You have a seemingly ideal concept for a software product. However, what is the probability that it will at least pay for itself, and at most – that you will break even with its launch after some time?
In fact, in pursuit of the perfect and profitable product, entrepreneurs forget one simple thing: hypotheses, even the most viable at first glance, can fail in practice. Therefore, to minimize all risks without spending a ton of resources on it, it makes sense to think about MVP app development.
In this article, you will find the answers to the following questions:
- What is an MVP product and what are its features?
- How to develop an MVP without wasting your budget?
- How to choose features, stack, and UX for an MVP?
- What are the trends in MVP application development and what is needed to scale it?
What Is an MVP in App Development?
MVP or minimum viable product is a product with a basic set of features that determine its value (usefulness) for the end user. For example, if users need a device for eating, a spoon will be enough for them. This will be an MVP. A fork, in turn, will become a full-fledged product, as well as all other, more complex variations of cutlery.
At the same time, you should understand that the MVP development concept implies much more than saving the budget and time required to launch a product. After all, the more concise the set of features for the MVP application is, the shorter the feedback cycle will be. This means there is less chance of burning the budget on unnecessary things and a higher opportunity to refine the idea as soon as possible (and therefore, provide the audience with a solution that will be enough to solve its problems before your competitors).
If you already have such an idea and are looking for a team for its high-quality and cost-efficient implementation, please contact us. We will bring your product to the market ASAP, determining the best architecture and tech stack for its further scaling.
Key Principles of MVP App Development
If your project is a startup, app development for MVP will act as a safety cushion. The fact is that at the initial stages of development, hardly any startup can afford expensive mistakes. At the same time, thanks to wise feature prioritization, MVP will allow you not to spend money on features that will not be in demand, better understand the behavioral patterns of end users to improve them, and, ultimately, enter the market 5-10 times faster than with a full-fledged solution. And yes, launching an MVP is a great opportunity to attract finance from third parties, because no presentation of your idea will be as informative for potential investors as a product that can be tested in practice.
It is also important to note that most MVPs fail not because of problems with the program code. Therefore, you should:
- Focus on one function that determines the value of the product for the end user;
- Build a design focused primarily on convenience rather than aesthetics;
- Initially plan an iterative development approach (like an Agile development methodology called “a lean startup”) and scalable architecture so that when you receive the first feedback, you can refine your solution as quickly as possible;
- Define metrics that will demonstrate the success or failure of your project (these include Customer Acquisition Cost, Customer Retention Rate, Lifetime Value, etc.) so that you have a clear understanding of which direction to move in and whether it is worth doing at all;
- Pay due attention to blackbox MVP testing (a “Fake Door” method, customer interviews, split testing, and so on), because no discussions within the team will replace the validation of your idea on its target audience.
By the way, here, you can learn about one of our MVP projects that in just a month and a half after launch received an audience of more than 50,000 users, and here – about how we improved it taking into account user feedback.
Would you like to repeat and perhaps even surpass such success? In this case, do not hesitate, contact us right now to plan the development of an MVP for your business idea.
The MVP App Development Process
The lifecycle of any MVP has some differences from the life cycle of developing a full-fledged product. This is a system with an iterative approach aimed at regular user testing of each hypothesis. Here is a list of the sequential steps that we follow at WEZOM during the MVP development process:
- Target audience identification and analysis of its problem;
- Competitor analysis and market validation;
- Generation of hypotheses aimed at solving this problem;
- Feature categorization to determine must-have, nice-to-have, and future features (for example, by evaluating each of them according to the criteria “does it affect the main value of the product?” and “can it be tested without code?”);
- MVP design and prototyping;
- Software development of the minimum viable product;
- Testing and measuring results on the target audience representatives;
- Product development strategy refinement.
In general, we always keep in mind that each release is an experiment, and the faster and cheaper its results are obtained, the better (for example, we completed work on this MVP in 30 sprints). And yes, we are not afraid to discard ideas, because ultimately the viability of each of them is determined not by the team, but by the consumer.
Designing Your MVP: User Experience & Interface
MVP design is often very different from the design needed for a full-fledged product. It should carry maximum meaning, while an emphasis on aesthetics is not necessary at all. Therefore, often MVP functionality is implemented as a primitive set of buttons, forms, and/or screens – the main thing is to minimize the cognitive load on the end user.
If we talk about our best practices of UX/UI design for MVPs, they include the following:
- App wireframing instead of developing pixel-perfect designs to speed up the product launch;
- Modeling user scenarios with AI tools;
- Prototype development using Figma to immediately test user scenarios;
- Adherence to the principles of “Poka-yoke” – since the product will be innovative in some way, we deliberately “protect” new users from performing incorrect actions to accelerate their onboarding.
If you would like to have these and many other effective approaches to UX/UI MVP design used in your project, choose us as your digital partner, and we will ensure that your solution gets to market ASAP without breaking your budget.
Choosing the Right Technology for Your MVP
Of course, every development team has its own favorite technology stack, and the more extensive it is, the better. As for WEZOM, despite our huge experience in working with numerous tools and languages for software development, we never spend weeks arguing about which is better, but immediately proceed from specific tasks:
- To spend as little time as possible on the frontend, we choose React with ready-made libraries or Next.js (when, for example, a specific project requires server-side rendering, static site generation, automatic code splitting, and other specific processes);
- For working on the backend, we often use Django and Laravel, but if a significant increase in functionality is planned, such as with enterprise-grade projects, we usually choose Spring;
- As for the database, the choice is also quite limited – it is usually either PostgreSQL (a relational database that is great for medium and large datasets and is often used in transaction processing) or Firebase (a NoSQL database often used in analytical software, as well as software that requires real-time query processing).
