What is MVP?
Before knowing how to scale your startup post the MVP stage, first let’s have a basic view of what an MVP is. In app development, an MVP is a basic model of your mobile application that provides the basic and most essential features to the target market. It can be called the initial version of the app which doesn’t contain many advanced features yet. It is built with a vision to save money and launch the app to check if it is a good fit for the market and get validation for your business.
A lot of apps that have been successful later were initially MVPs (Minimum Viable Product). When they reached the market, they made significant changes which were responsible for the level they have achieved today.
When to build an MVP?
When you are done with appropriate research about what basic features your app needs, according to market needs and customer opinion, then the stage to build an MVP is reached.
How to Scale an MVP?
Now that there is an MVP ready, you would further need to know when to move to a stage of developing it further. With an MVP ready and running, it is time to create a scalable product that satisfies a wide range of customers. The way to do this could be by creating the Most Scalable Product (MSP) which is also called the Minimum Marketable Product (MMP). After your MVP is released, you should start working on the next version of your product. The awareness of when there is a need for the next version is very crucial for a business.
Building a new version of your app requires the following steps,
1. Customer Feedback and Analysis
The startup needs to look at how the already released product is doing in the market. It must meet certain customer demands and expectations and the tech team needs to know what the customers feel about the product. All the success of the product depends on how satisfied the customers are with the product, which makes this stage one of the most important. Enabling feedback from the app itself or from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store through the review section can be ways to get reviews and feedback.
While taking feedback, it needs to be noted what they feel is lacking in the product, and also what they like about it. You will need to make changes and test the product again until you get a perfectly user-attractive version.
2. Keep an eye on competitors and their prices
While developing your product the focus should be on making a unique and affordable product which is high in demand. You need to research and increase user traffic and tightly deal with the conversions of potential buyers to real customers. Reasonable prices will force the users to use more of your product. Keeping an eye on how your competitors are doing is an equally essential step. You can add some features to the app by looking at the competitors and some more unique ones to make the app more attractive. Keep track of what users of the apps of other competitors feel about the app they use too.
3. Analysis and Verification of Results
The results you obtain need to be thoroughly analysed for further development of the next stage of your product. With the execution time data, you can already learn a lot about your team’s performance. It is not just about control but a viable assessment of what you can deliver within a specific timeframe. You can use analytics tools to analyse what has been going well and what needs to change. Setting up a tool like this before you release your MVP can be very helpful, for example- Google Analytics and HotJar. Observing user behaviour on the app will lead to better decision-making and quickening the process of building the next version of your product.
4. Marketing strategy
Marketing is very important to scale your product and spread its user base. Investments in marketing will be fully paid off if a competent strategy is implemented. Knowing what it costs to attract a customer is very important to implement a good marketing strategy. Always check your customer acquisition cost ─ the ratio of money spent on a customer acquisition channel to the number of customers acquired through that channel.
5. Determining further targets
Setting further targets helps you to organise the upcoming steps in the journey of scaling your product. The further targets decided should be beneficial to the investors and the user base. You need to allot specific tasks to teams keeping in mind the overall goal and process. In this phase, you might need to make crucial decisions, like choosing between something that saves time and something that saves money. You need to evaluate what will be good overall.
6. UI/UX audit
If the initial design was simple then there needs to be a UI/UX audit so that the app looks much better than the first version. UI and UX designers will have a look at this and examine whether the present design can cope with further versions.
7. Establishing the next steps with the development team
You might consider changing your development process and may want to hire more workforce or completely change the team. Getting yourself an outsourced development team might also seem like a feasible solution. All of these decisions need to be taken keeping in mind the resources required for the team phase. While implementing stuff the team tends to encounter more and more varied situations which leads to better experience and wisdom in further stages.
An MVP is a basic model of your mobile application that provides the basic and most essential features to the target market. You can go for building an MVP when you know the features that your MVP needs to have through observing the market. Building a new version of your app requires customer analysis and feedback, keeping a check on competitors, analysing and verifying results, marketing strategy, determining further targets, UI/UX audits and thinking of further steps along with the development team.