Building a compelling MVP is a vital stepping stone on the way to creating an exceptional, fully-fledged solution. This is especially true for SMBs and recently established startups with meager budgets.
MVP outsourcing empowers firms to verify the effectiveness of their concept within a brief time span and with minimal spending. Explore what stands behind this process and whether it suits your organization by looking through this expert piece.
The notion of MVP explained in more detail
So, what stands behind the three letters of this abbreviation? The first one is short for minimum, and the second one stands for viable, both indicating that the set of features in a newly developed program is just enough to make it fulfil its core functions and be of use to its target audience. The third letter, as you may have guessed, simply stands for product.
When you outsource MVP development, it’s like we’re saying to our provider: “Keep it as simple as possible.” What does this principle imply? Right, your solution will appear on the market within several months and will thus get into the hands of real users who’ll be welcome to share their impressions on it. At the same time, you’ll allocate only necessary resources to this small-scale IT initiative, having a chance to scale up at further stages by exploiting useful user comments and data from real-life performance and marketing analytics. Perhaps you’ll discover that some of the features planned aren’t employed as you thought they would, or, on the contrary, the users have a need for some specific functionality that hasn’t been provided for but can be included in subsequent iterations.
How does MVP outsourcing help you interact with your target audience in the early stages?
When you outsource MVP development, it amounts to peeping into the design and behavior of a fully-fledged solution based on its simplified core version. However, even in this somewhat rough model you can see how the program responds to requests and helps consumers achieve their goals.
MVP outsourcing is, in fact, the ideal way to rapidly and economically measure the future success of your business idea. By including a well-oiled MVP development process into your project, you have a fairly high chance to avoid the common stumbling block: a vaguely formulated product vision, inadequate terms of launch, and, most importantly, its uselessness and irrelevance. Progressing with your app side-by-side with the real users will surely help you avert the latter.
After all, the entire purpose of your endeavor is to meet the needs of whoever will turn to your solution. That’s why their active involvement in the test run is so valuable. No one but they can communicate their aspirations and goals better, although the requirement elicitation performed by a skilled business analyst at the discovery stage cannot be overstated either.
When you outsource MVP development, you, in a way, make users the fully-fledged participants of the building process who are able to initiate the necessary enhancement and rework as well as the stakeholders. When this core work is over, you’ll have a solid ground to add on additional, more sophisticated features.
Outstanding examples of MVPs that skyrocketed
In this compact section, we’d like to bring up several outstanding examples of extremely successful products of this sort for your inspiration.
Not many Airbnb fans can recall that the platform actually started as a sketchy page that didn’t stand out in any way, apart from the brilliant idea behind it. Remarkably, it didn’t even suggest paying for services online, supposing that the parties would perform settlement in cash. This initial simplicity didn’t hinder the creators from adding the necessary features further on, nor could it withhold the rising popularity of the app because its core idea was in full correspondence with what the users needed and wanted.
Hardly anyone is aware now that one of the largest social media platforms, Facebook, originated as an amateur college site. Then, the idea and its realization spreaded across educational establishments in North America, and only after that, eighteen years ago, the platform was made available to the masses. Needless to say, since then, it has been substantially revamped and now, it has little similarity with its initial version.
What stages does an MVP outsourcing firm lead you through?
Behind the seaming simplicity and definitiveness of the notion of MVP, there stands, in fact, a diversity of various jobs that an accomplished agency can do. The areas they’ll cover will depend on your request, including the project scale and other terms. In any case, the ultimate goal is to confirm the feasibility and potential of a business outlook on a soon-to-be-developed product.
Drawing up functional prototypes and verifying their usefulness with the target audience
At this phase, the crux of the future solution is outlined in the form of clickable prototypes that are subsequently gone through by potential users. This brief and cost-effective yet extremely useful stage actually efficiently saves customers thousands of dollars as it ensures that those for whom the solution is intended find it engaging and can resolve their problems with it. Prototyping can be equally well applied to intricate enterprise-grade sites and non-complicated apps, and it guarantees that the developer will lean their subsequent endeavors upon solid metrics.
Upgrading your prototypes through well-honed design
This intermediate phase precedes full-scale production and is about breathing color and volume into your schematic sketches. This is yet another prudent measure to secure the support of stakeholders and the approval of consumers before involving tech professionals and immersing yourself in comprehensive coding. Allocating your resources stage-by-stage in this economical and incremental way will ultimately save you funds.
Organizing end-to-end coding and quality assurance
The culmination of the entire process is the realization of the envisioning, i.e. programming itself, for the desired platforms. This process entails numerous additional and vital activities, e.g. working on the back-end part, conducting GUI testing, meticulously analyzing the results of consumer surveying, and refining the product until it’s ready to be rolled out.
