day when your team cannot boast to be tech-savvy. This is the most hassle-free way to create your MVP and expand it to a fully-fledged application. Partnering with such an agency will free you from all the hiring-related tasks we've mentioned earlier. Close-knit developer teams with versatile expertise, quality assurance specialists, business analysts, project managers, and other tech pros are in one place.

Also, the outsource software development companies, strive to produce high-quality software to gain or maintain their prestige. But remember that large tech firms pay more attention to their enterprise-grade projects and charge a lot for their services. Small and mid-sized companies specializing in startup software development are the best fit for MVP projects. Therefore, if you are planning to hire a startup software development company, don't fall for the company's size.

While choosing your tech partners, look if they:

1) Have an office in your country of residence.

2) Offer startup software development as a separate service with special pricing plans for MVP development (it means that they take such projects earnestly).

3) Have startup success stories.

4) Have QA and BA specialists.

5) Exercise agile software development methodologies (facilitates software development and makes the process easily manageable).

Launch, learn, and expand

All right, the MVP is ready, and it's time to launch. But remember, this is just the beginning of your startup application’s next evolution. The MVP launch provides valuable data that helps you understand how well your product is performing in the competitive market.

To ensure your MVP is on the right track, it's crucial to analyze its performance by gathering user feedback across different dimensions. This allows you to see if the MVP functionality is meeting your users’ needs or if it requires adjustments. Here are some key factors to consider when analyzing feedback:

• The number of downloads over a certain period of time.
• The total number of downloads.
• Review scores and qualitative feedback.
• The time users spend on the app.
• Any other metrics that help determine if your MVP is on target with your audience or needs improvement.

Testing: the key to your product's success

Additionally, don’t forget to test your simplest version thoroughly. Usability testing is essential at this stage to identify friction points in the user journeys and ensure your app's design is intuitive. Test various user flows, and identify any roadblocks to enhance user experience. This is a chance to iterate and improve on your MVP functionality based on real user interactions.

Once you have the feedback, continue developing your application. Iterate on your MVP with new versions that integrate what you’ve learned. Always balance new features with simplicity — remember that a complex MVP can overwhelm users and slow down growth. By focusing on improving what works, you’ll have the foundation for a product that can compete in a crowded market.

After, continue to create your application to the fullest, considering the feedback and your analytics.

Startup MVP creation process: tips to follow

Hire QA and BA specialists with the development team

The years of hands-on experience showed us that quality assurance and business analysis are vital for a successful MVP release. These routines increase your end product quality and help you transform your ideas into tech concepts that will be more clear for developers. Therefore, we recommend you hire QA and BA specialists to ensure these processes will run smoothly. Neglecting QA & BA can cause project delivery delays. For instance, if your developers have a vague picture of what you need, they will inevitably spend a lot of time sorting it out themselves instead of building your MVP.  

Create a landing page or SPA for your startup

There should be a representation of your idea that will explain how your product/service works and how customers can reach you. If you don't want to invest many resources in a complex website you can get along with a simple web app. A SPA (Single-page Application) with basic information on your project will be enough to introduce your start-up to the audience and create an additional customer traffic stream.

Choose the platforms on which to build your app carefully

Choosing the right programming language and a platform to deploy defines a great deal of a start-up's success. Develop a web, mobile app, or both? What operation system to target? What integrations will you be able to add to your application? All these questions should find their answers before you start developing your MVP.

Luckily, you can use cross-platform development frameworks and create applications that can work on different platforms. For example, with React Native mobile development framework, you can create a single mobile app that can run on both Android and iOS devices. Using such frameworks as Flutter, React Native, and Angular (web), saves you a bunch of time and money but you need to choose wisely to be able to add all the essential features to your app.

Pep talk

Now you are ready and equipped with a decent tooltip to start your own MVP creation process. All that is left to do is to tell you some inspiring words to stoke the fire of your brave and ingenious spirit.

It takes great passion and diligence to bring awesome ideas into existence and share their fruits with the world. There are thousands of great success stories in which dizzying advances occurred due to the founder's well-directed actions and strong belief. Jobs, Brin, Musk, Bezos, Hewlett, Packard, and others started developing their ideas as small yet ambitious garage/home start-ups. These people would never make it from tight garages to skyscraper quarters around the globe hadn't they enough persistence, business flair, and idea determination. So, if you maintain your confidence and really love what you are doing, there cannot be closed doors for you.

Looking up to the inspiring examples, we can also say that every industrious believer has an enormous potential to transform the world with his/her ideas. No matter how many mistakes, learning, and effort should be made to achieve it. All you need to do is begin your path and manifest your project step-by-step, starting from a simple MVP and moving towards a fully-fledged solution as your audience expands. Embrace challenges, experiment, stay inspired, and have good luck with your start-up project!

We've helped numerous startups develop their MVPs, get investments, and scale their software products to enterprise-level apps for more than 5 years. Akveo team offers inclusive startup software development services with web/mobile app creation, BA, QA, UI/UX design, branding, and project management. With us, you can dedicate more time to your idea shaping and business development while our savvy and seasoned professionals take care of the tech side of your project.

Therefore, if you feel like you need a professional startup MVP development company to make your startup MVP run like clockwork, feel free to book a free startup consultation at Akveo!

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