Key takeaways
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- MVP, or minimum viable product, can help you validate ideas, attract initial investments, test your product in field conditions and establish a useful feedback loop with your customers.
- There is no single algorithm for how to build an MVP. You can choose from several options or even create a new one — it all depends on resources and preferences you have at the moment.
- Development of an MVP usually costs about 56,000$, and the final price depends on the complexity of the app.
What is an MVP
A minimum viable product (MVP) is a barebone version of an app designed to showcase its main functionality. MVPs serve as vehicles for testing the viability of ideas and gathering feedback from target audiences. However, they’re not considered prototypes or first drafts — a proper MVP can actually be used in real-life scenarios and bring perceivable value to its users.
5 types of MVPs
Depending on the stage of a startup and the goals of a product, entrepreneurs choose different types of MVP. Some of them are fast and cheap to create with simple infrastructure, while others include more complex features to test an idea with real users. Here’re 5 of the most used ones.
Flintstone
Flintstone, also called Wizard of Oz, is a minimum viable product that just imitates a service. Here is the trick: there is a human behind the scenes who is making MVP work. This type allows entrepreneurs to rehearse all of their workflows and test the concept with real customers and without significant investments.
Zappos used to be one of the most popular retail platforms in the U.S. in the 2000s and 2010s
Example: Zappos, an online shoe and clothing retailer from the United States. In 10 years, it underwent a journey from an MVP to a $1.2 billion USD sale deal with Amazon.
Landing page
The landing page explains the advantages of the product, with an option to buy it or subscribe for future updates. Building an MVP like this is usually very fast and low effort. However, the observation depth is also low, but still helpful for hypothesis validation.
Buffer logo
Example: Buffer, a social media management platform, launched in 2010 as a two-page MVP to find out if people would even be interested in the idea of scheduling their posts for social media platforms in advance. Interesting fact, over Buffer’s lifetime, total revenue has been $159.16 million USD, but only $4 million were raised from investments. So the product itself made close to 40X of it’s funding so far.
Concierge
Concierge MVPs involve a curated experience that is manually delivered to a small group of customers. The idea is to test the concept without building out the entire product. Sounds similar to the Flintstone type, but there is a difference: concierge MVP assumes that you’re open and upfront with early users about manual service behind the app.
Airbnb allows users to rent a vacation home or a room worldwide
Example: Airbnb, a short-term apartment aggregator, is an exemplary success story of an MVP that turned into a $93 billion USD company.
Single-feature
Single-feature MVPs focus on one core functionality that demonstrates the product’s UVP (unique value proposition). If you simplify the offer, you’ll be able to quickly test the market and gather insights from customer response to that specific feature of your minimum viable product.
Example: Instagram, one of the largest social media platforms, started as a simple photo-sharing app that allowed users to take photos, apply filters to them, and share them with friends — a classic example of a single-feature MVP.
Instagram grew into a major company worth over $100 billion USD
Another example: Uber, a ride-share app, was originally “UberCab.” The MVP solved only one problem — booking a taxi. As the hypothesis was proven to be true, the product expanded and added more features. Now, you can order food, send packages, or rent a bike — all in one Uber app.
Uber app also started as an MVP back in 2009
Piecemeal
The piecemeal type involves using existing tools and components to create a usable product instead of building an MVP from scratch. Such products help to validate the hypothesis and analyze the demand on the market.
Example: Groupon offers coupons and discounts to local businesses. Their story started with a pre-launch landing page first, followed by a piecemeal MVP built on third-party tools.
The Groupon logo
What does MVP development help you achieve
In short: a lot. Minimum viable products help to attract initial investments, review your ideas in field conditions and establish a useful feedback loop with your customers. Let’s talk about all these points in more detail, so that you see why building an MVP might be a good idea for your startup.
Attract investments
Great projects require capital, and external funding is one of the best ways for startups to get it. The chances of running a successful campaign increase greatly with great presentation — and what better suits this purpose than an already functioning application? Stakeholders are more likely to support your project if they see a clear presentation, and minimum viable products help achieve exactly that.
See how your target audience reacts
A lot of businesses fail because there is no demand in the market — what initially seems like a fantastic idea may turn out to be unwanted or simply inconvenient and frustrating. This is why it is crucial to keep in touch with your target audience right from the very beginning of the project. This way, you will monitor the viability of your ideas and solutions in real-time, saving time and money from chasing abstract goals. One of the key advantages of minimum viable products is that they allow your audience to interact with the product and give useful feedback.
Reduce the risks
Entrepreneurship is risky. Virtually any idea can fail due to various factors: inviability, poor technical execution, or ineffective marketing campaigns. Risk management is part of the process, and it is important to leave room for possible losses. Minimum viable products provide a perfect space for cautious experimentation and testing. In case the project fails at this MVP stage, it will not drag its creators into a financial sinkhole — unlike a fully-developed app that has suddenly proved unsaleable without the team behind it ever foreseeing such a turn of events.
