For those just venturing into the world of mobile app development, MVP (minimum viable product) is a term you should familiarize yourself with fairly quickly. Not only will an MVP assist in validating your idea for a mobile product, but it will also provide direction towards which app features you should include to achieve success. So what does all this mean? An MVP is all about testing your idea and discovering what will work to properly target your customer. This article serves as a step-by-step guide that will provide you with a basic understanding of how to plan a minimum viable product. What is an MVP?
An MVP is a minimal form of your product that is tested on the market. This development strategy allows your team to validate (or invalidate) product assumptions and learn how your target users react and experience your product’s core functionality. This approach will provide insight into properly allocating your budget to satisfy your overall business objectives. Building an MVP is an iterative process designed to identify user pain points and determine the appropriate product functionality to address those needs over time.
In mobile app development, an MVP is a development method where you develop only the core functionalities to solve a specific problem and satisfy early adopters. Essentially, an MVP is the basic model of your product that will fulfill the primary goal you want to achieve.
MVP development follows a build-measure-learn process, which allows you to release a product that can be continually improved as you validate (or invalidate) assumptions, learn what users want, and build future iterations of your app that better serve your customers.
Why build an MVP?
The main goal of an MVP is to develop a working product that provides immediate value, quickly, while minimizing costs. Starting with an MVP will allow you to learn more about your end-user and the market you wish to enter as you test your assumptions. An MVP will also set the stage for future iterations of development and clarify the sequential steps to take in the project – whether that’s changing directions entirely, or continuing down your set development path. In some instances, an MVP can also be used to showcase business potential and win stakeholder buy-in. Whether you’re looking for support from internal or external investors, an MVP definitely strengthens your position, as it proves the merit of your product and secure funding for future development.
Below we outline the steps involved in creating an MVP and discuss in detail what occurs at each stage.
The Step-by-Step Guide to Plan a Minimum Viable Product
This process is part of the agile MVP development framework we use at Clearbridge Mobile for our mobile app development projects. Following these steps will help you identify and prioritize features, as well as help you confidently outline what you need to get your MVP to market.
Step 1: Identify and Understand your Business and Market Needs
The first step is to identify if there is a need for your product in the market. This can be an organizational need or a customer need that addresses a current gap. It is also important to analyze what your competitors are doing and establish how you can make your product stand out. This will help determine what kind of mobile product you need to be successful.
Long-Term Goals
Once you’ve determined there is a need for your product, it is important for you to set a long-term business goal: what are you planning to achieve? For example, if you are a coffee shop chain, you may have the long-term goal of reducing checkout time by 30 percent.
Success Criteria
Next, identify what will define the success of your product. Our coffee chain, for example, might define success by reaching that 30 percent time-to-checkout reduction, having 100,000 active monthly users, and reaching $1 million in monthly transactions via their app.
Step 2: Map Out User Journey(s)
It is important to design your mobile product with your users in mind. A good way to ensure that your users will have a good experience with the first iteration of your app is by mapping out user journeys. This will allow you to look at your product from the perspective of the user, beginning with opening the app to reaching an end goal, such as making a purchase. This provides insight into how you can design the app in a way that is convenient for users. In addition, defining user flow and addressing the actions users need to take in order to complete an end goal, ensures you don’t miss anything while keeping user satisfaction in mind.
Things to consider when creating a user journey:
Identify the user
Who will be using your product? It’s possible that you will have more than one category of users. For example, if you have a service appointment booking app, you may have the appointment scheduler (customer) and the service technician.
Identify the Actions (Jobs)
The jobs are the actions that the user or users need to take in order to reach the story ending and achieve the goal. When planning your MVP, you will likely want to look at which user has the most jobs and focus on that user; however, there may be higher priorities that need to be addressed, so you may need to focus on a different user or even multiple users.
Identify the Story Endings
For each user, there will be a story ending, which is the goal for the user (i.e. booking an appointment).
