MVP Development in Right Way: What Does the Platform Economy Driven by Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter Teach Us?

The app stores across platforms are full of new and old apps, offering a wide variety of options to the users to choose from. The success story of each app is different from the others. However, not all applications succeed in a competitive market. Like success stories, each app that fails to make it to user’s favourites have their share of failure stories as well. Well, there are more failures at the initial stages, than later.

It is not easy to build an app from scratch. It takes a lot of time, energy, brains, thought process and money above all. Therefore, it is important to be extra careful right from the beginning itself. This will help you sustain the competition in the long run and thrive successfully.

To start with, we must always make sure to take baby steps, one at a time. You need not necessarily put in all your effort and money on the app in the beginning. Take your time and follow the simple procedure followed by some leading apps like Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb and Uber. All of these top performing apps have followed the procedure of MVP (Minimum Viable Product). This means that a minimum amount of money is incurred in the initial days of mobile app development, which allows the businesses to add only a limited number of features. As and when the app makes profits, the money earned can be spend again on getting more features added. This won’t burn a hole in your pocket and you won’t have to invest a lot of money on building your app.

Let’s take a look at some reasons contributing to the failure of some new apps:

1- Lack of Pilot Research:

This is a common mistake, made by most new apps. It is of utmost importance to do proper research before starting to work on an application. You should study the target audience and add only those features that are important for the users and will be used to the maximum capacity. Proper research should be done on the users and their feedback should help the company to make changes as need be.

2- Demand:

If there is a lack of demand for the kind of application you developed, then there is nothing that can save it from entering the junk and being proclaimed as one of the most useless apps of all time. Therefore, you must look at the trend in the market and what the users are demanding at that point of time and give them exactly what they are looking for.

3- Inability to meet Competition:

There are many apps out there, that might give you a tough competition. You have to recognize the competitors and build an app that stands a chance to be liked by the users. Google once launched Google Wave, a social networking app, which didn’t thrive amongst the users as they were busy with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Twitter. It couldn’t survive the competition and went downhill from the day of its launch.

4- Promotion:

The application should be well researched and promoted. Until and unless you explain people of its benefits, and spend some money on its promotion, it will not be visible anywhere and the downloads would be really low. Therefore, you must not refrain from spending some good amount of money on the promotion of the application.

Also Read: How to Create an MVP in 2020?

5- MVP:

It is very important to create an MVP before launching the full-fledged app. Spending a limited amount of money initially and suffering loses and failure can still be coped up by making changes to the features and re-launching an app, rather than taking down a fully functional app, that costed you a bomb.

Big names like Amazon and Dropbox are the perfect examples of MVP’s. Now, let’s take a look at the main focus areas of MVP’s:

• Less amount of money spent on the development of a product. Few features are added initially, and the rest are added to the app gradually as it starts to grow.
• Delivering the end product in less time than estimated and solving the problem of end users.
• Incurring low costs on testing a product as it wouldn’t need much labour and time.

Benefits of developing an MVP

There are several benefits of developing an MVP as listed above. Let’s throw light over some of the major factors that contribute to the advantages of building an MVP.

1- Cost Efficiency:

If you make an application which is more feature rich and has too much to offer to the user, that will any day take a lot of time and effort of experts. This will in turn make the cost of the of the project go high than you expect. On the other hand, an MVP will cost much less and you can develop your business step-by-step. This will help you invest the money you earn through profits and put not much money from your own pocking burning a hole in your pocket.

2- Testing:

As an MVP does not contain a lot of features, it is easy to test the software. There is not cluster you have to take care of. The limited number of features are tested easily and you won’t have to remove features that have already been paid for. Later, new features can be added to your tested application or software, or you can also work on the development on the existing features.

3- Consumer Reach:

Feedback is very important for your business to flourish. This is why it is best to launch the product in the market before anyone else does. This will make the consumer or the end user use your product before anyone else’ and provide you feedback. Like mentioned earlier, you can then go step-by-step on building your product. There will be feedback which will help you make changes to the product in the later stage. Useful features can be later developed fulfilling the demands of the users.

4- Attraction for the Investors:

Since there is a lot of scope for addition and changes, an MVP gets the eyes of most investors. There are some companies who are ready to invest their money, however, most companies look forward to outside investment. Therefore, MVP is an attraction for the investors as there is a lot of scope for change in improvement in the same. Stakeholders in the case of an MVP, do not have to wait for long for the product to be launched.

Let’s take a look at some leading applications which are a result of MVP:

Now let’s look at some big names that started as MVP’s:

Facebook: The app was developed initially as an MVP to connect the students of a university. Hence, only those features were a part of the app, which were essential in connecting the students. Looking at the demand of the app, more features were added on to it and it was made live globally. It is one of the leading apps in today’s time.

Airbnb: It is fairly new, but has scaled up its application to a high level in no time. The concept was different and liked by many. It was initially launched as a website in 2008 as an MVP website. The creators got a clear idea of the essential features and they launched their app in 2012 for Android. Slowly and gradually, they started adding more features to their application, which were used more by the users.

Most of the well-established apps are performing really well and the credit for most of them goes to MVP. The sooner the companies learn about its benefits, the better it is for them to survive in the long term. With several applications being developed every hour, it is important to look at the competition in the market before taking any action.

A well conducted research can help an application compete in the market. Also, you must remember to include something different in the app, as you might have seen the Facebook reactions that are now most used worldwide. So, you must include some features that are unique and only you app offers them to the users.