Review your UI/UX solutions in field conditions
We have already discussed field-testing the idea as a whole, but a brilliant idea alone is not enough for a project to succeed. It also needs flawless execution — and UI/UX components are a crucial part of this. So, keeping yourself updated on what is convenient and expected is a must throughout the entire development process. This applies to the whole range of UI/UX solutions: from user flow to the positioning of the burger menu. The MVP approach makes it possible to exchange ideas, receive handy feedback, and shape the app in accordance with what the users want.
3 benefits of MVP development
Some other pleasant bonuses that come together with huge opportunities for development and cooperation:
1. It saves money
Instead of working on every single feature at once, with all the resources that you have, you strip the product down to its essence and develop only a few select aspects. Obviously, this is much cheaper than trying to launch another Instagram from scratch.
2. It’s quick
For the very same reasons described above you can have a marketable minimum viable product in three months’ time — compare this to a year or two required to build an app with every single feature (and there are a lot of them) working properly. It allows users to have a hands-on experience with your app.
Creating any service in isolation is a bad idea — both developers and their audiences benefit from cooperation. An idea might seem perfect when you consider it from the perspective of a developer, but it may turn out irrelevant when you bring it to the public. In addition, cooperating with the audience can shed light on design issues that were not apparent at first.
3. It creates a solid base for gradual development
Once you have launched and field-tested a minimum viable product for some time, you can relax a bit (but not too much!). You know whether the original idea is worth pursuing and it is much more clear what direction the project should go in. With an MVP, you get two important things: definite goals and an understanding of what the target audience really wants. Now all you have to do is try to stay on course and update the app while staying in touch with its end-users.
MVP Development in 9 Steps
OK, so now you know what an MVP is — now, let’s dive into how to actually build one. Note that we’re talking exclusively about how things work here at Purrweb — we can’t guarantee that other agencies work the same way.
Step 1. Conduct market research
Knowledge is power. And this power comes with market research. An entrepreneur should always understand market demands, define target audience, and be aware of the competition. Think about what makes your product different from the existing solutions and how can you improve upon them.
Step 2. Define the MVP features of your product
Once you’ve conducted market research and know what problems your future product aims to solve, determine what features will comprise the core of your app — this is what your MVP will revolve around. In order to do that, put yourself in the position of the end-user to better understand what they want and how they want it done.
Step 3. Design the UI/UX aspects
Now it’s time to actually define what your product will look like and how the end-users are going to experience it. This step requires you to define the customer journey. What will they see first? Where will they want to go next? How can you take them there in the most convenient way? The user flow should be intuitive and straightforward with no unexpected turns. Try not stray too far from the core feature — remember that it is the reason your app will be downloaded for.
Step 4. Create a prototype
Prototype and an MVP are not the same thing. Imagine an MVP as a slice of freshly baked pizza; it’s a tasty meal with all the essential ingredients like cheese, sauce, and toppings. While a prototype is like a beautifully detailed picture of that pizza, that gives you a clear idea of how it will look and what ingredients it will have, but you can’t actually eat or taste it.
The same way we sketch the MVP before we build it into a full-fledged product.
Step 5. Choose the tech stack and develop MVP
At this stage, the team starts the MVP development process. Developers choose tech stack, and code features, with a focus on how users can interact with the product, provide feedback, and validate its value.
A coherent user flow? Check. Tasty design? Check. Seems like it’s time for the minimum viable product development to begin. The task here is to create one or several screens for the main processes and make it easy to navigate between them. As you want to reach as wide an audience as possible, cross-platform development is the better choice — this means simultaneously coding for Android and iOS. Keep in mind that design is just a tool — avoid making it too complex or distractive and don’t stuff the app with tons of flashy animations and transitions.
Step 6. Test the MVP and get rid of the bugs
In the testing phase of the MVP development process, development teams actively evaluate a functional, market-ready product through various types of tests. These include unit tests, integration tests, and sometimes even user acceptance testing (UAT), where real users engage with the MVP to assess its usability and performance.
When the team finds issues and bugs, they employ debugging tools and diagnostics to pinpoint the root causes. After that, developers implement fixes — sometimes code adjustments, data updates, or configuration changes.
At this stage, the most important thing is good communication between developers and testers to ensure that the bugs are not just found, but fixed. If you launch a raw MVP, full of issues, you won’t get a second chance. That’s why everyone should be on the same wavelength when the team builds and tests an MVP.
Step 7. Prepare and launch MVP
The launch of an MVP is the first contact of the product with the real world. Think about this: you’re about to launch a new app. During the testing and development stages, the app worked well in controlled environments. But only after the release you’ll encounter real scenarios with various user devices, network conditions, and unpredictable behaviors.
In this real world, MVP can experience issues like server crashes, unexpected bugs, or scalability challenges. They can disrupt user experiences and damage your brand’s reputation.
Based on our experience, things rarely go as planned. Therefore, you need to be prepared to address and resolve challenges during the launch, and make sure the product meets user expectations and delivers a seamless experience. A successful release sets the tone for the future of the MVP, the brand and the fully-functional app.
