Why building an MVP is important?

The cake is cut, everyone is in ecstasy and celebrating. No, it's nobody's birthday, but a new app developed by Coffee IT has just gone live. The go-live of every new app is a cause for celebration for us.

The go-live of an app is huge for us. It means that you, as an entrepreneur, have persevered until the end of the development process. A process as exciting as a rocket launch.

You started with an idea, found the product market fit and is now live in the Google Play and App Store. Now it's time for your app to spread all over the world.

But wait a minute, how did we get here? How come this app has not just remained a dream, but is now a successful start-up?

By nature I am not a gambler myself, and in my role within Coffee IT I cannot afford that either. But if I have to bet my money on which of our clients has the highest chance of success for a successful start-up. Then I wouldn't bet my money on the customer with the most budget or with the simplest app, but on the app that developed will be with the best tested MVP.

An MVP (short for Minimum Viable Product) allows you to validate your product as much as possible with as little effort as possible. Making an MVP is an art, because you have to determine in advance what your customer needs in order to find out what your customer ultimately wants.

You can think of the MVP as a morning of coffee without the fancy additions like milk foam, chocolate chips or other flavors that I can't pronounce the name of.

A successful MVP:

• offers users enough value to buy the app upon release.
• offers the users a lot of insight into future applications.
• provides direct feedback from your end users so that your idea is refined.

An MVP contains the features with the most value for your end users. Stuffing an MVP with features is not a unique value. For example, Facebook had no timelines on release.

Also, don't think that making an MVP is only for start-ups, big companies like Google or Apple always build MVPs first. In this way they can help products into the world without investing tons of money right away.

Purely hypothetically, let's come up with an MVP for a standard video streaming app. What is the absolute essential functionality for this app? That is the possibility for users to upload videos and for other users to view them.

As an extra addition and added value for users, you also want users to be able to save videos and follow other users, but that's all. With these features you will launch your MVP in about ten weeks. Now we will see how easily this lead time can be doubled.

We first add three weeks to the release date because we want users to be able to comment on videos. We also think it's important to create playlists of videos, so we're adding another two weeks. It is of course also important that inappropriate videos are removed, so a management environment must also be created, which takes about two weeks. Of course you have to be able to log in with Facebook, so we add another two weeks. This way you can go on indefinitely.

My point with this is that you can keep adding features and that you not only increase the budget but also the lead time. With which you will only get further from your ultimate goal; Releasing your app idea.

The above functionalities are certainly worth investing in, but are certainly not important if your goal is to be the first to market your concept. Start building your MVP today and release tomorrow, if possible. Otherwise, you lose sight of your goal because you build fun-to-have functionalities while your competitors are already going live.

Building an MVP is not only cheaper, it is also faster. This way you have budget in the form of time and money to make improvements to your product. Start building an MVP for your idea today, we can support you in this as a sparring partner, designer and developer. Contact us today without obligation about the possibilities.