Building your MVP App

We love working with startups, we’ve seen them come to us a varied stages of idea development and continue with varied range of success.
One of the common behaviours we see is the temptation to develop as much as possible before showing the world and getting that valuable albeit daunting feedback on your precious idea.

This is quite understandable, good founders are very passionate about their idea and will have probably formed a perfectly vivid view of what their product will do and how it will handle even the most obscure scenarios.

Even before you get to the point of developing your app, avoiding this temptation is very important as it helps you explain to others and even clarify to yourselves what the core problem you’re trying to solve.

At such a crucial point in your business it’s important not to burning up time and money developing things that will not make a huge difference in terms of the overall business. Challenge every feature as an opportunity cost and aim for the smallest thing that you can build that delivers maximum customer value and insights.

Being frugal during this decision making can put you in a much better position:

• You can test your idea and gain feedback from customers without needing massive amounts of resource.
• You give your idea a chance to evolve along the way by getting feedback as early as possible.
• You can get your development team concentrating on these core features and really nailing them.
• That time saved not dwelling on less important features could mean you beat your competitor to market.

With these benefits in mind, here are some high level steps to planning out your
MVP.

Step 1 — define your business

• Answer, in simple terms “What does your project do, and how will it benefit me?”. Not only is it good to nail a good elevator pitch for talking investors and potential customers, clarifying your USP internally is a good start to focusing your MVP.
• Define what would make this project a success, what milestones are you looking to achieve during the initial stages of development ? Questions like this could help shape what would be needed for an initial app build, is it a throwaway prototype to impress an investor or is it to go to market quickly with the intention to scale.

Step 2 — define your audience

• Who are the people that would use your product, what would be a typical user journey?
• How can you market to these people, are there any free ways to get their attention?
• Talk to them, ask what they think of your idea before it’s built — it might help you better define the problem you’re trying to solve.

Step 3— define what you need to build

• Using the information that you’ve attained decide what features you need in your app to have.
• List out of features and identify which of those are absolutely necessary for MVP, breaking features down into small chunks and evaluating their cost/benefit can often help with this.
• Split out these features into individual sprints of work, do this in an order that gets you and beta users trying out end to end user journeys as quickly as possible.

Choose the right tools to do it.

Since being early adopters of React Native, of the most noticeable characteristics we’ve found other frameworks that come and go is it’s ability to have a great affect on getting your idea to market quicker and cheaper than other alternatives without sacrificing quality. A lot of tech savvy entrepreneurs have clocked onto this and often demand their app be built with this technology.

At Lollipop Media we’ve our fair share of MVP apps. We've even taken a few a bit further, check out some of our most recent apps on our site here: www.lollipop.media/work.

About Lollipop Media

Lollipop Media are a digital agency, based in London. We bring your ideas to life using our extensive experience working with large companies as well as start-ups. We design the perfect user experience for your target audience and get your product to market on any platform.

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