Below is an example of how we would lay out a user journey:
Step 3: Create a pain and gain map
Once you’ve worked out the user flow you will want to create a pain and gain map for each action.The pain and gain map allows you to identify all user pain points and the gains the user achieves when each is addressed. This tactic lets you determine where you have the greatest potential to add value. You are then able to focus your MVP in these areas while adding the less impactful ones to your product roadmap for future releases.
We recommend organizing the pain and gain map into a chart. Here is what a pain and gain chart might look like for the Pet Adopter user.
Step 4: Decide What Features to Build
At this stage, you will be able to discern what features to include in your MVP, as well as what features to include on your product roadmap that are a lower priority. Below are some tools you can use to decide which features are necessary to make your MVP successful. Asking the question of what does my user want vs. what does my user need, can helpIdentify and prioritize features. Keep in mind, implementing too many user-requested features too soon can harm the user experience and take away from the overall purpose of the product. The only features you should include should be connected to your product’s overall goal.
Opportunity Statements
Use opportunity statements to finalize what features you want to build out. At this stage in the MVP development process, you will want to create feature sentences. For our Pet Adopters that are applying to adopt animals, for example, the opportunity statement “How might we expedite the application process?” could become “Reduce application processing time by 10 percent.”
Breakdown Features to Include in Your Product Roadmap
List the user and the specific opportunity statements, and provide a breakdown of the features to include in the product roadmap.
Prioritization Matrix
This step helps you identify where you can make the most impact in relation to the urgency of the feature. Using a prioritization matrix, you can make the final decision on what absolutely needs to be included in your MVP, and what features can be included in later releases. Below is our recommended format for your MVP prioritization matrix.
At this point, you should have a strong foundation to plan a minimum viable product. You have identified and understand your business or customer needs; you have found the opportunity to address the pain points, and have decided what features to build and their priority. Now, you can focus on getting your MVP to market.
After Your MVP
After Launching your MVP it is imperative that you collect feedback from your users. Users tell us where the product is lacking and ensures market validation. This will help you generate new ideas grounded in user behavior research which will shape the subsequent versions of your product. It is important to continue to test, learn and measure, and then test again until the product is finalized.
How do you keep improving as a software engineer? Some pieces of advice are valid no matter your experience level, but often the advice will depend on where you are in your career.
If you're a beginner, the best advice is to simply learn your language, frameworks, and tools top to bottom and gain more experience with a variety of different projects.
If you're an experienced developer or working in a software development company UK or anywhere around the globe, than you should constantly try to find new ways to optimize your code for readability, performance, and maintainability, and then practice making well-reasoned decisions about where to focus time and resources in your code—whether it's testing, performance optimization, or other technical debt.
Those are some of the themes you’ll find if you ask veteran software engineers to share their best advice for being a great programmer. There aren’t any well-kept secrets. The advice of many of the most successful developers is readily available to you on blogs and forums.
I’ve taken the most illustrative advice and recurring tips from blogs and forums and organized them into five categories that emerged as I compiled them. I've paraphrased and merged various similar tips into single snippets, and I've also left a few pieces of advice as untouched quotes from their authors.
Whether you have five, ten, or twenty years of experience programming—or if you have almost no experience—I think just about every developer will find some good ideas for self-improvement.
Domains, architecture, and design
1. The best programmers can take a complex problem, break it down into smaller pieces, solve each of those pieces, and then put everything back together to solve the initial problem.
2. Software is just a tool for solving domain problems. Since it’s needed in almost all domains, develop in one that interests you. If you understand a domain well and are passionate about it, you’ll be a much better, more motivated developer. You’ll also be exponentially more valuable and lucrative to companies hiring in your chosen domain.
3. Don’t let one domain pigeonhole you into one way of coding. An example would be a mobile developer who is mainly good at hooking together existing APIs but can't come up with a sane data representation. Don’t be a one-trick pony.