Step 8. Gather feedback and iterate
So the long-awaited MVP is finally out there. Congratulations! The work is far from being done, though. To bring your product to perfect condition, you need to cooperate with the people who actually use it. Establish proper channels of communication and listen to what they have to say. Bear in mind that not all feedback is helpful and parts of it may even be counterproductive — you want to focus on the more constructive side of the incoming messages. Once you’ve filtered the incoming flow, start implementing the best suggestions.
Step 9 (bonus). Repeat step 5 until done
You’ve arrived at the development process loop. Now the task is to steadily flesh out the product and gradually implement your vision with help from the audience. This step actually goes beyond the scope of MVPs, so we’ll stop right here.
5 development mistakes to avoid while building an MVP
To help you avoid oversights and gaffes, we’ve put together a list of 5 most common mistakes to look out for during the MVP development process, together with ways to solve them.
Wrong problem to solve
The lack of problem understanding will lead to much larger mistakes in a future minimum viable product. If you catch it too late, already knee-deep in the development process, retracting, and pivoting will cost you a ton of money.
How to prevent: Consider conducting project discovery to research the market, interview the users, and make data-driven development decisions. Many IT teams, like Purrweb, offer project discovery services to validate the idea for a fraction of the development cost.
Wrong target audience
MVP is all about testing your product with real users and seeing how it performs among your target customers. If you pick the wrong group, the results of the process will be fully irrelevant and unreliable.
How to prevent: Study your audience in detail and work on creating user personas, and generalized profiles that represent different subgroups of your target audience. To learn more about your potential customers, conduct in-depth user interviews.
Small market segment
Market segmentation determines what your target market is and who are your direct competitors. Market segments for your product don’t necessarily have to be broad and big, but they have to be enough to generate profit and see the opportunities for expansion in the future.
How to prevent: Calculate unit economics in advance — the forecasted direct revenues and costs of a particular business, measured on a per-unit or per-user basis. Usually, this process is a part of project discovery services
Lack of feedback from users
Without proper input from the actual audience, it is hard to make the product engaging and relevant to user needs and expectations. Lack of feedback can lead you up to a blind alley and seriously harm the user experience of your minimum viable product.
How to prevent: Stay in touch with your potential users. Add in-app surveys or pop-ups asking to rate their experience, and don’t forget to conduct regular interviews to learn more about their needs.
Feature overload
Unnecessary features can lead to losing focus when developing a product and also extend the timeline and the budget of the whole process. In that sense, it’s important to be strategic and logical, rather than try to hit all targets at once.
How to prevent: Try to divide your features into different categories: must-have, nice-to-have, or “for the future.” You can use various prioritization methods such as user story mapping, MoSCoW matrix, or bubble sort tool. For the MVP, focus on core features only.
How much does MVP development cost
MVP product development usually costs about 56,000$. This sum includes:
| Stage | Approx. in weeks | Approx. costs |
| Project analysis | 1 | $1,000 |
| UI/UX design | 4 | $5,400 |
| App development | 9 – 10 | $36,000 – $40,500 |
| QA Testing | concurrently with the development | $5,400 – $6,000 |
| Project management | during the whole project | $3,950 – $4,100 |
The cost strongly depends on the complexity of the app in question. Read our article, if you would like to learn more about how much does it cost to make an app.
Purrweb’s approach to MVP product development
Our specialty is serving clients who want to develop an MVP for their big concept. To better understand our approach, you need to know about 3 pillars we base it on.
1. UX driven development
Everything we do is for an end-user to be comfortable, engaged and entertained. We prioritize user experience (UX) during planning and development.
We start the MVP process with a user-journey map of a product, where we think about needs, preferences, and pain points of actual customers.
Of course, we consider your business goals and technical capabilities too, in order to create a win-win situation for everyone. Here is an example.
Imagine, you request an MVP for a social media platform. Your goal is to boost ad revenue, and you want to introduce autoplay video ads, but users find them disruptive.
You can take a UX-driven approach with MVP, listen to user feedback, offer ad preferences, introduce less intrusive ad formats, and increase satisfaction. Or you can ignore feedback and drive users away to other platforms.
2. Process transparency
At Purrweb, we break down a big MVP project into smaller parts and work in sprints that usually last for 2 weeks. For each sprint, we plan a handful of tasks and assign responsible team members. At the end of each sprint, we report to you what has been done and the current status of the MVP project.
This way, you don’t have to wonder what Purrweb is up to right now, because you regularly get updates from our project manager.
If you need more details, we can always give you access to watch a project board and check the updates in real time. It’s an option when you work with us, but we bet you have more important things to do.
3. Flexible collaboration models
Developing an MVP is important, and we know that. That’s why we offer flexible collaboration models, such as outsourcing and outstaffing services.
| Outsourcing | Outstaffing |
| And external team gets hired to handle specific tasks or projects | Remote engineers are added to your in-house team, typically on a long-term basis as an extension of the existing team |
In addition to different collaboration models, our team works with different budgets and can accommodate any MVP project request. We can help you narrow down a feature list and focus only on essential features to cut costs of the development.
