Guide to Creating an MVP for Mobile Apps

With up to 90% of startups failing, you, as a business owner, must do everything in your power to mitigate this risk. 

A well-designed mobile MVP helps your startup create a successful application. How? By testing your core concept in the real world with minimal investment, you can gather feedback to validate key assumptions and refine your product based on real user insights. 

In today’s article, we will review what MVP development entails, the stages, evaluation process, and costs. Without further ado, let’s jump in.

What Is a Minimum Viable Product?

An MVP is a basic functional version of a new software solution. It has only the basic functionality and the most primitive design, intended to provide an initial insight into a concept developed. 

MVPs imitate a future mobile application, helping potential users decide whether they are willing to use it in the future or not. In turn, developers gather essential feedback that indicates an intended app’s strengths, weaknesses, and potential popularity to consider while making an investment decision.

5 Main Characteristics of Mobile App MVP

Below are a few characteristics of a mobile app MVP:

Validated Concept 

By introducing a concept to the market, MVPs allow you to validate its viability in real market scenarios, helping you determine whether your app has a chance of becoming successful. 

User Feedback

For constant improvement, MVPs rely on feedback mechanisms. These frameworks allow users to share opinions in real time, enabling developers to gather valuable insights for refining the final product. 

Efficient Product Evaluation

A well-developed presale campaign can be launched during the MVP development phase to assess your audience’s willingness to purchase your products so that developers can assess the product’s market potential. 

Cost Efficiency

MVP mobile apps naturally save costs and reduce business risks by preventing the launch of potentially unsuccessful apps. Moreover, they help avoid software errors, which would otherwise cost time and money to fix. 

Strength and Weakness Information

A robust MVP mobile app development program typically provides an overview of what users consider beneficial and obsolete. This knowledge allows startups to emphasize strengths and address weaknesses effectively. 

Development Flexibility

MVPs are a comparatively low-cost attempt to validate your concept. Thus, the cost of mistakes is lower, leading to higher development flexibility and adaptability.

MVP Types

There are several types of mobile MVPs that startups can use to validate their concepts. Each type serves a different purpose, depending on your goals and the stage of your product development:

• Landing Page MVP. A simple webpage or app that showcases your product’s concept. It often includes a call-to-action (CTA), like signing up for early access or updates, helping gauge user interest before building the full-fledged app. Examples include Dropbox and Buffer.
• Wizard of Oz MVP. The app appears fully functional to users, but some of its features are manually handled by the development team in the background. This approach helps validate whether users find the app’s functionality valuable without building out complex systems.
• Concierge MVP is similar to the previous approach but even more personalized. Instead of automating, you offer a hands-on, manual service that delivers your product’s value directly, allowing you to test user engagement with minimal tech development. Wealthfront is one of the prominent examples.
• Single-Feature MVP. Instead of launching a complete app, single-feature MVPs focus on developing one core feature that represents your app’s unique value. This helps you gather feedback on the most critical aspect of your product while keeping costs low. Instagram initially started as a single-feature MVP.
• Prototype MVP. A low-fidelity or interactive mockup of your app, often built with design tools. It allows you to showcase your concept to potential users or investors to get feedback before writing any code.
• Piecemeal MVP. This approach uses existing tools, services, or platforms (such as Google Forms, Slack, or Typeform) to deliver your app’s functionality. It’s a cost-effective way to test your idea without building a custom solution. A successful example is Angel List.
• Flintstone MVP. A version of the app that mimics full functionality using simple tools, allowing you to quickly test the concept and user experience. It often relies on non-scalable methods to deliver the app’s value proposition. Each type of MVP serves as a way to validate assumptions and collect feedback before fully committing to product development. Apps that have used this model include DoorDash and LinkedIn.

7 Steps of Mobile App MVP Development Process

Developing an MVP is quite similar to building software from scratch, and this process comprises the following seven stages. 

1. Market Research

Market research lays the groundwork for MVP development and informs all your decisions during later stages. Start by using surveys, interviews, and focus groups to define your target audience, their needs, and what software would fill those gaps correctly. Then, it is essential to evaluate close competitors and determine the strengths and weaknesses of their products. Research may also help determine a market’s potential and decide if developing such software can be a profitable investment.

2. Brainstorming Ideas

Once you have a set of goals, the next thing to do is come up with ideas of how to achieve them.

Ask yourself: “What do users want from my app? What challenges are my users facing, and what solutions are they looking for?” 

Besides these questions, some techniques to consider for effective group brainstorming are

• Mind Mapping.
• Brain Writing.
• Rapid Ideation.
• The Idea Napkin.
• Reverse Brainstorming.
• Step Ladder.
• Storyboarding.

Use these techniques to identify the key features that will make your product attractive to users. Prioritization is key during this stage because you don’t need to spend money implementing the full feature list until you’ve assessed the viability of your core idea. By the end of this stage, you should have a few must-have features to incorporate into your MVP.

3. Establishing Goals and Outlining a Plan

After brainstorming the basic functionalities of your MVP, you should identify all major principles of the project and determine what goals you intend to achieve during MVP development. Write them in the form of a step-by-step plan with approximate deadlines. It’s also important to set up some key performance indicators in your niche to determine the success of your product.  

