How MVP development can drive business growth: a comprehensive guide

When a company decides to develop an application, a choice arises whether to launch a fully-formed, near-perfect product on the market, or release an app with a minimal set of features and quickly test it in the market. Both approaches are valid, but the latter is safer for any new idea testing.

In this article, we will discuss what objectives the MVP development approach pursues and how we tailor the development of such applications to ensure our partners’ business growth and will present three successful cases from our experience in creating MVPs.

What is the MVP approach, and what are its main objectives?

The MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, is one of the initial versions of an application or other digital products, featuring a simple set of features enough to test the product in the market and garner the feedback of early users. This first test version of the product helps entrepreneurs gather insights about user behavior, demand, and experience with minimal time and resource expenditure, thereby aiding in driving business growth.

The MVP Development approach, thus, acts as a crucial driving force in business growth, enabling organizations to test their concepts with minimum resources and obtain invaluable market feedback. It plays a pivotal role in understanding the needs of the market and its users, thereby guiding later stages of product development and ensuring that the final product is better aligned with market demands.

Companies that want to develop their own products, choose the MVP approach to cover two key purposes. Let’s discuss them below.

Validate an idea

According to online surveys, 80% of apps do not survive beyond 12 months post-launch. The reasons for this may vary: an unviable business model or marketing strategy might have been chosen, the product may be inconvenient and unsuccessful, or it might be introduced in the market at an unfavorable time.

However, the most significant problem may arise in case of very low or no demand for your product and its inability to meet customer needs. MVP development plays a valuable role in addressing this challenge by providing the opportunity to test the business idea with real users and clients in a cost and time-effective manner. The MVP approach aids in driving business growth by allowing entrepreneurs to validate the strength of their business idea without investing in full-scale product development.

By implementing an MVP development strategy, businesses can navigate potential difficulties, optimize their product for the market's actual needs, and ultimately increase their chances of prolonged business growth and success.

Gather the first adopter’s feedback

Minimum Viable Product refers to the earliest edition of a product possessing the bare minimum functionalities. So, how does one identify the aspects of the project to be improved in subsequent iterations and enhance the service delivery process to offer an exceedingly user-friendly experience? Gathering feedback from the initial application users is one of the key functions of the MVP development process, paving the way for business growth.

So, what kind of feedback needs to be collected, and how to go about it? User experience and functionality are the two primary categories requiring feedback collection. Is everything in the application convenient, and can users easily achieve the goal for which the application was created? For instance, can they effortlessly hail a taxi if you’ve developed a mobile taxi app, or do they perform no more than three steps to purchase a product in your eCommerce app?

You can acquire quantitative data about user interaction with the interface through analytics systems like Google Analytics or Crazy Egg. Also, you can procure qualitative data by conducting live interviews with clients or performing A/B testing to explore superior solutions. In this way, gathering user feedback through MVP development becomes a crucial step in driving business growth and creating a product that your customers would be eager to use.

How do other advantages of MVP development boost business growth?

MVP approach provides other benefits for the company and especially for startup growth. We will enumerate them below.

Flexibility

One of the challenges startups and small businesses face is that they don’t have as much capital for development as larger companies do. Therefore, they need to wisely distribute funds and spend them only on the essentials. In this context, MVP development greatly contributes to driving business growth since developing a product with a viable minimum set of features is generally less expensive than building a full-scale product.

Moreover, the MVP development approach allows for the gradual addition of necessary features to the application. Initially, only crucial elements are incorporated into the MVP, with high-priority features added in subsequent updates when deemed necessary. This approach to MVP development fosters flexibility, enabling the regulation of the app’s progression based on the company’s needs and available budget. Consequently, this method ensures a cost-effective way to test, refine, and, finally, launch a product, further pushing business growth.