4. Plan your code away from the computer. It will help you build a clear mental model before you start. You use the same strategy in writing, because if you don’t have an outline, your content becomes a messy stream of consciousness.
5. As an architect, you can’t have blind spots in your understanding of your applications and their execution environments. You need to know how things work in the front end (UI), the back end, the data store, the OS, any virtualization layers, the hardware, the network, and the data center.
Languages, tools, and advancing from beginner to intermediate
6. Contribute to open-source projects as a bridge from beginner to intermediate. Collaborate with the developers of the project and attend meetups to collaborate with other developers in person.
7. Don’t let anything get in the way of that initial motivation to learn programming and just build something. Sometimes you block yourself by having too much focus on reading books or resources first. Other times beginners will try to find the perfect first language. Your first language doesn’t matter. What matters is learning to program well. Just start coding.
8. Learn multiple programming paradigms such as object-oriented programming, functional programming, reflective programming, etc. Believe it or not, your programming in one paradigm will improve after studying an alternative paradigm.
9. Make common programs that have been made before. Not for a production project (see “reinventing the wheel”), but as a learning project. If other developers can make a calculator, text editor, paint, Tetris, or Pong, then so can you. Look at several examples of these apps written by more experienced developers and try to learn their tricks.
10. Beginners learn just enough of their tools to get by. To become an intermediate or expert developer, you need to know your tools cold. Learn all of the features, menus, and context menus. Learn to use them without a mouse by memorizing keyboard shortcuts. Find every “tips and tricks” article available.
Code readability and maintainability
11. Name variables so that other developers can understand your code better. This is a skill you need to nurture.
12. Using inheritance often reduces testability and reusability of your object-oriented code in the long run. Your first choice should be using composition and interfaces.
13. Don’t use design patterns like a hammer looking for a nail. If you don’t have a clear reason you need it, don’t use it.
14. Always favor shallow code hierarchies to deep-nested code (whether it’s inside or outside a function). Deep-nested code is harder to maintain, harder to reuse, and more likely to create bugs.
15. Reusable code is helpful and important, but trying to write overgeneralized, super flexible code is often a waste of time. This kind of code is usually harder to maintain and causes bugs. It’s okay to hardcode some things if your code is doing one task.
Technical debt, code coverage, and process
16. Know when to take on technical debt and when to pay it off so it doesn’t compound. When exploring (and discarding) different features and pivoting frequently, borrow heavily on technical debt. When your position is stable and your direction is clearer, optimize your remaining features and clean up bugs to pay off that technical debt before moving on to the next stage.
17. Within the context of your projects, learn what the right amount of testing is. Too little and your software becomes unreliable and everyone is afraid to deploy to production. Too much and you’ll end up wasting too much time and resources writing and maintaining them, while also making the development process slower.
18. Commit your code in small, working chunks and write a detailed commit messages that will help developers find and understand bugs that may have been introduced in that commit. Just summarize what you did and why you did it.
19. Most developers don’t think about security in every unit of code they write. Many think that frameworks will handle that for them. Don’t be like most developers.
20. You can spend an exponentially greater amount of time hunting down the last 1% of bugs in a project than you would for the first 90%. If you’re not working in a domain that requires your software to work perfectly 99.999% of the time, then you should spend less time debugging the edge cases and features people probably won’t use.
Soft skills and productivity
21. Have large chunks of time set aside for focused coding each day. The quantity of time spent coding is meaningless if it’s full of interruptions such as meetings, emails, and web browsing.
22. Don’t be ashamed to admit when you don’t know something. As a developer, you’re often solving new problems, so you can’t be expected to know all the solutions immediately. Trying to hide your lack of knowledge only slows the learning process.
23. Don’t be afraid to share your unfinished work with others frequently.
24. Googling is a crucial developer skill. Learning how to do something you haven’t done before and finding optimal solutions from the collective intelligence of the developer community is half the battle in programming.