4. MVP Development

Time to proceed to the main stage, where you design and code the primary functionality of your minimum viable product. Up until now, you’ve gotten to understand your target audience better, validate your idea, and identify the strengths and weaknesses of your product. Now you need a reliable MVP development agency that will assist you in creating an MVP that is tailored to your needs. Speaking of this stage, MVP app development includes selecting a design direction and making a primitive control panel with several pages. Moreover, developers perform coding of the intended features and integrate Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) if necessary. 

5. Releasing the MVP

After your MVP is complete, you should let the audience try it. You may run a marketing campaign and advertise your product on social media, or you might launch it on app stores so your target users can freely check it and have the option to leave their feedback. The point of these feedback loops is to improve your MVP by acting on user input. 

6. Gathering Feedback and Conducting Assessment

Once users familiarize themselves with your MVP, they start leaving reviews. It is vital to filter and analyze this feedback thoughtfully, as it will help you determine certain tendencies. The key thing at this stage is not to passively collect feedback but to engage with your users by asking open-ended and closed-ended questions, so you get both qualitative and quantitative insights. You should consider their opinions while deciding on your next development steps. Once you’ve gathered enough feedback, you need to analyze it and turn it into actionable data. Start by separating the feedback into general categories like feature requests, bug reports, and more. Once you’ve categorized the data, use prioritization methods to determine what actions to take. 

7. Implementing Changes

Now that you have user-filtered suggestions and completed assessments to determine problematic areas, the last stage of building a mobile app MVP involves adjusting the basic model as per the build-measure-learn approach. In addition, the first updates and changes you release should be the ones with the most impact or that offer the most value to users. Over time, let them evaluate the progress achieved toward solving their problems. You may continue updating your MVP while working on creating a fully-fledged application.

Duration & Price of a Mobile App MVP Project

The duration of a mobile app MVP project depends on numerous factors, including:

• Idea validation time.
• Time to create a simple design.
• Time for coding core functionalities and integrating APIs.
• Time for basic testing.
• Pay rates of designers, developers, and testers.

Besides, if you run a pre-sale of your product, it would require landing page design and marketing, which you have to calculate separately.

Undoubtedly, it is faster to build an MVP than a complete software solution. Depending on the complexity of your app, it should take 1 to 4 months for an outsourced development team to work. Given the average hourly rate is $30, you can expect one month of development to cost around $20,000, or $20,000 to $80,000 for the whole project.

Check the table below for more details.

Title of employee	United States	Latin America	Eastern Europe	Asia
Business Analyst	$110–$205	$45–$55	$40–$63	$30–$42
Software Architect	$198–$292	$60–$72	$55–$77	$35–$48
Project Manager	$133–$233	$55–$66	$45–$70	$35–$48
Junior Developer	$105–$111	$35–$44	$25–$42	$18–$24
Middle Developer	$132–$140	$30–$52	$25–$42	$18–$42
Senior Developer	$176–$187	$50–$61	$40–$70	$30–$42
Lead Developer	$154–$163	$45–$55	$45–$70	$30–$42
Junior QA	$77–$81	$30–$39	$25–$40	$15–$24
Middle QA	$99–$105	$35–$44	$30–$49	$20–$30
Senior QA	$143–$169	$40–$50	$40–$63	$25–$36
Graphic Designer	$79–$163	$40–$50	$35–$56	$25–$36

Hiring Mobile App MVP Developers: Things to Consider and Expert Tips

Before you hire just any MVP development team, you need to assess a few key factors including their: 

Expertise

Expertise is a top priority because only an expert MVP development partner will understand what your startup needs from the outset. Being familiar with your technical limitations, they will be able to define a roadmap for transforming your concept into a product. 

Dev Team/Talent Pool

Probably, you’re not looking for just any developers. Instead, you want to trust the development of your app’s MVP to a professional MVP development team, comprising consultants, UI/UX specialists, developers, testers, DevOps engineers, and project managers, who understand the purpose of MVPs and how to achieve the outcomes you desire. 

Technical Capabilities

The tech stacks your development partner specializes in may not be the right stack for the development of your product. Therefore, you must work with professionals who understand your needs and offer solutions that best fit your MVP. 

Besides these factors, it also helps to ask potential candidates the following questions so you can gauge your options accurately: 

What is your MVP development approach?

From the answer, you will learn more about the development workflow, techniques to prioritize features in the app, nuances of the communication process, and other essential details. Preferably, your contractor is willing to adapt to your needs and ready to help with choosing MVP core functionality. 

What are your platform, domain, and user experience?

This way, you will learn if a contractor has expertise in creating software for your specific industry. 

What are the additional services you provide?

This may include assistance with creating a landing page and supporting materials for the pre-sale campaign, gathering and implementing user feedback, advanced analytics, etc. 

What is your project time estimation?

An answer will indicate how long it will take to develop an MVP and how much you will have to pay, respectively. Deadlines must be precise but leave room for inevitable operational adjustments. 

How will my application be tested?

This way, you will learn more about how carefully the contractor approaches product testing. You may also discover whether they perform manual or computerized testing, or, preferably, both.

Final Thoughts

MVP development is a complex process intended to reduce business risks from developing an innovative software solution. It starts with researching the market and ends with implementing changes based on the first users’ feedback.

It is especially important to determine only the essential features while planning to build an MVP app. Prioritization of functions to include will help you get the most out of the basic app model, while early pre-sales will show the target audience’s interest. Analysis of the MVP’s performance will guide your further decisions.

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