The first version of Instagram was also a kind of MVP. It didn’t have many features that it has today. At that time, adding filters to photos was a key Instagram feature. When the social network grew more popular and received new funding, it installed a new killer feature — stories. The Instagram team was developing and updating their app for more than 10 years. Although it is already successful, a few days ago a new feature called ‘Threads’ was added. As you can see, constant and flexible development can be one of the app’s successes, and MVP development is at the core of such flexibility.

Connection with investors

Receiving funding from investors is one of the keys to the growth of any business. MVP development fosters business growth as it helps entrepreneurs to build valuable connections with investors, and there are several reasons for that.

First of all, an MVP acts as tangible proof that your business idea works. It shows potential investors that you’ve moved beyond the ideation stage and have something concrete to attract users and deliver value.

More than that, a minimum viable product helps demonstrate a demand for your product in the market. Investor confidence increases when they know that real customers find your product or service valuable.

Finally, MVP development often highlights an entrepreneur’s ability to work with limited resources and yet develop a functioning product. This resourcefulness is a quality that many investors look for in founders.

In summary, entrepreneurs can leverage MVP development as a strategic tool to connect with potential investors and substantiate the worthiness of their business.

Quick time-to-market

In the face of high competition, it becomes crucial to bring your product to market as quickly as possible, especially if your idea is fresh and unique. MVP development approach fuels business growth and allows companies to promptly enter the market with their applications, accelerate profit generation, and gather essential information for project development.

Benefits for large businesses

Despite MVPs often being associated with new, unheard-of ideas, they can be beneficial for businesses of any size. As with small businesses, MVPs help save resources, but are there any specific reasons for large companies to launch an MVP product? Let’s explore.

Innovation and experimentation

Having an established reputation, it might be hard for big companies to explore new markets and technologies. MVP product development can help find new opportunities while avoiding risks associated with fully-fledged product development. One might find a truly promising business growth strategy in the most unexpected place. For example, Amazon started as a successful MVP with its core feature being selling books online. Over time, they started introducing other categories of products, such as electronics and music. They didn’t start as an all-encompassing e-commerce platform but expanded gradually, checking if the audience would be okay with changes and, in doing so, achieved product-market fit.

Competitive edge

A successful company usually has a central product with features adored by its customers. However, what was once loved might become outdated with the emergence of new technology launched by rivals. Therefore, MVP software development in parallel with maintaining the main product can become a safety cushion for securing a competitive edge.

Protecting brand reputation

Investing all resources into a fully-fledged product software development might threaten the well-established reputation of the company should it fail. In such cases, MVP product development helps test ideas without risking reputation. Remember the Zune portable media player by Microsoft? It’s fine if you don’t, as it launched in 2006 and was discontinued in 2011. The product didn’t withstand the competition against Apple’s iPod, which was immensely popular at the time. Rather than introducing an identical product, had Microsoft tested distinctive core features beforehand, the outcome might have been different.

Streamlining processes

MVP software development implies an iterative approach. This means that rather than spending time and resources on creating multiple features, a dedicated development team can build MVP software step-by-step, launching and testing before moving forward. This way, the audience can interact with the product in its early stages and doesn’t have to wait for it to be fully crafted.

These are some ways MVP software development can aid business growth for both small businesses and big companies. But how do you develop a successful MVP that can steer business growth strategy in the right way? There are different approaches to creating an MVP. One popular and universal approach is the Lean Startup methodology. While it doesn’t specifically deal with software development, it offers a general framework. Let’s first take a look at the broad picture of the Lean Startup methodology and then delve into the specifics of MVP software development, using Ronas IT Company as an example.

Lean Startup methodology

The Lean Startup methodology was formulated by Eric Ries, a co-founder of the IMVU social chat and avatar app, around 2011. His perspectives are derived from his successful development experiences as he sought to create a method that he could pass on to others.