25. Teach. Even if you’re a novice at programming, you’re knowledgeable about something. Teaching teaches the teacher. And if you can train other workers, your manager should realize that you’re exponentially more valuable.
Finally
Take a look at some of these and then maybe pick some of your favorite pieces of advice from this article to create a tentative checklist for your personal growth. Share some of your own advice in the comments below or tell us about some advice here that you really liked or disliked. Hopefully we'll all get the jobs we want with this advice.
The mobile app market is growing and bringing more revenue, but it’s still quite a venture to start a mobile app business. Data from CB Insights shows that only about 30 percent of startups succeed. To ensure the success of your mobile app startup, we’ve prepared some useful tips.
#1 Find a problem to solve
Mobile app startups often concentrate on an idea only, forgetting about crucial factors that lead to its success. But an idea alone might not be enough to hit the market. You should create an app specifically to provide value to your target audience, which you can only do by thoroughly planning the UI/UX and content. During the planning stage, ask yourself the following questions:
What problem does the mobile app startup solve?
If you take a look at the statistics of failed mobile app startups, you’ll see that the majority of them had an idea but didn’t solve a problem. As long as your startup has no aim and no solution to a user’s pain points, it’s not likely to succeed. To stay afloat, you need to offer a solution to a common (and long-lasting) problem.
Does anyone actually want this app?
There’s no point in making an app if there’s no market for it. Even the most outstanding idea will fail if you don’t know your target audience. With more than 5.5 billion apps available in the leading app stores, it seems impossible to create something unique. However, there’s still a chance to achieve success. Define your potential users and predict their needs, what they like, and what they’re afraid of.
Your task is to highlight the use of your app whenever they ask themselves, What do I get out of it? It’s not that easy to make users download your app, let alone like it. To increase the user retention rate, let your users see the benefits of the app right from the start.
#2 Choose the platform
When you have a limited budget and need to check if your idea is going to be profitable, you tend to look for the cheapest way to create an app. However, the price is not the only parameter you should take into consideration. Users’ loyalty to an operating system plays one of the most important roles. While choosing a platform for your app, you’ll inevitably face the Android vs iOS dilemma. Don’t follow your heart; rather, follow the market metrics and potential profit.
Target your users
Looking at the market, it’s obvious that there are more Android users worldwide (around 76 percent of all mobile phone users). This isn’t surprising due to the wide variety of Android smartphone manufacturers. However, when creating a mobile app startup, you should consider the location of your target audience and the local preferences. In the graphic below, you can see the dominant operating systems in different regions. If your target audience is in a region where users are loyal to one operating system, your choice is clear.
If your business model includes paid features, keep in mind that iOS users are more willing to buy apps and make in-app purchases.
Programming languages
Another crucial factor is how hard it is to develop your app, which influences the cost and speed of development as well as the features you can implement.
Android and iOS each support more than one programming language, and you should think of the ability to switch languages if you change the team or technology stack. For instance, iOS apps are developed in Objective-C and Swift, while Android apps use Kotlin and Java. These Android languages work well together, so you can combine them without any halt in development. However, the same is not true with iOS. Carefully choosing between the languages will help you switch between them much faster in the future when you scale and upgrade your app.
Time and cost
The cost of iOS and Android app development UK and around the world is approximately the same. The only thing that differs at this point is the testing time. Because of the great number of Android smartphones with different specifications, it takes much longer to check the compatibility of an Android app with devices. Compare 18 iOS devices with relatively the same configurations with hundreds of Android smartphones with a multitude of configurations. It’s a big scope of work for the QA specialist, which leads to increased production costs.
#3 Raise funds
There are various ways to get financing and various funding platforms to choose from. Your task is to weigh the pros and cons to choose the best method of financing. Below, you’ll find top sources of startup funding.
