How startups can reduce costs on MVP in web development?

The technological landscape has changed dramatically over the course of several years. Earlier, you would argue that building an MVP in web development instead of a fully-fledged solution is the ultimate cost reduction measure. These days, with the rise of free tools like website builders and other existing solutions, startups find themselves in a tough spot. With free website builders, there are plenty of simple solutions. On the other hand, mature market players have raised the bar for functionality, performance, and UI/UX quite high. Remembering that MVP stands for Minimum Viable Solution, the market reality of what is minimally viable appears hard to catch up with. 

As a proof, let’s look at the dreaded failure statistics. Running out of cash and no market need are primary reasons. Startups try to build more and more features while narrow functionality is not enough. 

MVP concept still works, yet you can find more advanced variations on it like – MMP/MSP, MLP, and MVA. So, a smarter strategic approach on how to build an MVP for your startup is required. Certainly, getting the functionality right requires more testing. On the flip side, there are tons of free tools to do that. In this article, we’ll explore strategies on how to launch your web startup in a lean cost-reducing way.

What is lean MVP in web development in today’s competitive landscape?

MVP in web development stands for a Minimum Viable Product. Let’s look at the examples of MVP web products for companies like Pinterest or Facebook. Looking at them, it becomes obvious that anything like that won’t make it in today’s marketplace. Not in terms of looks, nor in terms of functionality. So, the open question is what is Minimum yet Viable for today’s market?

As mentioned earlier, the MVP concept still has its use cases. And now, its advanced variations to cater to today’s demanding environment emerged. 

• MMP/MSP stands for Minimum Marketable / Sellable Product. It’s great for B2B solutions, established brands, and other cases when you manage to make the value obvious to the end user. 
• MLP – Minimum Lovable Product. This variation is viable for highly-competitive markets or businesses that rely heavily on network effects to gain a ‘critical mass’ of users. 
• MVA – Minimum Viable Architecture. This is essential if your startup plans on competing in the sophisticated market where every solution is like a family of products. 

So, how does lean MVP development help to reduce costs for your startup that is going to launch in this challenging environment? 

Cost Reduction Through Early Validation

This is where lean MVP validation tools  come in and start reducing costs for your startup. The first stage of any professional MVP development is Discovery Phase. We’ve written more on the topic in our article “Lean Project Discovery Phase: Definition, Process, Benefits”. Looking at two major reasons for failure above, the lean MVP methodology ensures:

• Product-market fit with paying customers,
• Leanest cost-saving way to achieve that.

And this works from step 0. Basically, you should utilize all the popular free or very affordable assumption testing and demand validating tools. They can be:

• Fake Google ads to see how many people are interested in your business idea,
• No-code website builders to create a landing page and test out basic functionality, 
• Creating a prototype which will be featured in the explainer video or showcased through influencers to get a mail list of interested users,
• And more. 

The Best Use Case for Free Website Builders

With today’s no-code free website builders you can really up your game during the Discovery phase. Even if your business idea includes personalized AI-recommendations, you can still use no-code web builders. Though, you will need to ‘fake’ it a little. How? Just create basic functionality and generate AI-inputs by hand, and copy-paste it into the ‘live’ chat or “personalized assistant” window. It is a perfect cost-efficient solution for testing the waters with your first hundred users. 

Free no-code web builders is the perfect solution for testing assumptions and validating demand before you invest any money into MVP web development. Arguably, it is underused for this purpose, and misused in other ways. But, ideally, after toying with this free experimentation tool, you can have statistically significant proof on what kind of features will make a difference for your users. Moreover, supported by competitors research, you can arrive at a data-driven decision on what kind of MVP you are going to build.

• Will plain MVP suffice?
• Do you require a more practical MSP/MMP approach?
• Is the market going to respond only to something that users will love, so MLP?
• Is it a systemic product requiring an MVA solution?   

If you decide to build an MVP when only MLP can meet the expectations of the audience, you will end up having an iteration over iteration with poor results. It will happen simply because there are not enough ‘nice-to-have’ features or competitors have a much more advanced UI/UX. Applying lean MVP validation techniques costs little to no money and ensures that whatever you end up building as an MVP is viable enough.

Business Case: From Landing Page for Discovery to MVP

One of the most prominent examples is Buffer. Buffer’s founder created a simple landing page with one frame describing what Buffer is going to be and another one saying that the product isn’t ready yet. Once this was launched, 500 customers signed up for an update on when the app is going to be ready.

Then, after the idea validation, the founder went on to validate if people were going to pay for it. So, Joel Gascoigne added an extra page in-between with prices. 

Then, it took 7 weeks to build a first working web MVP. After more than a decade of iterations, the product evolved into what today is a full-fledged product. Now you can even use Buffer to do your own simple experiments like that, as one of the tools in its full-fledged product is a free landing page builder. 