In general, we have a certain technology stack selection that does not require intricate DevOps practices, the tools from which we select for each individual MVP project, taking into account its specifics. More details about how MVP development occurs in WEZOM can be found here.
MVP Testing: Ensuring Quality and Usability
Covering the entire MVP code with case studies is counterproductive because your main goal is to test your business hypothesis. Therefore, it is much more important to check whether the main functionality works and make sure that the product is stable under standard user scenarios.
Here are the types of tests that allow you to evaluate these aspects:
- Unit tests (to check the correctness of individual features in isolation from others);
- Integration tests (to check the correctness of features interacting with each other);
- E2E tests (allow you to simulate typical user actions to make sure that the entire user flow is performed as expected);
- UI/UX tests (to check the intuitiveness of your product);
- Performance tests (to evaluate the system's resilience to increased loads);
- Security check (here it is crucial to make sure that when the solution collects user data, it remains secure – that is, whether HTTPS, validation, and protection from XSS and CSRF work correctly).
By the way, if you would like to learn more about what results a well-thought-out approach to testing can achieve, check out this case study.
MVP Development for Web and Mobile Platforms
Are you hesitating between a web and mobile version for your MVP? Just keep several important considerations in mind.
MVP website development is often cheaper and faster; moreover, the web version is easier to distribute (since the mobile version requires uploading to app stores, which have their own unique rules and requirements for both applications and ASO). At the same time, your team will need to make a lot of effort to ensure cross-browser compatibility and determine behavioral patterns, as they are less predictable than in mobile development. And yes, your users will certainly encounter problems with offline access to your solution.
If these reasons are enough to abandon the MVP web development option, remember that the MVP mobile application development, although it takes longer, allows you to test the mobile UX immediately and, thus, provide better usability.
If you don't want to miss any opportunity to make your product better in all aspects, just start with the web version and then, as you test the functionality and attract funds, smoothly move on to implementing a mobile alternative. This way, you won't risk your money and will be able to offer your audience an advanced user experience, even if only over time.
Cost Considerations in MVP App Development
The question: “How much does MVP development cost?” is at the top among our clients. Since the MVP budget, like any other custom development budget, depends on the complexity of the business logic, the selected tech stack, the presence of a design system, the necessary integrations, and the requirements for compliance with certain standards, it can range from $5,000 to $50,000 and higher. However, you should understand that MVP is primarily not about “cheaper” but about making every cent and every minute invested worth it.
Speaking from our experience, the budget for a web or mobile app MVP project is usually distributed according to the “70/20/10” rule, where 70% goes to development, 20% to UX/UI, and 10% to testing and support. Also, don't forget to set aside 15-20% of the budget for iterations after the release, so that the product doesn't stay idle with its shortcomings because you just can't find funds urgently.
At WEZOM, to minimize your expenses, we can build an "MVP skeleton", that is, a project without unnecessary buttons and visual gloss, which works stably and is enough to eliminate the pain points of its audience.
To avoid guessing, you can simply schedule a consultation with us, and we will calculate the budget for your MVP solution on an individual basis.
Choosing an MVP App Development Company
Along with the obvious criterion for choosing a contractor company – the cost of its services – You have to rely on such characteristics as experience in MVP development (this can be verified by relevant cases in the portfolio) and expertise in your business niche (usually this can be identified by checking your contractor’s website in the Industries section).
Additionally, try to find out, based on the team's previous experience, how they worked with hypotheses, how they built a feature map, and by what principles they filtered out secondary and unnecessary functionality.
Would you like to collaborate with a digital partner with the perfect balance between knowledge of your business industry and understanding how best to implement your MVP? In this case, you should definitely consider our offer!
The Future of MVP App Development in 2025
Thanks to modern achievements in the digital industry, such as artificial intelligence (which we often use at the stages of idea validation, user feedback analysis, mockup and prototype building, as well as automatic testing based on user stories) and no-/low-code development tools (they significantly speed up the process of developing user interfaces and admin panels), development teams can devote more time to building highly scalable and flexible architectures and other essential things that require manual work.
Integrated analytics (if time and budget allow, we can connect Mixpanel or Amplitude) and the use of generative AI for the rapid creation of the first content additionally contribute to reducing the product iteration duration and your budget.
Actually, that’s why we can confidently say that today, the environment to create an MVP looks much more favorable than it was ten years ago or more.
Launching and Scaling Your MVP
If your MVP goals are achieved, you can move on to more complex but more promising steps on the way to ensuring the full viability of your idea. So, our standard after-launch set of practices is as follows:
- Implementation of CI/CD practices and transition to auto-scale infrastructure;
- Building a microservice architecture on top of the existing monolithic one;
- Adding new functional modules, ensuring multi-tenancy, and integrating business analytics.
In general, you need to get away from being fixated on 100% readiness of your MVP project, because time is not on our side either. At the same time, you will have the opportunity to quickly collect feedback (which in the case of MVP is much more important than “polished” code) and refine what caused a biased perception among end users.
And lastly: in the case of MVP, you have the right to make a mistake, because this will be exactly what will allow you to become better and better. Therefore, let's move from theory to practice faster with our MVP app development company!