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1. Complete Guide on Minimum Viable
Product
What is the most common way to start with mobile app
development?
Research → Design → Development → Testing →
Deployment → Maintenance/ Upgrading
This is standard practice when it comes to developing
applications. However, over time, businesses have changed
their ways of building applications. One of these changed ways
is creating a Minimum Viable Product. There are more than six
billion mobile devices in the world which are estimated to

2. increase by 2026. This is a huge number when we think about
the number of mobile users and the number of applications.
The mobile apps market is also extremely competitive, and if
you are thinking of developing an application, you need to
have a USP which helps you stand out. Over the years, users’
needs have changed immensely, and to keep up with these
changing needs, businesses need to define the new model.
Hence, MVP came into play. This app development model
helps startups and middle and large scale companies develop
applications with purpose.
What is the Minimum Viable Product?
Minimum Viable Product acronym as MVP is a basic
launchable product that can work for early adopters. It is a
basic app with needed features that define its value
proposition.
The major aim of building MVP products is to attract early
adopters, understand the market, and make an application
that fulfills user needs. Once you launch the MVP product, the
next step is to take user feedback and re-iterate the app by
fixing bugs and adding new features.

3. Going further, let’s see the benefits of MVP products:
Benefits of MVP Products:
Focus on the Main Objective:
Here, the main focus is to define the core objective of the
application. You just need to focus on one idea and solve it.
The purpose of the MVP model is to build the right product
with a minimum budget. Having a high priority but minimum
features can reduce the cost of the products.
Early Testing Opportunities:
When you develop an MVP product, one of the major benefits
is that you can test it with the users. It helps you know
whether the application fulfills the needs, is it helping users,
are features working perfectly, and more. Early testing helps
you to make the application better with each iteration.
Gathering Feedback:
When you provide the application to early testers, you get
their feedback which helps you to make the application better.
Each feedback will help you to make the application better by
adding needed features and removing unwanted ones.

4. Understanding the Market:
When you research the market and develop an application
according to its needs, you know the market better and are
able to solve real-world problems. When you launch the MVP
product and invite early testers, you realize what the people
think of your product and ways you can make it better.
Less Development Time:
MVP products take less time to develop an application which
means less development cost. This helps businesses to develop
applications faster and save money.
Budget Friendly:
MVP apps are budget-friendly as it does not take much
investment to develop basic app features. When you start with
mobile app development, starting with MVP will help you
know the market and users.
Next up, let’s discuss the MVP development process:
MVP Development Process:
Start with Market Research:

5. The first step you need to do is to carry out market research.
Understand the market and your users’ needs. When you do
market research, you understand the recent market trends,
things your customers need, know your competitors, and
understand how they are solving the problems. These things
will help you to define the needs of the market.
The first step is to conduct various surveys to know the
market’s problems or the current need of the market. This will
help you to solve real-world problems. One of the major
reasons why startups fail is the lack of research. So, make sure
to invest more time in research to understand the market and
users better.
Setting up User Persona:
Understanding and defining your users’ persona is important.
It will help you understand the product from the users’
perspective and provide them with a better experience with
your app’s first iteration. Building a user persona starts from
the first step: users opening the application to the last step,
i.e., purchasing the products. Define the user’s flow and
address the actions users need to take to meet the end goal.

6. Following are the things you need to consider when creating a
user persona:
● Identify the Users:
Here you need to define who will use your application, in
other words, your target audience. For example: if you are
developing an airplane ticket booking application, you
have a large user base. Your audience will be end
customers who will be booking an application, flight
companies who will tie-up with you and share the
schedule of their planes. Your target audience will provide
you more clarity on what kind of application you need to
develop, so it helps them and makes the ticket booking
process simpler.
● Identify Users’ Activities:
Here, you will need to define the users’ activities, their
touchpoints will help you make the application better.
Know how users interact with the application and reach
the last stage, i.e., paying for the ticket booking.
Once you know the users’ activities and study them, you