Angel or seed funding
The most preferred option for any startup is an angel investor who’s ready to provide enough capital in exchange for a high rate of return or equity. Angel investors are typically family and friends, prosperous business people, or groups of individuals united by one goal. Seed funding from an angel investor always comes at the start of a promising startup. To put it simply, an investor acquires part of the startup in exchange for money this startup will hopefully make later.
All in all, getting an angel investor is the safest way to get financing for your business in comparison to bank loans and unstable crowdfunding. You don’t have to return the money in case of failure, so there’ll be no debt. Moreover, angel investors are often savvy in terms of conducting business; therefore, they can provide you some guidance.
Common problems with angel investors include lack of involvement (investors are too busy with side projects), the itch for gain (investors expect fast growth), slow funding, reduced founder control, and unclear roles of the founder and angel investor.
You can search for potential investors on AngelList, Funded.com, and Angel Investment Network.
Bootstrapping
Bootstrapping is starting a business without relying on external funding. If you already have some capital to start your small business, you’ll enjoy sole ownership. Unlike with an angel investor, in this case you’re the one with the equity. What’s more, nobody will interfere with your control over the direction of your mobile app startup. No external investor will change the focus of business development.
On the flip side, the CEO bears the personal risk of failing and losing everything invested. Additionally, bootstrapping usually means limited resources, which leads to slow growth.
There are big chances that you can succeed with such an approach, provided you’re focused on your strategy, stick to the budget, and scale carefully.
Bank loans
Taking a loan from a bank may be the first thing that springs to mind when you think about finding funds for your startup. One of the key points is that banks provide some of the lowest interest rates for loans.
However, it’s a challenge to get a bank loan, as you need to provide business credit scores and reports, personal guarantees, collateral, etc. Banks need strong proof that you’re likely to repay them, which is never clear with mobile app startups.
If you’re ready to put in the time and effort to prove that your business is going to bring a healthy cash flow, this option is for you.
Crowdfunding
The most popular funding method among startup CEOs is crowdfunding. There are a number of trusted platforms where one can share their idea and get funding from a big pool of investors. The advantage of this fundraising strategy is that your idea reaches people worldwide. This increases the chances of getting the money you need in a short time. In addition to raising funds, crowdfunding allows you to validate your idea and see if it’s going to be a success.
The most popular crowdfunding platforms are Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe.
#4 Prepare a perfect pitch deck
To attract potential investors, an engaging pitch deck is a must. Your pitch deck must give the essence of your startup, your development plan, and your promotional strategy.
You may have heard of the elevator pitch: it’s your perfect middle ground to strive for. This tactic assumes a short, informative presentation that can describe your product in 30 seconds, which is the length of an average elevator ride. Try to grab attention with the first two sentences, use simple language, don’t complicate your presentation with statistics, and stick to the point.
#5 Build an MVP to test your idea
Building a minimum viable product (MVP) is essential to the success of your startup. An MVP has proved to be the go-to solution for mobile app startups, as it contains only crucial features. Launching an MVP will help you figure out whether your target audience is really interested in your app, allow you to get feedback on possible improvements, and help you validate the concept before you start making a complete app with further iterations. Other benefits you get with an MVP include:
An affordable core product
User feedback
Quick market launch
Product ready for presentation to possible investors
A lot of top companies launched an MVP before the final app was born. Let’s take a look at the story of Instagram, which became a success in a few months. First, there was an HTML5 prototype called Burbn. Even though the name doesn’t reflect the app idea, Kevin Systrom, the creator, named the app Burbn because he likes whiskey and bourbon. The app featured photo sharing, check-ins, and planned posts. Photo sharing was the most popular component of the app.
After Systrom raised $500,000, Kevin put together a team and focused on developing the photo sharing aspect of the prototype. Having researched the market and their direct competitor, Hipstamatic, they decided to blend photo filters with social elements. So they pivoted to leave only photo editing, posting, liking, and commenting. In eight weeks, there was the Instagram beta.
