Application development for startups

Let’s say you have an ambitious idea for launching a startup, and even if you are completely confident that it will work, pouring the main budget into its development is a rather risky endeavor. It is much more correct to start by checking the viability of the idea, testing the response of the target audience and laying the foundation for further smooth development.

To do this, you will need an MVP and a reliable development team with good technical and analytical expertise that can carefully select functionality, create an exciting UI/UX and think through the main features of the project. And the main thing is that all this fits within the budget and the established deadline.

MVP, or Minimum Viable Product – translated as minimum viable product. This is the initial version of the application, which performs only its main function, such as streaming videos, booking tables in restaurants or ordering food. The task of the MVP is to check how relevant the idea is to the market and get feedback from the target audience.

At the same time, an MVP should not be confused with an alpha version or a prototype of an application. In contrast, a minimum viable product is an independent and useful solution that is available to a wide range of consumers and helps users solve certain problems.

The development of an MVP application has several goals:

• Attract financing. The project needs money for development, and investors want to see what they are investing in. MVP allows you to break out of this vicious circle, because you can present them with a ready-made solution that works in the market and show its promise. This will be much more convincing than demonstrating prototypes, beautiful graphs and verbal promises.
• Look at the reaction of the target audience. According to Startup Genome, 90% of startups fail, and the main reason is that the proposed idea is not in demand. Bringing an MVP to market will help evaluate the viability of a product or specific solutions and help avoid unnecessary costs.

• Reduce risks. Any business involves risks. Even a sought-after product can be ruined by factors such as poor technical implementation, ineffective marketing or poor management decisions. It is almost impossible to avoid risks completely, but they can be managed. With an MVP, you can test the relevance of different ideas and experiment relatively inexpensively.

A custom mobile application for a startup is the next step after MVP. When you are convinced that your idea is reliable and in demand in the market, you can begin to develop a minimum viable product and create a full-fledged application: with additional functions, features and a deeper user experience.

Of course, such development will require significantly larger investments, but now, after the MVP, you will clearly understand that the project will be successful.

In some cases, a custom application is not the development of an MVP, but a “step to the side” that a pivot helps to make. It may be required if you decide to change the course of your startup’s development, or test new models and growth mechanisms.

From creating an MVP to receiving traction, the application goes through many changes and variations, which means that during the technical development of such solutions, the flexibility of the team and its ability to quickly adapt the product to new goals and objectives is very important.

Understanding this feature, when creating applications for startups, our team uses the two best Agile methodologies – Scrum and Kanban. The iterative approach allows you to make any, even fundamental, adjustments to the project right during the development process and maintain close communication with the client.

The priority task for most startups is to launch a productive MVP as quickly as possible, reach the maximum audience, and at the same time stay within a limited budget. Therefore, most often we prefer the cross-platform Flutter framework for developing such applications. It uses one code base to work on the IOS and Android operating systems, and allows you to create a functional solution in a short time and at no extra cost.

In terms of performance, Flutter is not much inferior to native technologies, so it is quite advisable to build a full-fledged custom application on it in the future.

However, depending on the technical characteristics of the project, we can also choose native technologies as the main stack: Kotlin language for Android, and Swift for iOS. In this case, you will actually have to create two separate applications, separately for each operating system.

It is important to understand here that the technology stack is always selected individually and depends on many factors, including the planned functionality of the application. For our part, we always try to choose the most optimal set of technologies that will allow your solution to effectively solve the tasks assigned to it.

The application development cycle for a startup in our company consists of eight main stages. Let’s look at them in more detail:

• Discussion of the project and collection of information. It all starts with communication. We study your idea, conduct an assessment, analyze your closest competitors, and then offer our vision for the implementation of the MVP, with an approximate indication of the cost and development time.
• Application design. Once the concept is approved, a prototype application is created. It includes a detailed description of the planned functionality, block diagrams of modules and the technology stack that will be used for development.
• UX design. At this stage, warframing and mind mapping are performed. In other words, the skeleton of the future application is created.
• UI design. Designers create several concepts and variations of the visual design of the application, and after approval, add elements to the layout, creating a unique experience with the product.

• Frontend and backend. Developers create the client and server parts of the application. The front-end part is responsible for interaction with the user on the side of the mobile device, and the back-end is responsible for processing and storing data, functionality, and interaction of the product with external services via API interfaces.
• Testing. Following the Scrum concept, QA engineers test code in parallel with writing it. Their task is to detect bugs in a timely manner and monitor their elimination, so that after the application is released, your customers receive the most stable solution.
• Release to release. Our team has conducted many checks from Apple and Google, and will help your application take its place in the App Store and Google Play catalogs.
• Technical support and development. After the first downloads of the application, you will begin to receive the first analytics and feedback from the target audience. Using this data, you will be able to make more accurate and reasoned decisions regarding the development of your startup and, quite possibly, you will need to refine the existing functionality. Our qualified technical support teams can easily solve this problem.

We clearly understand the challenges startups face and provide all the necessary technical base, experience and expertise to help you achieve your goals. In addition to the main application, we can also create additional tools for your startup: landing page, CRM and chat bots in instant messengers.

They will help you attract more target users, establish effective communication with them and receive quality feedback. If you are ready to take action, contact us!