A minimum viable product (MVP) is always the first version of a product with only the “core and most useful features” meant for early adapters. MVP Development is low cost, low risk, quick and it works!
The term MVP (Minimum Viable Product) was first coined by Frank Robinson (Founder of SyncDev) back in 2001, however it was popularized into the masses through the works of Eric Ries through his works especially the book Lean Startup which is a go-to book for all modern day Entrepreneurs, and also by Steve Blank.
The definition of an MVP, since then, has changed a lot and gained many flavors because of the way startups are conceived, launched, and grown has changed a lot over the last two decades. Though MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is applicable across all the industries, it is widely used in the domain of Tech Startups that are creating digital software products like Mobile Apps, Web Apps, IoT Apps, AI Apps etc.
Common Myths around Minimum Viable Products: An MVP is often confused with a Prototype, Proof of Concept, Test Product, and even with wireframes or Blueprint, and that is a wrong understanding. An MVP is a commercial product that users can actually use (and often pay for) and is not at all an “Prototype or Proof of concept” for internal testing.
What makes a product an MVP?
It is important to understand that an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a relative term and not absolute. An MVP of a bigger product (Say MVP of Dropbox) can be a full product in itself of a smaller product vision. If your full product vision has 20 big features then an MVP can have mostly 2 to 5 core features, whereas if your full product vision has just 5 total features then its MVP can have just 1 or maybe 2. Hence, as I said, an MVP is relative to its full product vision.
In the world of Startups doing Software, App Development, Web Development, the following are some real “pointers” that can define an MVP:
- An MVP is a smaller and quickly developed version of a potentially bigger software product idea.
- An MVP is the version of your software product that should be created and launched within 3 to 6 months.
- An MVP is not a “Proof of Concept” for testing, it’s a working product that is launched in the market in front of real users.
- An MVP can be both paid or free product. In the current world, it is often Freemium i.e you use it for free for a limited time and limited features and then pay for the full features.
- An MVP is oftentimes easily scalable, it just waits for more users to jump on and next features are implemented. ETC
MVP (Minimum Viable Product) Examples from the Real World?
Both theoretically and practically almost all big software products and Apps you use today were once MVPs (Except a few examples of good old office tools from giant software publishers, lol). But let’s take up some recent and well known examples:
- Whatsapp Messenger was a pretty lean MVP when it was first launched and it only had a mechanism to send messages and invite others and few more essential features. And now, it lets you do group calls, put status, create groups, communities, exchange money and what not.
- Your beloved Facebook was an MVP made inside a college campus that just had a good UI, user’s database, ability to send connections and write on the wall. It was a “bigger size” MVP though but compare that with the features that you see on a “Grown Up” Facebook, you’ll call the earlier version as the MVP.
- Airbnb was an MVP not on the software side but also on the operations side as the founders used their own apartment to test the concept. As per my understanding, Airbnb is the most excellent example of an MVP in recent times.
- Big apps like Instagram, Youtube, Dropbox were all very-very lean versions of their current selves when they were just an MVP.
How can an MVP Development Company help Startups in building their MVP?
An MVP Development company like Agicent can help you immensely in not only building the MVP version of your Product but also in ideation, App idea validation, MVP marketing, and then also scaling the MVP to a full product. The usefulness of such a Tech Partner gets super high when you don’t have your own technical team and quickly want to create your MVP in low risk and short time. The following are the services of an MVP Development Company:
- MVP Product Discovery: Understanding your larger product vision by working closely with you and then identifying and filtering out the “Core Features” for the MVP Development.
- Roadmap from MVP to full Product: An MVP Development Company will work with you in identifying the MVP version of the product and then its future roadmap when it achieves some success.
- UI/ UX Design and Wireframing: An MVP Development company will create the visual simulation of your product in the form of high fidelity UI/UX screens or wireframes.
- Scoping and MVP Development Cost: Once the scope of work is identified for the MVP, an MVP Development Company can then estimate the cost and time duration to develop that MVP.
At Agicent, we offer you both fixed price MVP Development Cost and also a “Monthly cost of a Development Team” that starts at as low as $ 2900/ month and you get a team of Full stack developer, designer, tester, project owner at your disposal to work on a regular basis.
- Tech Stack Identification and Scalable Architecture: your MVP Development company will work on finding the easiest and most scalable Tech stack for your MVP Product development. That can include using open source technologies and ready to use libraries to cut down the cost of MVP development and also to secure hosting services. This also includes the creation of the MVP Architecture in a way that the future scaling is easier (and that’s why we emphasize on knowing the bigger product vision even when the actual MVP development is just a tiny part of it).
- Actual MVP Development: As the name suggests, this is the actual meat of the whole game of MVP – the actual MVP Development. This will include coding the frontend and backend, creating APIs, testing whenever a new feature is developed, shipping it and going live and adding more features. A truly agile way to keep enhancing the product when it is already in action in the market.
The most important part of the MVP development is continuous testing, deployment, taking feedback and iterations and then going for the hold when MVP is launched. Wait for the customer and investor feedback, and then start working on the newer features.
MVP Development is as similar as any other software development, though the differentiator here is the approach. The MVP Development teams have a very focused goal in terms of product features and time to market all bells and whistles are left for the future development.
MVP Development Cost: How much does it cost to build an MVP?
A really important and most commonly asked question is How much does it cost to build an MVP App? The normal answer to MVP Development cost would be- it depends! However, after working on plenty of MVP products over the last decade, we’ve found some kind of range for the MVP development and we are happy to share that with you as follows:
- An MVP should be built inside 3 months (using 1 developer team) to 6 months (with 2 developer teams). As per our costing standards, this means between $ 9000 to $ 18000. Time * Engineer skills are the major MVP Development cost factors here.
- A complex MVP where you are creating a unique tech feature (which may not have been done before) will cost more as you’ll do that as follows –
You create the Proof of concept at first, and that can cost from $ 5000 to anything. Just to give you an example – we recently started working on a PoC project where we needed to capture and study the “speech pattern” of a particular user group and then to achieve the capabilities to identify different speech patterns technologically. Now this PoC took more than 3 months already and more than $ 25000 as the investment. However, such projects are one in a hundred but really challenging and have the potential to change the world in a larger way. If you have that level of challenging project, contact us and we’ll lay out a proper plan for research and development.
Once the proof of concept passes, you go about creating the whole MVP product around it so again around $ 18000 + anything. So the total cost will be more. You’ll ofcourse pivot if the proof of concept fails to achieve the required outcome.
- An MVP using modern technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Generative AI, chatbots etc will need to be trained on a large amount of data first before it becomes actually useful for the users. Such AI laden MVPs will definitely cost more than the regular ones.
However, using existing AI libraries (which are mostly paid) one can save a lot of time on implementation and training of the AI engines and hence the cost. You can launch your MVP for success using such ready to use libraries, pay as you use and once you see a large user base you can replace these third party libraries with your own code and get the best of both worlds. A real good Fractional CTO can guide you to choose the right technology set for your MVP as well as future full scale product. You can hire such a CTO from Agicent at a very reasonable Fractional CTO Cost starting from $ 50/ hour.
Source:- https://www.agicent.com/blog/what-is-mvp-minimum-viable-product/
