For as long as there have been products and people — or teams — making them, companies have struggled with issues like productivity, efficiency, performance and competition. Today, every startup company in existence needs to deal with finding the right problem to solve and the right market to sell it. And they need to do it fast and well. 

Up to nearly a decade ago, they would do it with heavy product management, following a top-down — or waterfall — approach. Things changed with the introduction of Lean Startup. These types of goals are much better served using an MVP approach.

What is MVP?

MVP is one of the most important lean startup techniques. It's the bare-bones version of a product, which is required to achieve proof of concept.

MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. These three words alone should give you a basic idea of what an MVP app is. The Internet today is flooded with definitions for this acronym.

The phrase 'most viable product' is actually quite misleading; it's not about creating minimal products. It's about giving your concept a chance and letting it grow organically, being shaped by user feedback.

One of the biggest mistakes that appreneurs make is getting caught up in adding features that may seem necessary. In reality, it is just like ice cream toppings: sure, they add new layers of flavour, but this will cost extra. And if you add too many toppings, it's harder to distinguish the actual flavour of your ice cream. 

What is meant by this analogy is: if you pollute your app with unnecessary features, initial users may forget what the app's intended purpose was in the first place.


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Why is MVP necessary?

Competition

First to the market is a huge advantage. Early adopters are eagerly trying an app whose functionality was unseen in the market up until now. It will grow rapidly because it solves a problem, and no other app in the market has solved this problem. Sure thing, your app might be better. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter to the rest of the world. It doesn't exist, and your competition is securing users that should've been yours.

Cost

MVP contains only a narrow set of required features. Hence, much less time and money need to be spent. Later, when you realize that your idea is successful, or even the app has begun to bring money, you can get it by filling it with extra functions.

Feedback

Organic Feedback = The Best Solutions. You can spend weeks in development getting into heated debates about the validity and necessity of a certain function or design element. 

And no matter how much logic you apply, your result will still reflect the thoughts of only a few people in the office. At the same time, it could've represented hundreds, even thousands of actual users had you released an MVP version of your app and utilized A/B split testing.

A/B split testing is a means of comparing two options and comparing the results. By changing the value of a single variable in your app, through the examination of analytics, you can determine which variable provides the best response.

For example: in our hypothetical discounted flights app, we've realized that users were more likely to pick fights with the shortest duration and least amount of transfers than the flights that covered greater distances at the same price. 

With this new insight, your team can tweak the way the list gets populated, the flights with the shortest durations appearing first in the list.

One team will never be a sound sample to exemplify the general population. Fortunately, analytic tools are available to all: some free, others at competitive prices. A/B split testing is one of the most natural ways to distinguish what works best. When it comes to apps, you must never rely on assumptions.

What differences MVP from a final product

To create a proper MVP version of your app, you must provide users with what they need before taking that insight and applying it to developing features that will fulfil their wants.

Launching an MVP is the quickest, most efficient, and most fruitful way to test the waters. Many appreneurs, especially newbies, make the same mistake over and over. They dump all of their resources into a complex and grandiose vision. 

The problem is that the marketplace is not looking for complex, quite the opposite actually. And pulverizing an entire script with elements that seem fun and 'can't hurt' will overwhelm initial users.

What is the difference between prototype and MVP?

Prototyping is an essential part of product design. MVP is a product so its design requires a prototype. Despite this, the prototype and the MVP concepts are sometimes mistakenly considered to be the same. 

A prototype is a simple visualization of future products needed for further product development and production.

Prototyping is used by those teams who are going to launch MVP, as well as by those who decide to release a completely finished product. A product can have many prototypes. 

The main task of the prototype is to visualize the service and its logic or to give as many samples of the future product embodiment as possible. Based on the chosen sample, a final product (or MVP) is created. 

Unlike a minimum viable product, which is designed to serve real consumers, a prototype is created for inner use or to present UX and ID for investors.

How to build an MVP?

What problem does your app solve?

Instead of getting caught up in all of the bells and whistles that your app could feature, the MVP product is about lasering your focus on the app's core principle. What is the issue that your app fixes? What problem does your app solve?

Maybe your app aggregates last-minute plane tickets at unbeatable prices. There may be tons of adventurous individuals who are itching to get away from home this weekend but can't afford to splurge an insane sum of money on a last-minute booking. 

They might not care so much about where they go as long as they go somewhere. With all the last-minute cancellations, we can already see groups of eager individuals hanging around their local airport just hunting for a deal!

Problem: Thousands of gallivanters want to get away for a few days because of a spur-of-the-moment decision but can't afford a plane ticket at an inflated price.

Solution: Through your app, these individuals will be able to see and purchase tickets from a list of last-minute offers at a heavily discounted rate.

That solution should be natural borders for your MVP. Try to include only the necessary features.

What is the most significant feature your app has?

Disregard all the noise in your head that comes in the form of never-ending chatter that sounds something like, "What if we gave users the ability to…?", "I think they'd really appreciate it if we added…". And perhaps these features may be useful, but that's not the point. 

The point is you're getting distracted with could or should instead of focusing on must. It's not about these features being useless, but they are not significant either. Just because of them, you won't download the app.

"Should we integrate the app with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter?" Perhaps, you should, but these types of operations burn time and resources, and due to the practically innumerable amount of apps across the app stores and growing competition, time is of the essence. Take this scenario. 

For example, your app has been in production for 6 months now. You've been steadily adding features/tweaking the old ones, etc. No one but you and your team has really experienced the app. 

Your competition, however, has just released an MVP version of their app. It's been in production for 2 months. Their feature list is nowhere near as extensive as yours, but the core functionality that defines both you and your competition's product is there.