Whether you’re a startup or an established organization, cost-effectiveness will always remain a priority in this modern-day business world. The rule applies to businesses that are thinking of developing an application. We know that competition increases with advancement in technology in the IT sector. Therefore, companies need to look for cost-effective services to build their Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
In this blog, we would like to discuss various factors that drive the cost of software development. Despite going with full-fledged functional apps early, it’s better to build an MVP model. Let’s understand the importance of MVP and tips to reduce the software development cost for MVP.
What is MVP?
Minimum Viable Product is a software product version that launches with an essential feature to validate users with receiving their feedback. Based on feedback, one can decide whether the app is worth investing in or not. Launch MVP at an early stage by adding minimum essential features that are cost-effective and time-saving. Companies like Facebook and Spotify have launched MVP successfully, but they didn’t spend much time and money on building unnecessary features.
Must read: Things to know before launching MVP
Choose the correct pricing and business model
What are your thoughts? What do you do first, planning or budgeting? Few development projects define their budget first, while some try to fix the development cost. Some experts plan everything involving software development thoroughly before planning their budget. As planning makes it easier to highlight goals for a software development project. If you decide to work on MVP, be prepared to have a high cost for building new features and rebuilding certain parts of the software from scratch.
Communicate properly
It’s one crucial thing to communicate with stakeholders and consider their vision and inputs on the software goals. Proper communication is always needed to define the product and solve it. After determining the problem, one needs to look for ways to solve it. You need to break down big goals into smaller software development tasks by adding the estimated time and cost of the project.
Prioritize features for your MVP
Do first thing first, when developing an MVP, it’s essential to differentiate between must-have features and nice to have features. Must have features covered without this feature, your product won’t function properly. At the same time, it is nice to have a feature to boost the user experience. Choosing the right feature would help add the prioritization technique by dividing the product features into three categories covering critical, moderate and optional methods. Ask a few questions to yourself:
- What do you want your end-user to get from your product?
- What features do you include in your product that are unique selling points?
- What feature needs to be covered to make the product more efficient and attractive in the final version?
Using design system
We know quality design is essential for user engagement. Design systems are sets ready-to-use for HTML and CSS user elements, style guides and design patterns. One can apply to a design system by accelerating the design process and reducing the overall software development cost.
Start testing as early as possible
Engage quality assurance specialists from an early stage of MVP development that supports cutting down software development costs. When creating product requirements, the QA specialist helps to identify incorrect needs by preventing the appearance of numerous bugs caused by subsequent stages of your release flow.
Opt for cross-platform development
If you’re targeting users of several operating systems, you can choose cross-platform app development to reduce software development costs. Tools such as React Native and Xamarin allow building a single app on both Android and iOS platforms to create a separate codebase for each operating system. If you’re seeking to make any changes to your app, modify it using one codebase.
Use open-source solutions
Open-source libraries and frameworks help contribute to the time-efficiency and cost-efficiency of software development. Many communities built around programming languages to collaborate with simplifying software development by creating and sharing ready-to-use functional components. An open-source framework is an excellent help for your project, allowing developers to avoid coding functionality from scratch by reducing development duration.
Looking to hire dedicated developers?
By using the backend as a service solution
Backend as a service solution (BaaS) helps in reducing the time required to build the server-side of your application. Using BaaS, you get free resources to devote to them and create a high-quality client-side of your application. The BaaS components include:
- Databases
- File Storage
- User authentication
- Infrastructure
- Push notification
Select a proper project management approach
To use an efficient development process and keep software development costs under control, one needs to use a proper project management method. Few approaches used are Lean, Agile and waterfall. If we compare these three approaches, the waterfall is cheaper while Agile and Lean are expensive. Besides these, a few other methods like Scrum and Kanban are also used.
Set clear tasks
The team needs to receive complete tasks to ensure an efficient development process and optimize the development budget. The method of setting a task consist of steps like:
- Step 1: Shape the product vision
- Step 2: Build a business model
- Step 3: Establish goals
- Step 4: Present the expected results
- Step 5: Define tasks to be completed
Outsource development
If you’re planning to outsource, you need to avoid the expense required for recruiting in-house specialists and renting and managing workspace. Now that you have decided to delegate your software development task to third party vendors, you need to choose between outstaffing and outsourcing. At the same time, outstaffing is a remote employment model that assumes responsibility for all aspects of searching and recruiting specialists. While outsourcing allows for setting project goals for the team and delegating responsibility for product development. One can look into resources like Clutch, G2 and good firms to search for software development outsourcing teams and get reviews on them.
Looking to configure your business structure with MVP based solutions? Let’s connect!
Final Thoughts
Now that you discovered various factors that affect the cost of building MVP for startups. It would be excellent to find a balance between pricing and quality. As we saw numerous ways to reduce MVP cost, it seems logical that low price may result in low quality at times. However, choose the best practices before building an MVP by creating high-quality products and delivering real value to users.
If you’re looking for an MVP development partner at a reasonable price and want to save money by getting a robust MVP product on time, connect to our Agile Infoways development team and get world-class MVP.
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