Benefits of Building an MVP for Your Startup

Startups have a natural limitation on budget, and therefore they cannot spend money carelessly. However, the business environment always demands quality from its participants, whether it be a startup or a company that has unlimited resources at its disposal. This is where the concept of a minimum viable product or an MVP is useful.

However, MVP is such a widely used term that we will tell you what it’s not before telling you what it actually is so that any confusion is eliminated. MVP is not a prototype or a beta version of the final product, which means it doesn’t precede the real product in any manner. The MVP will never be seen by the end-user. MVP is also not short for “most valuable player”, which is another term that comes in the area of software development. 

So what is an MVP?

MVP is essentially a basic version of the final product a startup focuses on developing, but it just contains the core parts of the final product or the service. It can be applied to any service and is often helpful to test the long term success of an application or a website.

It is also helpful in presenting the capabilities of the said service be it a website or an app in a limited timeframe. This can also help gain an edge over competitors because it helps to identify flaws quickly thereby fixing them quickly. MVP can be designed with the help of expert MVP developers who have expertise in identifying the core parts of the final product and laying them down in a manner that replicates the user experience with the final product. 

The Benefits of building an MVP

Following are the many benefits of building a minimum viable product. When you are a startup and have to compete against the big players, each of the following advantages becomes important.

Risk reduction

There are a lot of risks for the startup that is already short of resources that tries to develop the final product whether it be a website or a mobile/computer application in one go. The lack of market demand is a large cause of market failure for startups as one survey showed that it accounts for 35% of all startup failures.

With such odds, startups who test an MVP will know early on whether such market demand exists for their product or not. If the worst actually happens and your MVP fails for any particular reason, it will fail swiftly and inexpensively, saving the startup money and time.

Speed of development

The speed of development is increased if you plan to develop an MVP. This seems to be counterintuitive as the MVP is never intended to be used by end-users. The advantage of developing the MVP is that you will know for a fact which core parts of the website or the app are useful and appeal to your end-user.

By contacting a good MVP development company, you will be able to test the vital features of the product beforehand and thereby reduce any surprises while you deploy the final product on the market. You will also be able to incorporate any new technology in your final product that gets developed while you are making the MVP. This can help you gain a greater foothold in the market if your final product turns out to be more responsive and attractive than your competitor. 

Finding investors

As a startup, you will have limited resources and are especially low on financial supplies. However, if you build an MVP and show it to professional investors, they will be able to understand your final product better. You can gain their trust by making them see the core features in action. If you already have a decent user base and have had prior successes in the market, you have a better chance to gather their investment.

How does one go about building an MVP?

Market research

If your product is a mobile app, there’s a lot on the line and therefore you must start with market research. The market research must look into what people want, what technologies are available and what features of the app must be focussed on. Competitors must also be analyzed as effectively as possible. 

Dive into design

This is the most important stage of building an MVP. One must choose the most important features of the application or the website and build it so that user experience, performance and the impact on the market, in general, can be analyzed. If the final product is a website, the MVP design begins by using an inexpensive open-source software like WordPress. If the website has other features that cannot be replicated with freely available services, you can approach a web development company to help you with it.

Testing

The whole point of developing an MVP is to test important features so that they can be up to their standard. A/B testing is carried out extensively on MVPs. user experience and performance is tested at every vital process of the MVP development. The testing process must show any flaw with the idea, the process of development and any scalability issues in the product. MVP Testing can also help determine the right pricing for the final product.

Conclusion

Now that you know what an MVP is capable of and why many companies use it as a primary way of efficiently boosting their success, you can too. If you are short on experts that can help you build, test and get objective results about an MVP, try contacting the relevant sources.

Nextbrain Technologies is an expert Website development company located in Toronto, Canada. We also have experts on website development and have our own UX/UI designers who have expertise in providing the best user experience in both mobile applications and websites. We can help you build an MVP and test it qualitatively in real-world scenarios.