You have an idea for the next great mobile app, and now you need someone to develop your app. Then you also need a website, marketing, e-commerce and maybe even the ability for your users to upload a special kind of unique data that only you know how to process correctly.

Picture this scenario. You spend time detailing out all the features of your app idea to a development company and then wait. A few days later, they give you the estimated cost, and it is big. Much bigger than you expected. You have hit your first roadblock to your goals, and it is a big one. So what do you do now? Do you give up on your app dream? Maybe you start looking for investors and trying to convince them that your idea is worth their time and money.

How do you avoid these common app development pitfalls? The solution is to find your MVP or Most Viable Product (or sometimes, Minimally Viable Product).

Why do I need an MVP?

In app development or any product development, timelines are critical. Most companies don’t make a product and then stop improving it. Over the life of the product, you’ll be steadily improving your product or service’s efficiency, features, and scale. This initial MVP or initial product might have just a third of the features of the version were hoping to ultimately create. The reason we recommend this is two-fold. First, it forces you to think about how you will be making money with your product as quickly as possible. Second, it causes you to consider what it is that makes your product or service viable in the first place.

How to Find the Most Viable Product

Using our experience and case studies on other apps or products, we start out with a list of user stories. We start out with “the sky is the limit” kind of thinking during this phase. “No” is not a word we will use here. A user story looks something like this: “As a user, I want to login.” We will write these for the entire app.

As a user, I want to login.
As a user, I want to change my password.
As a user, I want to tag my videos.
As a visitor, I want to be able to find videos by a tag.
As a user, I want to be able to upload videos.

Sometimes, an app that does all of these things can get too expensive, so you want to cut down on unnecessary features. This is part of the MVP. Looking at the features list, there are somethings that are pretty obvious in our example.

Users need to be able to log in
Users need to be able to upload and view a video.

We would call these the core features. They makeup what the app is about and what it is useful for. So what does that leave us with? Looking at the user stories we can eliminate:

As a user, I want to login.
As a user, I want to change my password.
~~As a user, I want to tag my videos.~~
~~As a visitor, I want to be able to find videos by a tag.~~
As a user, I want to be able to upload videos.

Removing just these two user stories/features makes it possible to drive down the cost of the project.

Final user stories and the MVP

As a user, I want to login.
As a user, I want to change my password.
As a user, I want to be able to upload videos.

This is our MVP. From here we are able to get started with wireframing, cost analysis and if needed, how to investors to fund your idea.

So, if you want to have your application developed in a cost-efficient way, contact us about your project, and let us help you find your own MVP.

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