Thanks to a well-timed pivot and beta testing, Instagram managed to find their unique offer, fix emerging bugs, and launch a unique product. On the launch day, Instagram became the top free photo editing app on the App Store. In ten weeks, there were one million Instagram users. In a year, Facebook bought the company of twelve employees for $1 billion. Even nine years later, we still have a minimalist app with one core feature.
The lesson to learn from this story is that you can launch a successful product in two months if you act fast and make it simple and easy to use.
Among other companies who started with MVPs you can find Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb, Facebook, Spotify, and Pinterest. Thanks to their MVPs, these companies fixed issues with their apps, got fresh ideas, and evolved into the perfect products we now enjoy.
#6 Promotion
After you’ve made an MVP, you need to deliver it to your target audience as soon as possible. There are different channels for advertising and promoting your app. The promotion strategy you choose can have a big influence on your app’s success. Some of the most popular ways to publicize your app are:
Social media marketing
Entrepreneurs use social networks to increase brand awareness and engagement, generate leads, get customer support, etc. There are a lot of social networking sites, so how can you find the perfect match and reach your goals? We’ve chosen the top five social networks:
Facebook
Facebook is a must for any startup. However, B2C startups are likely to get more from this network. If your startup is a social network, photo or video editing, ecommerce, travel, beauty, or fashion app, pay extra attention to strengthening user engagement and connections. Whatever startup you have, effective interaction with users will add value to your product. For instance, RunKeeper, a fitness app, promotes its brand on Facebook by posting entertaining sports trivia and photos of runners in branded gear.
Instagram
Instagram is a pure B2C platform that gives unlimited opportunities to startups in the travel, fashion, health, arts, food, ecommerce, beauty, and photography industries. Also, if your target audience is young women or Millennials, Instagram is a must. Moreover, it shares the same ad platform with Facebook. To make your Instagram account more comfortable to use, switch to the business profile, where you’ll find analytics on engagement, likes, audience, etc.
Visit the Instagram page of Intercom, a customer messaging platform, to see how they interact with their followers on a daily basis. Intercom actively uses the Instagram questions feature, posting answers in Stories. According to MediaKix, Instagram stories and posts are the most efficient content promotion tools and will stay the focal point of many advertising strategies.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an irreplaceable (and the most business-centered) platform for B2B startups. Companies in the finance, employment, legal, IT, science, and technology sectors are more than welcome to use LinkedIn. As it’s business only, B2B promotion looks organic in this environment. A startup that resolves the pain points of businesspeople is sure to reach its target users and generate qualified leads on LinkedIn. According to HubSpot findings, LinkedIn generates the highest conversion rate at 2.74%, three times higher than Twitter and Facebook combined.
Amazon keeps its product news updated and engages followers in conversations by posting photos from science fairs and posting short bios of their outstanding workers. My first 100 days in Amazon posts are especially popular among followers.
YouTube
This is a perfect network for visual content and can greatly contribute to your brand. Another advantage of YouTube is that it has access to the Google Ad platform. YouTube videos are a good way to promote B2B companies and startups that are visually driven. It’s a great choice for ecommerce, as users feel more confident after watching product videos.
YouTube has become a valuable platform for Canva, a free design tool. Canva posts workshops on how to use their product and shows off the amazing results their users achieve.
Twitter
Communication and information businesses use Twitter to generate content and promote themselves. It’s more of a B2C platform, which is why so many customers refer to Twitter accounts if they have issues with a product. Twitter can be a fast and convenient addition to your customer service. Industries that can benefit from Twitter include retail, ecommerce, travel, and sports.
Chanty, an AI-powered team chat, grew their number of Twitter followers organically. Posting behind-the-scenes tweets, using hashtags, and prompting replies helped Chanty gather an active community around the product.
Influencers
The best advertising is a recommendation based on personal experience from an opinion leader or trendsetter. Research by Twitter shows that nearly 40 percent of users have bought a product because of a recommendation from an influencer. The reason for that is the native type of advertisement influencers offer and the level of trust they already have.
