What if I tell you that Facebook, Uber, and Amazon owe their success to one common thing? For the most part, they managed to grow into giants since they have started small — each of them began as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). As you might understand from its name, an MVP is a software product that includes only the most essential (minimum) functionality, but that is also viable enough and can be applied to solve a particular user issue. MVP development services require less time and resources than full-scale production, and the final result is always impressive. Here are some of the most notable benefits that an MVP offers.
1. An MVP Helps to Attract Investors/Stakeholders
Stakeholders and investors are vital for almost any business, and the best way to attract their attention and prove that your project is worth their money is to develop an MVP. It usually does not take much time and resources to build a minimum viable version of a software product. Yet, if an MVP manages to receive positive customer feedback and stimulate demand, then it will be way easier to find stakeholders.
Stakeholders want to invest in something that they believe has all chances for future success, and you can’t blame them for that. An MVP is not just some mere words or bold dreams. It is a physical product that your potential investors can see and feel. If your MVP already managed to prove itself at least partially worthy among users, then your project will likely also win stakeholders’ hearts (or wallets, at least).
2. It Allows for Risk-free Experimenting
An MVP is crucial both for already established companies and for startups, especially when they want to release something innovative. Developing an MVP is a good way to test the waters when you came up with a new business concept. Such a product does not require considerable investment and can instead focus on presenting the core feature of the future product. It helps to test whether your new product will generate the desired demand, while not risking dramatic financial losses. There is no need to go all-in since a minimum viable product will immediately show whether your project has chances for future success.
What is more, MVP allows collecting feedback, which you can later analyze, and changing the product’s direction while the development goes. Along with the feedback, you might also get information regarding the users’ age, social group, and the way they interact with your product. This data can be utilized to improve features or add some missing yet important functionality. Note that it is the minimalism of an MVP that allows for these actions. The product is still not finished, and you gradually build it based on the mentioned-above factors. A feature-heavy product, in turn, leaves far less space for changes.
3. It Helps to Verify Market Demand
The very purpose of an MVP is to conduct initial testing. It will show you which solutions work and what fail to satisfy customers’ needs. Sometimes companies may falsely assume that their product will be of high demand as it addresses some critical problems and offers a suitable solution. They invest a considerable amount of resources in full-scale development but end up being ignored by users. It often happens that either their solution failed to establish effective ways of human-computer interaction, or there is another better solution that emerged in the ever-changing market.
An MVP is the most efficient way to verify market demand before investing a significant amount of money. It actually manages to kill two birds with one stone. First, an MVP allows to offer a potentially good solution to customers and gradually make it suit their needs even more. Second, an MVP can surely be developed much faster than a full-scale product, and thus you can outscore your competitors and become the first to present an effective solution.
4. It Promotes UX and Usability Optimization
As a rule, almost one-third of mobile users abandon using an app after the first or second try. The number of users who downloaded your app is not an indication of success. That is why it is so important to pay a great deal of attention to usability and user experience if you want your customers to actually use your product.
Establishing a solid user engagement is a difficult yet possible task, especially when the project starts with an MVP development. An MVP is only the beginning, and customers usually understand it. If they liked the idea and solution, then they will gladly share their experience with you to make your app more suitable for them. The goal of your company is to absorb and analyze their feedback. Then you ought to make a proper response in the form of relevant and well-timed updates. With such an approach, there are no chances that you will fail to establish a deep user engagement.
5. An MVP is Cost-Efficient
It was already mentioned several times before, but this point surely deserves a separate section since a low cost of an MVP development is indisputably one of its chief benefits. Sure thing that full-scale product development is much more expensive than that of a minimum viable product since they are in a different weight range.
In the long run, the gradual development of an MVP and its evolution into a full-scale product is, in most cases, a cheaper variant than the regular approach. When going for an all-in development, companies often add many excessive features just to be safe, which surely may cost a pretty penny. An MVP, in turn, includes only the most essential features and develops gradually based on particular user needs, so it rarely has any redundancy.
Final Words
An MVP development aims at providing a safe ground for testing at a relatively low cost. It allows to start small and gradually develop while building up the functionality and improving usability based on users’ feedback. It is one of the safest and most effective ways of software development.
