Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the most critical step in transforming your business idea into a successful product. In 2025, with 42% of startups still failing due to a lack of market need, the MVP approach has become more essential than ever for validating ideas before investing significant resources.
An MVP allows you to test your core assumptions, gather real user feedback, and iterate quickly—all while minimizing risk and development costs. Whether you’re a first-time founder or an established business launching a new product, understanding how to build an MVP properly can mean the difference between success and joining the 90% of startups that fail.
This comprehensive guide will walk you through every step of MVP development, from initial concept to successful launch, with proven frameworks, real-world examples, and actionable strategies you can implement immediately.
Okay, let’s jump right in!
What is a Minimum Viable Product?
An MVP, also called a Minimum Viable Product, is the first implementation of a product that has a minimum set of features that are still enough to create value for early adopters and gather customers’ feedback for further product development.
Eric Ries, the author of the book “The Lean Startup”, provides a methodology for developing a viable product in a shorter period of time. His Minimum Viable Product definition is as follows:
The difference between an MVP and a fully-featured product
An MVP gives enough understanding of your product’s potential at an early stage and at a lower cost compared to a fully-featured product.
The Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop
At the core of successful MVP development lies the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop – a methodology that turns assumptions into validated learning through systematic experimentation.
How the Build-Measure-Learn Loop Works
1. Build: Create a minimal version of your product that tests your core hypothesis. This isn’t about building something perfect – it’s about building something measurable.
2. Measure: Track how users interact with your MVP using both quantitative metrics (user engagement, conversion rates, feature usage) and qualitative feedback (user interviews, surveys, behavior observations).
3. Learn: Analyze the data to validate or invalidate your assumptions. Based on these insights, decide whether to pivot (change direction), persevere (continue on the current path), or iterate (make improvements).
Why This Loop Matters
Companies that effectively implement the Build-Measure-Learn loop grow faster and raise more funding than those that don’t, according to Startup Genome 2025 research. This approach minimizes the risk of building something nobody wants—the #1 reason startups fail.
Real-World Example: Dropbox initially built a simple explainer video as their MVP to test market demand before writing a single line of code. The overwhelming response validated their hypothesis, leading to 75,000 signups overnight. Only then did they build the actual product, using ongoing feedback loops to refine features iteratively.
The key is speed: complete each loop as quickly as possible to maximize learning and minimize waste. Modern MVP development now takes an average of 3-4 months compared to 6 months previously, thanks to no-code tools, cloud infrastructure, and agile methodologies.
Why do you need an MVP?
Idea validation
Every potentially successful founder believes in their idea. As one of our customers recently said, it isn’t even worth starting if you are not 100% sure.
But everyone makes mistakes. And a great idea might just not fit the market at that time. And if the project doesn’t solve any pains for your target audience, you might end up with a washed-up product.
The faster you get feedback, validate the idea, and realize the weak components, the faster you can fix them and pivot in another direction.
And it’s much more pleasant to see the full picture early on rather than when you have paid a fortune for a fully-featured product, right?
Reduces time-to-market
Time is a very important factor in launching a new and innovative project. As usual, the first is the one who creams money off the top.
Compared to developing a fully-featured product that can easily last more than one year, an average MVP development now takes 3-4 months, thanks to modern no-code tools and cloud infrastructure. Plus, you will obviously have a clear advantage over others since you’ll be the first one on the market to present your idea.
Cheaper than a fully-featured product
People call the MVP cheapness a myth. And it’s true – Minimum Viable Product development is not about saving money. But let’s face it: MVP is cheaper than a fully-featured product.
First, developing an MVP involves fewer features. Therefore it is much quicker to build than a fully-fledged product. As a result, starting your software with an MVP saves you half of a fortune.
Attracts early adopters
Early adopters don’t just bring you money – they are extremely important to your product. They are the ones who will:
- test your product
- provide you with feedback on the functionality
- actually tell if your product solves their problems.
Additionally, they’ll create traction that you can show to your potential investors.
Ways to attract early adopters
From the inception of your idea to the MVP release, every post on social media, every speech about your soon-to-be product should warm up your target audience. And when it’s released, your audience should feel a wave of excitement that the product is already on the market.
By viewing and analyzing data from customers who are already using your product, you should be able to confirm whether you’ve defined your target audience correctly or if it’s time to pivot.