Further, Buffer grew in functionality and platform as well as evolved as a business. Below you can see today’s scale: 6 core groups of functionalities and 11 social media channels. The pricing model remained almost the same but the final price varies per number of channels, functionality scope, and number of users.

The point is that the founder blogged about its lean development process. Joel Gascoigne shared how he fought the urge to code up the ideational functionality. So, he put brakes on it, and instead created a simple landing page. Iteratively, based on the confirmed demand, he proceeded with the creation process. It ensures that each step of the way, you end up incurring as little expenses as possible.

Cost Reduction Strategy for MVP in web development 1: Use free web builder tools for validation

The lean MVP methodology has long argued for validating your business idea and paying customers first. In today’s digital landscape, there are free, accessible, and easy tools to do as many validations as you need. This is the most important and cost-saving tip you should start with. Before building a working MVP app, make sure the idea is competitive in today’s challenging competitive landscape.

Past Discovery: Lean Start

Once you have the idea validated and first clients, it is time to deliver on your promises. MVP is often criticized on its first impressions. When built fast and with only essential functionalities, the first launch might often underwhelm the early adopters. The MVP in web development that follows lean methodologies ensures that this does not happen. 

It is essential to carefully prioritize the functionality. Custom MVP web development recognizes the need to go beyond the ‘standard’ and does more and better where it is essentially required. 

For example, most professional development agencies recognize variations of MVP such as MLP, MMP/MSP, and MVA. As such, prioritizing functionality varies:

• For MLP, a greater attention goes to UI/UX and different ‘social’ elements;
• For MMP, it is performance and sensitive data security;
• For MVA, it’s scalability and roadmapping for future functionalities. 

Where are the cost reductions in that? Going back to the list of startup failures, here it is all about the correct feature prioritization. 30% of businesses didn’t select the right functionality to satisfy the early adopters, the other 20% didn’t do enough (or weren’t fast enough) to go up against the competition. So, this point is mostly about cost-saving strategy. 

Cost Reduction Tips with MVP in web development 2: Do Feature Prioritization Based on Market Research and Idea Validation Data

Your ideation/discovery phase provides enough data to shortlist the core features you must deliver. Also, you get market research data to determine functionality to successfully go against the competition. Based on all of this, select the right MVP development path: MVP, MLP, MMP/MSP or MVA. All of that boils down to clear vision as each lean MVP development process is unique and tailored to reduce costs.

Implementation: How Lean MVP Development Reduces Costs Of Running Your Startup

There is a variety of software development services, yet lean MVP development for startups stands out. Especially when it comes to pre-development services. Planning out your MVP implementation reduces costs in several ways. 

Let’s discuss using an example. 

Case in point: handling concurrency & traffic costs

Imagine your startup is going to be a marketplace with live auctions. Live functionality where a list of users should receive updates when one person makes changes is considered ‘heavy’. You should transfer a sizable amount of data quite frequently. If you set it up on a cloud like AWS, you are billed for that traffic monthly.  Surely, it also depends on app complexity, data type, type of server, and so much more. But, the problem is evident and the right implementation can mean a difference of tens of thousands of dollars.

Also, this example is valid for any type of startup that aims at a collaborative application or stock trading and whatnot.

To put it in numbers, let’s imagine you do REST API for the server and polling for the client. It means that a web UI sends an HTTP request to the server for ‘fresh’ data every 1 second or 100 milliseconds. Whatever time interval makes sense for your functionality. So, your user base is around 100 users. Concurrently, you may have peak hours of 30 users at a time. That equals to 1,800 requests per minute. That will be fine for almost any server. 

Imagine, after 6 months of iterations you expand functionality and your user base grows. Suddenly, it becomes 18,000 requests per minute with increased complexity and response size. Generally, you want to ‘sit’ in MVP architecture for several years. Having to re-architecture your entire solution so early is not feasible. So what you do is pay for more servers and traffic. It’s expensive but migration to a new architecture is an even more inconvenient process at this stage. Let’s move on to the lean MVP development solution. 

What does lean MVP development implement differently?

First of all, the lean MVP development focuses on lean and fast performance itself. Even during functionality selection, each feature is evaluated in terms of its ‘weight’ on app’s performance. In this example, it might make much more sense to use web sockets and trigger data exchange only when data changes on either end.

In addition, lean MVP development includes the usage of resource optimization tools. After all, MVP in essence is about quality and not quantity. Fewer well-executed features constitute a core of any MVP in web development. 

Cost Reduction Tips with MVP in Web Development 3: Carefully Consider The Architecture and App Design For Scalability and Maintainability

Things like ‘just enough’ but scalable architecture to serve your MVP for a few years, or optimizing resources are pillars of lean MVP development. As you launch your startup, it is important to ensure your app uses up only essential traffic and there is no redundancy or complexity that slows down processing times.

FAQ: How Startups Can Reduce Costs on MVP in Web Development