What is an MVP and How Much does it Cost?
Minimum Viable Product: Just an outstanding idea and concept is not sufficient to build a mobile application. It's very difficult and risky to move forward with only an idea, a proper mobile app development process requires a lot of time, efforts and money.
In this high-technological world, there are a lot of business ideas sprouting in the startup ecosystem to entrepreneur’s every day, but there are only a few of them worth investing money and time into it and only a few of them get success in the mobile world.
Sadly, even after putting all the ideas, time, and money into their product for a long time, they are on the verge to fall drastically in the market. The general blunder behind these falls is that the individual or entrepreneur does not search or explore the need of their users and target audience. They directly launch their product in the market thinking that it will be successful and will do revolution. So, before doing any such thing entrepreneurs should survey about their target user’s requirement, should design proper strategy solutions to their problem by defining the need for their product in the market.
For doing all these things, the best and quick way is to launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Minimum Viable Product not only gives you the right strategy but also saves your precious time, money, and will find all the threats allied with your project.
What is an MVP? - Minimum Viable Product
A minimum viable product (MVP) is the Lean Startup concept and the author of Lean Startup “Eric Ries” has defined the MVP as a variant of the end product that permits to assemble as much as important data about the customer and future investment with least effort.
An MVP mobile app helps business to go through the future deliberation of the product concept and also pushes to understand the customer behavior to the app with minimum development costs and time.
It is a smart and efficient technique to help determine the product’s potential in the market.
The main focal point of the Minimal Viable Product technique is to helps recognize, build and provide features that meet the customers’ expectations and requirements. The MVP technique can be used to build any mobile app and website product.
In the MVP method, a new product is launched with barely sufficient features that are essentials like UI/UX and other standard services of the product. With the help of MVP, you can protect your product from huge failures and it plays an essential role in growing funds for the end product.
Why is it important to build a minimum viable product?
A Minimal Viable Product supports the startup or established companies by providing a way to obtain initial data of the consumers with their feedback, which ensures their interest and desire to purchase the product without fully developing the product.
These are some main benefits of developing a Minimum Viable Product:
- MVP contains only the core and fundamental features of the app, but designs and functionality being not fundamental is not included in it.
- Will help you to save your money by not investing in a nonviable product. At the initial stage, MVP will let you know about those features which are not popular among the users. In this way, you can save your resources from giving their efforts into those features.
- Minimal Viable Product marvelously reduces the risks of the business and provides a phenomenal strategy to build a strong presence in the market.
- MVP contains only the core features which make it easy to access by the users so it provides real feedback by real-time consumers which increases production efficiency.
- The main advantage of minimal Viable Product is that it saves your precious time and money on building the final product and help to pitch the investors for funding.
It gives the quickest way to introduce yourself to the market and will provide a vision of the product potential that you are planning to sell.
Types of Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
Listed below are some kinds of MVPs which are divided on the basis of their use cases:
1. Piecemeal MVP: Piecemeal MVP is an inexpensive and smart approach to introduce an application to the users by investing a minimum amount of money. A piecemeal MVP is developed from the ready-made instruments and through a little innovation.
To develop the baseline of your product the piecemeal MVP will keep the components together from multiple sources and implement the product's basic features. An example of the product where this type of MVP used is Groupon which is a huge corporation now.
2. Concierge MVP: A concierge MVP is the best MVP where your ideas will be tested by the human service. In this MVP the services will be provided manually, you can connect with the users and understand how they will respond to your idea. With this type of Minimal Viable Product, you find the opportunity to closely analyze your users. Food on the table is an example of Concierge MVP.
3. Wizard of Oz MVP: Wizard of Oz MVP is mainly building the mirage of the actual
product before the complete development. With this Wizard of Oz MVP, you can examine if a userwants to buy your product without trying them on. A retailer store Zappos was launched by this MVP.
Factors of an MVP App
The cost or total budget of a Minimal Viable Product depends on some factors which are listed below:
- The platform on which you wanted to build the MVP, for example, Android, or iOS.
- Numbers of features and functionality that will be added into the minimal viable product.
- The fixed timeline for the development of the MVP.
- The Complexity of the app design and the type of platform you choose for the development.
- And of course the organization’s pricing which you have hired for your MVP development process.
What will it Cost to Build an MVP for Your Mobile App Idea?
Compared to the actual cost of developing an idea based app, developing an MVP for the same acquires only a fraction of the cost.You can build an MVP based on your mobile app idea at a minimum cost if you will be an expert mobile app developer.
Although, we know that every great thinker cannot be a good coder. So, if you have a phenomenal app idea but your skill is not sufficient for the app development process then the developed MVP might not be effective to that extent to appeal the target audience.
There are several factors that influence the total cost of an MVP application. You will get to know the value of an MVP app when you would be able to understand how the MVP rate and the entire mobile app are calculated.
There are different ways to create your MVP app which is: Either develop it by yourself or hire a freelance developer to design the prototype or outsource the MVP Development or Hire a mobile app development company.
From these approaches whatever method you choose will determine the final price of the MVP app that is computed based on the hourly rates.
So, the cost of MVP depends on the type of project that you are willing to build.
Moreover, hiring a freelancer can be affordable for you than hiring a mobile app development company but this budget difference can be visible in the quality of the MVP.
Hiring a freelancer creates a lot of issues, in which the most important issue is communication barriers. It is challenging to contact the developers who are sitting somewhere else.
Contacting a complete mobile app development company means you have the full security of the app as you will have the company’s registered contact information, their address, and the opportunity to directly contact the team member.
From the listed example below, you would be able to understand the cost to build an MVP for your app idea if you choose to work with a development company.
Let, the minimum time required to build an MVP app is = one month which is 30 days and,
- The hourly rate= $30/hour, then:
- 40 hours * $30 = $1200 is your weekly cost.
- $1200 * 4 = $4,800 would be the monthly cost.
Further, you can multiply the value by the number of months it will take to finish the project, and you will get to know the exact total price.
Developing a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) for the ideal project is the best initiative by any startup or well-established companies for enormous success. The Minimum-Viable Product will find the market value of your idea, by experiencing the users' response as well as expectations showing its worth to invest further or not.
The MVP is one of the most crucial aspects of any mobile application, which can also be considered as the core foundation of the app. This saves your money, time, efforts and lets you know your target audiencerequirement.