The problem this method addresses is that entrepreneurs often fail to test their ideas with real users before developing their product. The idea behind the methodology is simple: startups that do not meet users’ needs are doomed to fail. On the other hand, lean startups adhere to the following principles:

1. Applicability. Any new product is a startup, meaning that the Lean Startup approach can be applied by companies of any size.
2. Entrepreneurial management. A startup requires a product manager who has a mindset adaptable to uncertainty. Essentially, every startup needs an entrepreneur who will drive development and turn chaos into a system.
3. Validated learning. This is at the core of building a viable business. While intuition is valuable, a scientific approach to experimenting can more effectively validate ideas.
4. Build–measure–learn cycle. This is highly applicable to MVP software development. Measuring user feedback after every iteration is crucial to wisely defining the growth strategy.
5. Start-up specific accounting. It's vital to use metrics that provide a full vision of the business. These metrics should be actionable, accessible, and auditable to measure success effectively.

Key insights from Eric Ries’ book

Apart from the core principles Eric Ries formulated, there are other important concepts that have heavily influenced startup entrepreneurship. Chief among these is the idea of the minimum viable product (MVP) itself. More specifically, Ries underlined the importance of concentrating on just enough features to create an MVP.

Regarding software development, an MVP doesn’t have to be digitalized right from the beginning. For example, the Food on the Table (FotT) service initially created massive databases of thousands of grocery stores but started as a service with no software at all. The CEO of the company would personally visit the only customer who agreed to help validate their idea and bring her products from local shops. By doing this, they gained valuable knowledge about user needs, which allowed their service to gain momentum. It was only after this initial validation that they began software development.

Another key idea is the importance of engaging with potential customers early on, as their feedback is crucial for shaping the future product. This often means leaving the office and studying the market in the field.

Developing an MVP is one thing, but responding to feedback correctly is even more important. Ries introduces the ‘Pivot or Persevere’ concept. The idea is straightforward: after testing the MVP, if the product growth strategy works, you should persevere. If not, it’s crucial to pivot to another hypothesis. There’s nothing worse than persistently working on a failing strategy.

To minimize the pain of pivoting, it's essential to stick to small batch processing and view development as a perpetual cycle rather than a linear process. Implementing features incrementally and continuously, and using A/B testing to compare the effectiveness of changes, helps ensure that the product evolves in a way that meets customer needs.

If your software development cycle faces issues beyond user feedback, using the Five Whys method can help uncover the root cause. This method, adapted by Ries from Taiichi Ohno's original concept, involves asking "why" five times to drill down to the underlying issue. Here’s an illustration:

Let’s imagine the feature doesn’t work as expected.

First why. Why doesn't the feature work as expected? Because the new feature code caused a bug in the software.

Second why. Why did it cause the bug? Because developers were rushing to meet the deadline.

Third why. Why were the developers rushing? Because a product manager set an unrealistic deadline.

Fourth why. Why was the project timeline unrealistic? Because the scope of work wasn't clearly defined at the beginning and kept changing.

Fifth why. Why was the scope of work not clearly defined? Because there was insufficient communication between the product management and development teams about the project requirements and priorities.

By addressing the root problem—poor communication between teams—you solve the real issue and avoid unproductive blame.

The Lean Startup has numerous insights to help validate ideas and calibrate direction, whether for a small business or an enterprise launching a new product. Our company, since 2007, has specialized in providing software development services for businesses of varying sizes and industries and can share our own achievements regarding business growth.

How does Ronas IT team approach MVP development so that it fosters the business growth of our customers?

When we undertake MVP development, we strive to structure our workflow in such a way that we manage to create a functioning product by the time it’s needed by our client. We endeavor to tweak the MVP to fall in line with our client’s demands to the fullest extent. We may even increase the number of designers and developers in the dedicated development team to craft an application in an extraordinarily short period of just 1–3 months. More on how our workflow aids in saving our client's time and development cost will follow, as it plays an integral role in promoting business growth.

Discovery phase

Before initiating the UI/UX design and software development of the MVP, we analyze all project-related materials you provide, which could be market analysis or user persona analysis. We conduct a call to learn about your company and the requirements for your future application.

