Building an MVP is essential for businesses to launch faster, save money, and test real user feedback. It also reduces the risk of building something people don’t need. When you create a full-fledged app, you can face several issues and losses.
That’s why businesses prefer building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to meet the evolving needs of users. Famous mobile apps like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox, etc, were also started as an MVP, and they were updated after the real user feedback.
However, building an MVP isn’t easy, and you need to follow some necessary steps to build a future-proof MVP for your business. In this guide, we’ll explore some important steps to help you build a future-proof MVP for your business. So, let’s jump right in:
Why You Should Build An MVP?
Before we explore the steps to build an MVP, we need to understand the benefits of building a digital product. These benefits can help you understand why startups should choose MVP development instead of a full-fledged app. Let’s take a look at the benefits of building an MVP:
1. Attracting The Investors
An MVP is a showcase of your app concept, and it allows you to showcase your idea, eliminating the need for talking about it for hours. Furthermore, if you get people to use the product and find value, the chances of you getting the investments increase rapidly.
2. Faster & Affordable Idea Validation
You need to include basic features during MVP development, and it can reduce your development time. Time and resources are vital parts of the process, and MVP reduces them. It allows businesses to meet the unique demands of their target audience without spending much time and money.
3. Allows Businesses To Experiment
An MVP helps businesses test their idea in the market. It also gives them the room for evolution. Firstly, if some emerging technologies emerge, you can use them during development. MVP allows you to add new features seamlessly and keeps the product concept flexible for the latest changes.
Step-by-Step Process To Build an MVP
MVP product development is a process that involves the same steps as the software product development process. But, still, there are some different steps, and you need to take a look at the complete process to build a feature-rich MVP.
Step 1: Identify The Problem and Target Audience
It’s essential to begin the development process by clearly understanding the problem. You need to begin by understanding what issue your product aims to solve and for whom. You need to find the answer of these following questions:
- What pain point are you addressing?
- Who experiences this problem most frequently?
- Are they already using a workaround or a competitor product?
Your primary goal is clarity. You need to define the user’s problems and profile carefully to make your MVP more user-focused and relevant.
Step 2: Conduct Market Research
Before you decide to build anything, you need to validate your idea with real-world data. This process involves researching the existing market, analyzing competitors, and talking to potential users. You can ask a few questions like:
- Is there a demand for your solution?
- How are current alternatives failing?
- Would people be willing to pay for your product?
You can use tools like surveys, interviews, landing pages, and email waitlists to gauge your interests and refine your concept before moving forward.
Step 3: Define the Core Features
Once you validate your idea, you need to determine which features to include in your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). You need to focus on essential functionalities that address the primary issue for your target audience. You can confirm all the features that you want to include in your application after creating a list of must-have features, nice-to-have features, and extra features that add value. This simple process can help you avoid extra features and stay laser-focused on what really matters.
Step 4: Design The User Flow and Wireframes
Now that you know about the essential features that you want to include in your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). It’s important for you to map out the user journey from onboarding to the end goal. Here are some questions that you need to answer while designing the user flow and wireframe:
- What does the user see first?
- How do they interact with the core features?
- What steps lead to value delivery?
Remember to take a look at the future app design trends and design simple wireframes to visualize this flow. These wireframes will serve as blueprints for both developers and designers to understand how the MVP should function and feel.
Step 5: Develop the MVP
Designing the user flow and wireframes led us to the development of the MVP. The user flow and wireframes can help the development team build the application easily. At this stage, you need to choose the right tech stack, set up the backend and frontend, build APIs, databases, and essential infrastructure, and prioritize performance & mobile app security checklist. The development team needs to follow an agile methodology because it allows quick sprints, iterative development, and continuous feedback. You need to focus on reliability and speed to make your MVP user-centered and gather real user feedback.
Step 6: Test The Application
After building the MVP, it’s important to test the product to make it reliable and seamless for the real users. You need to look for bugs and crashes, user flow confusion, security issues, and core feature performance to create a high-end MVP for your business. Internal/alpha testing can help you identify common problems, and you can ensure the product is stable enough for external release.
Step 7: Launch The App
Once you make your MVP bug-free and remove other issues from that. You need to release it to a small group of real users who are often called beta testers or early adopters. This phase is all about observation and learning. Here are some questions to help you understand some important things:
- How are users interacting with the product?
- Are they finding value?
- What features are they ignoring or confused by?
- What feedback keeps repeating?
Finding the answers to these questions can provide you with a reliable and advanced MVP for your business. Focusing on both quantitative data and qualitative feedback helps you make appropriate changes.
Step 8: Plan For Your Next Version
After refining your MVP based on the user feedback, you need to make decisions about the future. It’s important to scale the product, pivot based on feedback, and invest in building more features. After launching the new version of your MVP, you can achieve success in the industry because it will be based on user feedback.
Conclusion
MVP development is all about building a smart, fast, and effective product. It helps businesses reduce waste, learn from the users, and grow their product based on what actually works. This step-by-step process should be followed properly to save time, reduce risk, and move forward with confidence. However, MVP development is a complex task, and you need to partner with an experienced MVP development company.