7. will know how to make the application better and make
users interact with the application to make a purchase.
● Identify the Story Endings:
Each user will have an end goal, booking a ticket. Identify
what things are working to make the users book the flight
tickets.
Selecting Technologies:
The next step is to select the technologies you use. There are
plenty of options available when you want to develop an
application. But, the first thing you need to have is clarity that
you are going to develop: an MVP or a fully functional
application. If you are going with the former one, i.e., MVP
product, choose the flexible and scalable technology. MVP
apps will constantly be changing, and it will be easy for your
developers to make relevant changes.
You should always choose the technology your team is
comfortable with. You need to know the type of architecture
you will use. Here is the brief about two types of architecture:

8. ● Microservices:
Microservices architecture carries excellent benefits for
MVP development as they are available in small modules
which communicate with each other and users. Using
modular builds, you can decompose an application into
different, more minor services. This makes it easier to
understand, develop, test, and make changes in the
architecture. Due to functioning modules, multiple
autonomous teams can work on development
simultaneously, which makes the development fast.
● Monolithic Architecture:
Monolithic architecture helps develop a minimalistic
MVP if you plan to develop using a small team, and
scalability is not the priority. It is faster to develop and
uses lower hardware requirements. The developed
application will be self-contained and work
independently. Later, if scalability becomes important and
your team expands, you can move to microservices.

9. Developing Features:
Choosing features is crucial; you need to carry out market
research and know your users’ necessary features. Here, you
will need to verify your concept before moving to product
development. When developing any application following are
the typical steps:
● Define product requirements
● Assign development tasks
● Decide the features, development, and testing
● Release the product
● Product updates and maintenance

10. This is a continuous and ongoing process for mobile app
development. You will reiterate the process based on your
user feedback and their needs.
One of the best examples of this is the app named “Burbn.”
It was a location-based iPhone-only app that allows users to
check-in, earn points to hang out with their friends, and share
their pictures. Unfortunately, after the initial release, the
application was not working correctly, and users were just
sharing pictures. So the team decided to remove all the
unnecessary features and keep the photo-sharing option. And
this application today is “Instagram.” We all know the success
of Instagram, and the number of users it has, the number of
images, Reels, and Stories shared every day, and the amount of
data generated every second.
The key takeaway here is to know your users, understand their
needs, and re-iterate accordingly.
Testing:
In this phase, you will need to do user testing and usability
testing. The testing phase helps you know whether your app

11. will be used and how users can use your application. These
two things will give you more clarity on your application.
Generally, before releasing any application, it is expected that
it is complete. But that’s not the case with MVP products; the
initial release is incomplete; it is expected to at least work
flawlessly on any device. So, in MVP products, your aim while
testing should be to make it flawless.
Collecting Data:
The main aim of MVP products is to collect user feedback,
analyze them, and take necessary actions in the subsequent
iterations. Once your application is stable, your next step is to
set up the necessary tools to collect users’ feedback. Different
measures you need to take to understand your users better,
like demographic and behavioral data.
Note: Data collection must be done with users’ consent.
There are three ways you can collect the data from the users:
● Third-party collection services:
There are many ready-to-use tools like Google Analytics,
Crazy Egg, Hotjar, etc., which can help you collect useful

12. data for your apps. You can also gather data from the App
Store and Play Store for your applications.
Note: Due to EU laws, you won’t use these tools to their full
potential in European Union.
● Built-in custom data collection:
You can integrate monitoring features, measure and
analyze any element of your product at this stage. You
can also keep track of which software features people are
using, where and when they are using them. This will help
you to know more about your users and make the app
better.
● Surveys:
Email and pop-up surveys are a common way to collect
information about user satisfaction and
recommendations. You can use them to get answers and
cannot find them by just monitoring behavior. Remember
to not bug your customers all the time with emails and
surveys.

13. Launch:
This is the last step. Here your MVP product is ready to
launch, and users can use it. Remember, this is just the first
step. You need to iterate the entire development process
depending on the feedback you receive from your users.
Going further, let’s discuss the cost of developing MVP
products:
Cost of Developing MVP Products:
There are three ways you can develop your MVP products, let’s
discuss them in brief:
In house Development:
When planning to start with in-house development, you need
to consider plenty of things. First, you need to identify people
with unique and different skill sets who can handle pressure
and develop applications. There are pros and cons of in-house
development as well. You will be responsible for everything
from picking the team, assigning tasks, ensuring they are done
perfectly, timely deliveries, etc.