Analyzing rollout results
At this stage, the rollout outcomes and dynamics are clearly seen, and the business can decide whether to continue scaling up its product and fine-tuning in the course of further iterations, polishing the final version to achieve top-notch quality.
What kinds of work can you count on within the frame of MVP outsourcing?
In terms of their needs, even two seemingly similar companies within the same niche can be like chalk and cheese. However, well-versed MVP outsourcing agencies provide talent for every need. Whether you reach out to such an agency for mere envisioning or you require a more comprehensive approach that is supervised by an adept project manager and accompanied by meticulous requirement elicitation by an expert business analyst, you can find all you need within the competencies of a single provider, namely you can count on the provision of services within the following areas:
- Devising solutions for the web;
- Crafting mobile versions of apps;
- Performing the entire scope of UI/UX design tasks;
- Verifying the concept on the level of a prototype;
- Eliciting and prioritizing requirements within the scope of professionally conducted business analysis;
- Testing the resulting solution through and through;
- Providing for carrying out the work in the cloud if required.
What advantages will you avail yourself of when opting for MVP outsourcing?
When firms who have recently started on the market choose to outsource MVP development, they get a unique chance to access resources, potential, and talent readily provided by an experienced IT professional who knows how to perform greatly on an expedited timeline and within constrained budgets. Below, we’ve listed some of the compelling pros you as a customer will avail yourself of.
Grounding your assumptions on solid metrics
Catering to the aspirations and needs of the target audience is your ultimate goal. Not only does MVP outsourcing lean on the opinions of consumers, but this process is also about translating these emotions and options into tangible metrics that can subsequently be translated by tech specialists into useful features. This way, the criterion of viability is successfully realized.
Being guided by accomplished specialists in the niche
Even if you can’t clearly formulate your brilliant business vision, don’t worry. Adept agencies provide all the necessary expertise to help you define the requirements, prioritize features, and come up with the best way of their technical realization. This pro is especially valuable, taking into account that building MVPs for freshly established startups (and not only for them) has its specificity and, thus, requires dedicated expertise.
Availing yourself of an accurately tailored-fit option — now and in the long run
Perhaps, the greatest advantage of turning to a reliable developer of custom solutions is that you can expect to get the very scope of work to be done that you need at the moment, as well as secure long-term assistance by the company who already knows your program through and through. Thus, you can rest assured that your vision of the situation gets precisely the realization you demand, whether in the form of prototypes, lines of code, or another.
Reaping economic and marketing benefits with your fine-tuned solution
The fact that a successful one-of-a-kind product easily catches the attention of users needs no proof. Consequently, the crux marketing indicators, e.g. conversion rates, rise as well, and the owner reaps substantial economic benefits.
Receiving ROI rapidly thanks to the expedited release
The timelines of an MVP outsourcing project can vary depending on your niche and business requirements and can be from two to six months. However, on average, the entire initiative of this sort takes between three and four months.
These expedited terms, together with sparely used resources, empower decision-makers to ‘spy out the land’ and try out their ideas on the market with no considerable spending yet with a good chance to reap ROI rapidly. Your investors will surely be pleased to see the result of the effort quickly, and subsequently, this money can be invested in the further enhancement of the solution. The icing on the cake is that, in this way, heavy risks and financial losses are averted.
How do IT teams proceed step-by-step when working on an MVP?
Those who outsource MVP development must understand that this is not a new concept, and thus, the processes are carried out in accordance with Agile guidelines and software engineering practices that have proven their effectiveness. Let’s dive more deeply into the sequencing of steps that are normally taken to craft a well-performing program of this type.
Step #1: Drawing up an actionable roadmap
In this document, a clear schedule with the features to be created, the roles that are apt for the tasks, the required programs, hardware, and other resources, and the timelines for all these phases are stipulated.
The preceding work narrows down to conducting the discovery and drawing up the product template. The former is about arranging a meeting or a series of meetings between the stakeholders and the dedicated representatives of an MVP outsourcing agency to agree on the product vision, look through the market situation, analyze the current and desired metrics of the customer, and outline the outcomes. The latter is a schematic envisioning of your future solution upon which the programmers subsequently base their efforts.
Step #2: Engineering software itself
At this phase, the adept team you choose will envision an intuitive and interactive diminished version of your software, i.e. do the prototyping. Then, they’ll bring it to the market, and their well-versed marketers will start their solid work by surveying the audience and analyzing the metrics. Your provider will then come up with an outlook on your business idea and suggestions for further iterations.
So, what are you waiting for?
It turns out that MVP outsourcing is a fundamental component of a subsequent fully-fledged and well-oiled solution that will yield high ROI and meet consumers’ expectations. To get started, you just need to find an accomplished IT agency with a proven record in this segment and in your niche and with the mastery of the tech stacks you require.