Based on the obtained information, we form a list of MVP features in the form of user stories and prioritize them with you to leave only essential ones. Having created dozens of applications, we can advise on which features to focus on and which ones can be reserved for future versions.

Next, we estimate the project in terms of time and cost and assemble the project team by appointing the required number of developers and designers to ensure the project’s timely completion.

All these steps help us create an application tied to your business objectives and plan the work in such a way as to develop the MVP by a specific deadline or in time for certain important events for your company. For instance, an event you plan to participate in, a season, or a presentation to investors.

UI/UX design

Our UI/UX design process is divided into several stages. We adhere to this specific workflow to ensure our vision of design aligns with that of the client. This way, we can spend as little time as possible on design modifications, thereby saving more time and resources for the client, and driving their business growth using the MVP development methodology.

1. Step 1: Mind Maps

   In the mind map, we record all the app features described in the user stories. Through the map, we understand the structure of the future application and identify the screens that will require designing.

2. Step 2: Design Concept

   Next, we sketch the design concept, which helps establish the visual style of the future application. If you already have a vision for the future UI of the application, we will follow that. Conversely, you can choose positive and negative references from our library of shots on Dribbble.

3. Step 3: UX/UI Design

   Having a mind map and a UI kit with an approved style, we design the UX part in its final form, approve it with you, and make the necessary adjustments.

   Furthermore, we can create a prototype of the future interface. This prototype is a simulation of how the user will interact with the application. We’ll suggest making one if your application has animations or complex transitions. It also helps the client and the project team to better understand each other and share a common vision of the product.

Ultimately, this efficient design process in our MVP development streamlines the transition from concept to delivery, caters specifically to the needs of the client, and significantly contributes to their business growth. By minimizing time spent on remaking the design and modifications, we help cater to the businesses that have their eyes set on quick market entry and expansion.

Software development

We will select the right technology for your application to implement all the necessary features and services, proven to facilitate business growth and efficient MVP development. We have a list of preferred technologies, chosen based on our extensive experience, hence accelerating the development process. These technologies have large communities with many ready-made code snippets that we can employ for faster development. Here’s a brief list of our preferred technologies:

Mobile Development

Here, we always recommend using React Native, as it allows us to develop applications simultaneously for iOS and Android using a single codebase. This way, you can test the MVP on both platforms and make it accessible to a wider audience, propelling your business growth.

Backend

For backend development, we highly recommend Laravel. Our vast experience with it, coupled with the technology’s capabilities, make it ideal for creating applications with a superior level of data security – thereby ensuring your company’s resources remain secure. We also favor the Django framework for its versatility, allowing us to implement a wide array of features.

Frontend

For the front end, we typically use React and Angular as they both have numerous ready-made libraries with code snippets, expediting the development process. By leveraging these technologies, we can optimize your MVP development and stimulate your company’s business growth.

After-release maintenance

Also, after concluding the MVP development, we offer sustained app support. We can fix any bugs that may arise or embark on the development of a full-fledged app after gathering feedback.

Some clients even enter into partnerships with us. Together, we brainstorm and strategize the development paths for the company or brand. In addition to MVP development, we can create showreels, landing pages, or branding for our partners’ marketing campaigns, aiding in meticulous positioning. Thus, we provide a holistic approach to business growth and product development.

How did Ronas IT team help 3 startups with MVP development?

Lainappi renting app

Idea. Lainappi is a rental service for items in Finland. Its core idea is that it’s more environmentally friendly and efficient to rent items instead of buying them. We were tasked with developing a cross-platform MVP for a mobile application.

Steps. Initially, Lainappi’s founders came to us with a basic design outline; we helped refine it. We chose green shades for the app and branding to underscore the company’s mission and values.

During the design revamping, we added a payment screen, formulated a unified block for account verification, and incorporated a killer feature — a chat where users can interact and pay for item rental.

We identified several key flows that were included in the MVP development. These included flows for item management, searching items on the map with filtering, verification of item owners with Stripe Connect, renting and payment flow, and chat between owners and renters.

