Startup Costs: Can the MVP Route Save You a Lot of Money?

Entrepreneurship is getting popular with every passing day, leading to an increase in rising startups. But how many have tasted success?

Maybe very few.

Establishing startups in the current competitive environment is a challenging task that requires an ample amount of time, effort, and investment.

A successful startup depends on various factors that comprise a business plan, the expert workforce, product quality, proposed value, industry knowledge and experience, team cohesion, market reputation and so on.

It’s difficult to manage everything right when building a product.

As with the rising fierce competition in the industry right now, the startups have less time to present their ideas to their customers and to know about their response. 

What is an MVP?

MVP or minimum viable product is a methodology based on Lean Startup that works on build, measure and learns the principle. 

A minimum viable product is the early product release with “minimum features” and launched in the market to measure customer response. The MVP approach not only supercharges your digital product but also saves development costs and time.

The customer’s response and feedback are then used to develop and scale the final product.

Why Startups Need MVP for Product Development?

Establishing a business keeping MVP approach in mind is the most preferred way used by most of the startups just like Uber and Airbnb. It helps to find your product-market-fit and scale it accordingly as per the customer feedback.

An MVP approach helps in redefining your idea into a primitive product and then scaling it into a final product driven by real customer feedback.

A few points as to why MVP is a need for every business type:

• It helps you boil down your ideas to the core features.
• It helps build products faster without exhausting your entire budget.
• It helps analyze and test customers' requirements and delight early buyers.
• It helps mitigate risks.

In this article, we are going to discuss how the MVP approach benefits startups to reach their customers faster and that too with low startup development cost.

Why MVP is considered the most preferred option for Startups?

Every Startup comes up with some unique and brilliant idea, however, not all of them attain success. Is this the right idea to work on; will it satisfy customer requirements; will it boost my revenues; all these questions will often come to your mind.

For businesses, starting with MVP is a smarter move. You have a faster market response; you avoid the risk of failure; you save development time, and also save on your business costs.

It helps to reduce rework

Adding extra and non-core features in your early startup product may raise the value and complicate the customer experience. Fewer features will reduce the risk of failure and also incurs less development cost.

When you keep your startup product launched as “minimal featured”, you’ll be more straightforward and responsive to the market.

It leads to low development costs

As the product is all about to be “minimal features”, there is a reduction in the startup cost that entrepreneurs invest. This is because the product is focused only on the core features to solve a problem, therefore limiting the amount of time needed to build the product. 

The MVP approach also helps to hinder the complicated coding and solutions. You can keep your costs low by developing a simplified version of your product.

It takes less time to launch in the market

The time taken to complete an MVP product is not much. The time includes both the development and design phase that are used to build an MVP.  

By keeping the product minimal and focusing on just core features as stated in the MVP approach, the product development time can also be reduced. 

Thus, less time to launch the product in the market will result in fewer development costs.

The faster you launch the product in the market, the sooner you get customer feedback and market validation.

The right technology stack is the way

The estimated and optimized technology stack is all you need when developing an MVP.

While planning MVP for a startup, you can consider some tailored and robust technology solutions that can be easily coordinated. You can also go for the native or hybrid solution to avoid future challenges.

It is considered a cost-effective solution to developing websites and apps, with the help of hybrid or native development technology stack. 

Hybrid apps are faster to develop and deploy as compared to native. The hybrid solution helps in leveraging high-quality features with less development time.

It mitigates the risks involved

As we know there are many risks associated with product development, startups do face certain challenges when investing their funds. Startups do not spend their entire funds on mere assumptions-it is riskier to their business. 

Choosing an MVP methodology facilitates startups to spend a little less in the entire MVP development process. It helps businesses to mitigate the risks and eliminate failures. And with reduced risk, the development cost can ultimately be reduced.

Final Thoughts

You have to see if your product is customer engaging and attractive. Is it performing the way it is supposed to be?

MVP ensures the product development to be done beautifully step by step and too with increased efficiency, high-quality and of course in less time.  

All in all, we can say, minimum viable product development is considered one of the best business models for startups. It saves your time, money, and workforce.

Now that you have identified factors that determine how startups' development costs can be reduced with MVP, you can now easily figure out what is right for your business with respect to quality and cost. If still you feel confused as to how to start with MVP, here is a guide that can help you with MVP development.

So, let your idea bloom in the market with the smart MVP approach and the real cost of development.