14. Here, the development cost is higher as you will need to invest
a lot in hiring people, building the infrastructure, setting up
servers, marketing, and plenty of other things.
Outsourced Development:
You can outsource your development to other IT companies
like us to help you develop an MVP product from scratch.
Established IT companies have a dedicated team of developers,
researchers, designers, marketers, testers, system
administrators, and sales who can help you with the entire
development process. The major benefits of hiring IT
companies are timely deliveries and industry-level work.
You don’t need to worry about any technicalities as the
companies will help you with everything. They will also help
you with deployment and further updates and maintenance of
the applications.
Freelance Development:
Many freelance developers can help you with developing an
application. But, there are some loopholes here as freelance
developers lack experience and will not provide you the
complete infrastructure. You will have to deploy the MVP

15. product, get feedback from users, understand them, and reach
out to them to make the changes. This entire process includes
many back and forth, and there are chances of
miscommunication, resulting in the delay of release and
making the process complex.
Considering all the factors and depending on your
requirements, you can decide where and how you want to
develop an application. In my opinion, the best solution is to
hire an IT company that can help you with app development
and provide the needed infrastructure and resources. If you
are looking for an IT company that can help you with
ecommerce mobile app development, you can reach out to us.
Get in Touch with Us
Things to Avoid While Building MVP Products:
While starting with mobile app development, below are some
of the common mistakes which everyone makes. So, let’s see
them in brief:
Lack of Understanding Market Demand:

16. Instead of directly starting with development, the first step is
to understand the market’s demand. Then, find the answer to
certain questions like:
● Who is this product for?
● What problem are you trying to solve?
● Is your solution helping in solving the problem?
Once you find the answers to these questions and have the
clarity of mind to know what you want to do and create, you
can easily find the solution.
Skipping Prototyping:
Prototyping the product is the most important thing. It gives
you insights into how the product will turn up, how users will
interact, use and understand it easily, etc. Skipping this step is
not at all a good idea. It is a vital part of product development
that helps in turning the idea into a reality. A prototype is the
bridge between an idea and turning it into a reality as it
focuses on the “How” part of the product.

17. No Clarity on Target Audience:
Once you create a prototype model, your next step is to allow
users to try it. Here, you need to understand who your
audience is. Don’t get feedback on your product from friends
or relatives who are not your target audience. This will end up
having the wrong feedback from the wrong audience, and your
product might not see the light of the day at all. So, make sure
you have clarity on your target audience.
Unorganized Development Process:
You need to have an organized methodology to develop an
application. Working without proper methodology is very
likely to burn you out and make you drop the development
halfway. Here, you can follow the different development
practices like the Waterfall model, Agile model, etc.
Agile model is the most preferred model currently because it is
easy to iterate the product and have the team on the same
page. Not only this, it even helps businesses to make
qualitative products.

18. Lack of Qualitative and Quantitative Products:
Qualitative and quantitative feedback are two ways to collect
data from your users. You need to rely on both ways and value
them to an accurate conclusion. Both of these methods have a
vital role to play and can help to make the right decision.
● Qualitative Feedback: It consists of user-friendliness of
the features of the products or services. It directly
assesses the usability of the system by helping developers
to analyze the specific problems UI elements.
● Quantitative Feedback: It pinpoints whether the tasks
were easy or difficult to perform. It also checks the
usability of the design and such.
Example:
All the successful products started as MVP products initially
and got better with each passing day on users’ feedback.
Facebook:
Facebook did an MVP testing that connects schools and
colleges with messaging and sharing things with friends

19. online. In the early days, Facebook was a basic model MVP that
had all the necessary functionality to get users to use it. The
application launched to a certain number of users and got
plenty of feedback. We all know today how huge Facebook has
become.
Twitter:
Today Twitter is the second most popular social media
platform, followed by Facebook. It was started as a platform for
internal communication, and later on, looking at the potential
of the platform, it was launched.
Conclusion:
Developing an MVP has become a need of an hour. It gives you
plenty of opportunities to understand the market, know about
users’ needs, and define ways to solve them. Initially, it would
be difficult to keep up with the changing demands of the
users, but you will understand your users’ needs over time. If
you plan to build the minimum viable product, you can reach
out to us; we have helped many companies build their MVP,
turn their ideas into reality, and develop full-fledged
applications.

20. Get in Touch with Us
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