If you’re looking for an influencer, contact:
Celebrities
Industry experts
Popular bloggers
Micro-influencers
All of these people have reputations and a lot of followers who can become your potential users. Moreover, there’s payment flexibility. Even micro-influencers with 2,000 to 10,000 followers can offer a loyal audience with high engagement.
To resonate with your target audience, choose the right social network. Which is right directly depends on your niche and target audience. We recommend working with influencers on the social platform you already use. Thus, it’s a good idea for B2B startups, such as SaaS and consulting services, to collaborate with LinkedIn industry experts for relevant and valuable leads. Fashion, ecommerce, beauty, and lifestyle startups can attract thousands of users by working with Instagram and YouTube influencers. Messengers and information-driven startups will resonate among the followers of Twitter influencers.
For a successful influencer promotion, follow these tips:
Address niche influencers in your sphere
Create unique promotional materials
Prioritize platforms
Set clear goals and expectations, e.g. to increase engagement or expand reach
Add individual hashtags to monitor and measure the success of ad campaigns
Provide influencers with clear guidelines of how to promote your brand
ASO
App store optimization (ASO) is SEO for applications. ASO makes it easier for users to find your app. With the help of ASO, you can improve your app ranking on the Google Play Store and the App Store. ASO increases app exposure and user engagement. By investing in ASO, you ensure that your app won’t get lost at the bottom of lists.
Pay extra attention to the features below when listing your app startup:
App name, URL, and subtitle. All these attributes must reflect the idea of your app and include the main keywords that refer to your app.
Keywords. This is the crucial attribute in terms of optimizing your app in search results. Research keywords in user search queries and fill in this field thoroughly.
Ratings and reviews. Ratings and reviews are not only a deciding factor for the majority of users but a ranking signal for app stores. The number of reviews, recent votes, and positive ratings matters. Motivate your users to leave regular reviews, and don’t forget to reply to them.
Over to you
Creating a mobile app startup is easy. Creating a successful mobile app startup is a challenge.
You’ve probably heard about the Lean Startup methodology, which describes how to release products in less time and with lower budgets. In this article, we explain how a web application development company can take advantage of the lean approach and its fundamental principles to build better software products and avoid wasting valuable resources.
Is the Lean Startup only for startups?
Even though the name of this methodology includes the word startup, it isn’t used only by startups. This approach can be adopted whenever there’s extreme uncertainty (a concept suggested by Eric Ries) concerning the target audience’s needs. And a company doesn’t necessarily have to be a small startup. When it comes to web application development, a large company can adopt Lean Startup principles to build new products too. As we can see, the Lean Startup works best for building high-risk products.
A central concept of the Lean Startup is the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. The point is to develop a product quickly and put it into users’ hands to receive feedback. This feedback is then analyzed to discover what features customers actually want and to let the company see if the product has demand. This approach helps companies make data-driven decisions. If there’s demand for a product, it can be improved further. Then the process is repeated to receive user feedback on the new features. If there’s no demand for a particular product, it can be redesigned according to the market need.
This approach helps entrepreneurs avoid situations when they spend years building a new product only to discover that nobody wants to use it. The Lean Startup methodology helps companies avoid adding unnecessary features and spending more resources than a product actually requires.
How does the Lean Startup approach work with software development?
There are some fundamental principles of the Lean Startup that can be used in software development. They include building a minimum viable product (MVP), A/B testing, and using validated learning. Let’s see how these practices can help when developing software products.
Minimum viable product
An MVP is a prototype that includes only key features. As Eric Ries notes, an MVP is about getting validated learning with the least effort. So the main goal here is to release a basic model of a product in order to get and analyze user feedback. This will help you realize what changes you need to make to improve your product. With an MVP, you can start learning and adapt your product to users’ needs as early as possible.
However, building an MVP shouldn’t be taken too lightly. An MVP should be good enough to let users see the potential of your product. It’s easier to find early adopters when you offer a high-quality and usable product.