For the app development, we employed React Native, as this allowed us to release the app simultaneously for iOS and Android and test the business idea with a broad audience — a strategic move for business growth.

Result. We were able to launch the MVP in the market in just three months. Lainappi’s founders were so pleased with our collaboration that we continue to work together. We assisted this startup in developing its branding and creating a landing page for promoting its service.

Today, Lainappi’s business is operating successfully in Finland. Users rent items and use lockboxes located at metro stops in Helsinki to pick them up. The app has already garnered over 6,000 downloads, and we continue to enhance it with new features and help the Lainappi team in the project’s development. Our efforts contribute significantly to their business growth and the continuous refinement of their MVP development strategy.

Oddscrowd betting app

Idea. OddsCrowd needed to develop a cross-platform application for a digital community of bettors. This app would streamline the use of their service, allowing users to track information right on their gadget screens while, for example, watching their favorite games.

The inception of this app came to the client just 10 weeks before the Super Bowl. The first challenge was to efficiently develop a robust, easily scalable MVP for the mobile app in such a short span, an essential undertaking for their business growth.

Steps. We created an interface design leveraging the brand colors. To ensure rapid scalability, we developed a UI Kit from UI elements to quickly assemble new screens as and when required.

In this case, we also relied on the React Native framework during the development phase. It enabled us to develop an app for both operating systems simultaneously, saving our clients’ time and money on development and support due to the single codebase.

Since the app needed to display match analytics for various disciplines, we integrated third-party API services, facilitating incoming data on game results. We adjusted these APIs each time the OddsCrowd team discovered newer, more reliable sources of information to ensure only accurate data was delivered to users.

Results. We were successful in developing the app within 10 weeks and following its release, the number of regular users of the service increased tenfold. This significant user growth is a testament to our efficient MVP development process. Currently, we continue to support the project, occasionally refining the interface and rectifying any bugs that may emerge. By doing so, we’re steadily contributing to the sustained business growth of OddsCrowd.

Noah farmer marketplace app

Idea. In 2019, a Swedish startup approached our team intending to create a farmer marketplace. This app was envisioned to bridge local food producers and regular consumers, an innovative concept designed to stimulate business growth.

We were tasked with crafting and developing interfaces for three distinct apps: iOS and Android mobile apps for consumers, a mobile application for food producers, and a web-based admin panel. The clients approached us in March with the goal of having the apps ready before the harvest season. Typically, in Sweden, the harvest season stretches from July to October, so we had a 4-month window for this MVP development.

Steps. We crafted a design interface, wherein farmers could showcase their brands on the marketplace and enhance their profiles with logos and photos. The design style of the app was minimal and versatile, equally accommodating bold and subdued visual styles.

This time around, we employed native development with Swift and Kotlin for MVP development. Our client chose these platforms to provide a smoother user experience, an essential determinant of their business growth potential.

We also utilized Angular and Laravel for development, as our extensive experience with these platforms enables quick and efficient development of web panels.

Furthermore, we incorporated a custom map with a zoom-in feature via the Google Maps SDK. Here, users can search for desired goods and farmers. This way, they can determine the speed of product delivery and pinpoint where to go if they prefer to pick up the products themselves.

Result. Our team successfully completed the development of all apps within the 4-month timeframe. As a result, the Noah farmer marketplace app was launched in the market ahead of the harvest season. The timely release enabled a significant profit generation, underlining the importance of our prompt MVP development in fueling the business growth of our clients.

Wrapping up

All in all, in our opinion, the path to achieving substantial business growth often begins with effective MVP development. At Ronas IT, we place great emphasis on this approach, understanding that a well-executed MVP not only offers a swift route to market but also provides invaluable insights into customer preferences and behavior.

If you have a product idea, fill in the form, and we will contact you within 24 hours. We can help you to outline essential flows in your MVP, design, and develop it in a short time of just 3–4 months.