Product Development
The MVP Development Process – From Idea to Launch
Let’s go through the process of successfully launching a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for your tech idea – along with actionable insights and best practices at each stage of the journey.
In today’s fast-paced tech landscape, businesses face immense pressure to innovate quickly while minimizing risk.
Enter the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a strategic approach to validating ideas, gathering user insights, and accelerating time to market. For startups and enterprises alike, MVP development isn’t just a trend; it’s a necessity.
At Proshore, your offshore software development partner, we’ve helped multiple businesses transform raw ideas into market-ready MVPs for over 15 years.
Whether you’re a founder with a disruptive concept or an enterprise seeking agile innovation, this guide breaks down the MVP journey from pre-development to scaling, providing actionable insights tailored for service providers.
Why do businesses seek MVP development services?
Building an MVP requires expertise in lean development, user-centric design, and rapid iteration—areas where specialized service providers like Proshore excel.
Here’s why businesses partner with us:
- Risk Mitigation: Avoid costly full-scale failures by testing core assumptions first.
- Cost Efficiency: Leverage offshore talent to reduce development costs by up to 60%.
- Speed: Launch in weeks, not months, with agile workflows.
- Focus: Free up internal teams to strategize while experts handle execution.
Key Benefits of MVP Development
Let’s dive deeper into the various benefits of investing to develop a MVP first;
10 steps of the MVP development process
Now that we’ve gone through what a MVP is and its benefits, let’s walk through the steps involved in building your MVP.
To make it easier to digest, we have divided the process into 3 phases consisting of 10 steps in total.
Pre-Development Phase: Laying the Groundwork
When you are building anything whether it be a tech product or your furniture at home – having a strong foundation is crucial.
Market Research & Ideation
First, identify gaps in the market by analyzing your competitors. Ask yourself,
- Who are your competitors?
- What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- What is their market share?
Next, understand the pain points of your future users through surveys or focus groups. Find out who are your ideal customers by listing down their demographics, interests, and pain points.
Lastly, align your MVP with business goals using SWOT analysis.
Define Clear Objectives
Set SMART goals that you want to achieve with your MVP. For example,
- “Acquire 1,000 beta users in 3 months”,
- Validate a core assumption of the product idea, or
- Generate a specific level of revenue.
Prioritize KPIs like user retention, conversion rates, or feedback volume.
Feature Prioritization
Remember, an MVP is not about having all the bells and whistles; it’s about validating your core concept. Here are some tips from our past experiences,
- Use the MoSCoW Method: Categorize features as Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, or Won’t-have.
- Apply the 80/20 Rule: Deliver 80% of value with 20% of features.
MVP Development Process: Agile Execution
After laying the groundwork, comes the actual development of your MVP. Remember, speed and prioritizing are key.
Rapid Prototyping
- Build clickable prototypes to visualize workflows. Use tools like Figma.
- Validate UX with stakeholders before coding.
Quality Assurance
Automate testing from the get-go to ensure core functionalities work flawlessly. Use tools like Cypress.
Launch & Feedback Collection
- Deploy MVP to a controlled audience.
- Embed feedback tools, e.g., in-app surveys and Hotjar.
Post-Launch Phase: Iterate, Pivot, or Scale
Once your MVP is out being used by your ideal customers, you need to focus on what to do next to get to your desired product stage.
Analyze Feedback
Iterate or Pivot
Depending on your user adoption and feedback, move towards either,
- Iteration: Refine features based on feedback and actionable insights. For example, you might gotten feedback that the checkout process has a lot of friction, hence you focus on simplifying the checkout flow.
- Pivot: Shift product strategy if needed. For example, high focus group reception but low user engagement could mean you need to change the target audience.
Scaling Strategically
Once you’ve validated your MVP, you start scaling your product. Here are three strategies you can start with one at a time or together,
- Technical Scalability: Ensure your technology stack can handle increased traffic, data storage, and processing demands.
- For example, you could future-proof by migrating to cloud infrastructure like AWS and Azure.
- Remember, team size and expertise will also scale with tech infrastructure.
- Feature Expansion: Based on user feedback and market analysis, prioritize new features that provide the most value and address key pain points.
- For example, you could add premium tiers, or integrations with popular services like PayPal or Slack.
- Remember, use A/B testing to optimize for conversions and user engagement.
- Geographic Growth: Localize for new markets. You could do so via strategic partnerships to share risk or leverage digital channels to reach your target audience and build a community around your product.
Common challenges in MVP development
With a decade-plus of MVP development under our belt, we have these challenges recur in many clients. Here are the simple yet best practices we suggest,
Cost of offshore MVP Development
The cost of outsourcing MVP development can vary significantly depending on factors such as:
- Complexity of the product: The number of features, the level of customization, and the complexity of the technology involved.
- Development team location: The cost of development can vary significantly depending on the location of the development team (e.g., onshore, offshore, nearshore).
- Development methodology: The chosen development methodology (e.g., Agile, Waterfall) can impact the overall cost.
You can also take your budget as the deciding factor;
High budget + long TTM + high expertise needed = In-house development
Limited budget + short TTM + high expertise needed = Offshore development
Low budget + flexible TTM + low expertise needed = No/low-code platforms
Why Offshore with Proshore?
- Access to Nepal’s top 1% of developers at competitive rates.
- Hire from a talent pool of 5k+ devs from Nepal with Proshore.
- Flexible outsourcing models.
Proshore: Your End-to-End MVP Partner
MVP development is more than a checklist—it’s a strategic partnership. At Proshore, we have 15 years of experience combining technical expertise with business acumen to turn your vision into a scalable reality.
From concept to scale, Proshore powers your MVP journey. Explore how we’ve done so in the past.
“Our challenge was bridging the gap between evolving requirements and long development cycles. By embracing shorter sprints, we could stay aligned with progress and adapt to changes in real-time.”
— Project Manager (Software Development)
De Heus: Leading global experts in animal nutrition supporting farmers, dealers, and industries in the sector.
With a passion for progress, and to meet the changing needs of customers, animal feed experts De Heus digitally transformed. Here’s how Proshore helped.
“We started out with one ‘extra employee’ via Proshore, and a year and a half later we’ve expanded to a team of four… The people and the teams are really dedicated to being part of the company.”
— Co-Owner & Platform Strategist
OrderXL: An innovative solution that allows hospitality entrepreneurs and suppliers to do business through an app.
How Proshore took full ownership of developing OrderXL, formerly Blinqed's, business concept from paper to an app, allowing the co-founders to focus on business development and partnerships.
“Right now, our app is being used by more than 7000 merchants… Our growth is led by our tech team and our top-notch support team.”
— Co-Founder
Digital Product Labs: API that integrates and sync products over Etsy and Shopify in real-time
Find out how Proshore and Digital Product Labs partnered to connect the popularity of Etsy with the power of Shopify through a new API.
FAQs
How long does MVP development take?
Time to market varies great from project to project and mostly depends on the projest’s complexity. However, we estimate and suggest to get it done between 6–12 weeks.
What technologies are best for MVPs?
Again, the tech stack varies from projct to project and depends on the nature of your products. We suggest React, Flutter, Laravel, and Node.js for rapid development.
Can I scale with the same offshore team?
Yes! Your ready-to-code Proshore dev team grows with you. Add expertise and talents as we help you scale from MVP to enterprise-grade solutions.
Schedule a free consultation with Proshore’s MVP experts – tap into a talent pool of 5000+ devs and save up to half on development costs compared to the EU and US.