Things to remember about an MVP:
It should include only the most necessary features.
It should provide enough value to demonstrate future benefit in order to retain early adopters.
It should help to gather user feedback.
Lots of today’s influential tech companies have managed to create popular products by developing MVPs first.
For example, the founders of Buffer ‒ a social media scheduler ‒ started their business by testing whether people needed their product. To find out what people thought of their idea, they launched a two-page website, keeping it as simple as possible. It was just a landing page explaining what the app would do. After discovering that people were interested, the Buffer founders needed to find out if people were ready to pay for their product. So they added a page with pricing. Then they analyzed the results and moved on to building the first version of the product.
A/B testing
The concept of A/B testing lies in offering several versions of a product to users at the same time. A/B testing can show if a change, even a slight one, has an impact on customer behavior. And if it does, you can measure how big of a difference it makes.
In terms of web application development, A/B testing can help to test different versions of pages to see which is more effective. The result can be analyzed by calculating the conversion rate or other metrics depending on your goal.
The aim of an A/B test is to check a hypothesis and measure which version of a product works best.
Upworthy, a viral content portal, turned to A/B testing to test layouts and designs for recommended content on their news and media website. They wanted to provide users with recommended content but were afraid it would decrease the number of social shares. Upworthy took a two-step approach to check that assumption. First, they tested out seven different layouts with their users. Once they found which one performed best, they moved on to the second phase, testing different designs. As a result, they found out that with a right sidebar and a minimalist design, Upworthy could increase social shares by 28 percent.
We rely on testing to just make better decisions. People are really fascinating and interesting… and weird! It’s really hard to guess their behaviors accurately.
Peter Koechley, Co-founder of Upworthy
Validated learning
Building an MVP and performing A/B testing leads to what’s called validated learning. An essential part of the Lean Startup methodology, validated learning helps with making data-driven decisions.
The process of validating product-related ideas is iterative, where testing one idea is one iteration. Results are measured by metrics. Validated learning happens when ideas and features are improved and there’s a positive change in metrics. Website features and their impacts can be tested by tracking visitor behavior.
Spotify, for instance, created an MVP and iterated, taking into account user feedback they gathered to improve the product. This approach helped them realize what their customers wanted and avoid risks.
The Dropbox founders adopted the Lean Startup methodology at the very beginning. They first made a demo video explaining how their product would work. This video helped them generate interest at the early stage, engage users in the development, and learn how to improve the product. For Dropbox, the key to success was giving customers the exact product they wanted.
Pivot or persevere
When you test a concept, there are basically two outcomes. In the first case, you find out there’s a need for the product. So it makes sense to persevere with the same idea and keep on improving it. In the other case, you discover there’s no need for this particular product. That means you need to pivot to test another hypothesis, repeating the Build-Measure-Learn loop.
There are several options when it comes to pivoting. For instance, having analyzed feedback, you might need to consider building the entire product around a single feature. This is called a zoom-in pivot. Sending money by email became this feature for PayPal. When they discovered that their customers preferred using email for payments, they did a zoom-in pivot.
A zoom-out pivot is in the opposite direction, making an existing product one of the features of a new bigger product. There are other options you can opt for as well. It all depends on what you discover during the process of validated learning. For instance, you might need to consider changing the problem you address, targeting different customers, or changing the technology you’re using.
It can be a difficult decision to make. But sometimes it’s necessary to look for a better way to reach your goal. In any case, your decision to pivot or persevere should be based on data, not an assumption.
Why use the Lean Startup in web development?
As you can see, the Lean Startup methodology can help entrepreneurs see if they’re on the right path. Using the principles of this methodology enables you to determine if a particular feature is worth spending time and money on.
Implementing Lean Startup practices can help you:
Understand if there’s a need for your product
Get feedback in order to improve your product, meet your target customers’ needs, and maintain loyalty
Avoid adding unnecessary features and wasting resources