Enables Rapid Experimentation
The Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop allows you to test assumptions quickly and adjust course based on real data. In today’s fast-moving market, the ability to adapt is crucial—74% of high-growth startups that fail do so because of premature scaling, according to Startup Genome’s research.
Reduces Financial Risk
With 29% of startups running out of cash, building an MVP helps you validate demand before committing significant resources. The typical MVP development cost ranges from $15,000 to $150,000, far less than a full-featured product, which can cost upwards of $500,000.
When not to build an MVP
Though it is uncommon to start a project with a fully-featured product – it may be the correct approach if:
- Time and budget are not a question
- You are 100% sure of the success of your idea
It can happen if you conduct solid market research or you want to build a clone of the other successful product.
Typical Mistakes in MVP Development
1. No ‘V’ – Not a Viable Product
Users in the current marketplace know every popular product on the market in every niche. With so many options, users are unlikely to care about new products unless they offer unique features.
This implies that having ‘some minimal product’ is sometimes not enough for attracting customers. Having implemented the main features in your MVP, you need to focus on a Minimum Awesome Product (MAP). It means that besides building some basic features, you’ll have to present some unique features and impressive UI and UX. That is what will make your product ‘enough’ and hence viable.
2. No market need
Did you know that ‘no market fit’ is actually the first reason why startups fail?
According to CB Insights, 42% of startups failed because there was no market need for their product.
This happens because startups don’t have clear goals or don’t meet customers’ needs.
Despite a Minimum Viable Product being a way of validation, it is still worth paying attention to planning and analysis at the very beginning. Having a goal of building MVP software is a must.
We’ll talk more about planning your MVP further ahead.
3. No clear goal
Lots of startuppers light up about their idea. They start creating their MVPs without actually setting their goals. In most cases, they think of how to build a Minimum Viable Product more quickly rather than plan long-term goals. Our experience with developing startups shows that in most cases, this results in failure.
4. No ‘M’- Not a Minimal Product and the delayed launch
One of the advantages of an MVP is a rapid time-to-market. It never works in favor of startuppers when they wait too long to launch.
Why do some MVPs launch so late?
– MVP is not minimal
While thinking of how to build a Minimum Viable Product, keep in mind that the whole point of creating an MVP is to build a product with minimum yet sufficient features.
The difficulty here is that you need to maintain a balance between viable and minimum. The key is to focus on features that are significant and unique. Not all cool features should be included in your MVP.
We’ll have some time to talk about the features below.
– Founders do everything by themselves
You can’t do everything by yourself or with your partner in crime.
It is true that success starts with the founder. But usually, there are a lot of things on the founder’s and co-founder’s shoulders. But they can’t do all those things at once: development, marketing, pitching, general management.
There is a lot to go through. Saving on additional developers is an understandable thing, but sometimes time is more costly.
– Weak Team
As a famous proverb says “I’m Not Rich Enough to Buy Cheap Things”.
Don’t take it the wrong way. We are not saying it is worth hiring Silicon Valley developers when you are just starting out. But it IS worth calculating the possible time needed for debugging when you are paying the lowest market rates.
– Wrong Technology
Any technology is just a way of achieving your business goals. We have to admit that some developers recommend the technologies they are actually selling. And that’s not a problem until it’s the wrong technology for You.
Some languages and frameworks bring projects to life much faster than others. For example, a large number of startups choose Ruby and PHP because they have many in-built solutions that reduce time-to-market tremendously.
However, other technologies like C# and Java are not focused on speedy development. So, they wouldn’t be a smart choice for your MVP software.
If time-to-market is a crucial point for your MVP development, then choose a technology that would save your time and of course money with it.
Related: How to choose a startup technology stack?
5. No budget for marketing/poor marketing
Everybody knows that having launched an MVP doesn’t guarantee you immediate success.
We’ve emphasized the importance of a solid plan and here is why: lots of novice startups don’t allocate funds for promotion. And that’s where they make one of their biggest mistakes.
Or even worse, they don’t have any money for promotion after development.
Why Startups are Left with No Marketing Budget?
– Costly/Cheap team of developers
Startups either pay extremely high rates for development and run out of money in a matter of seconds or they pay too low rates that lead to redoing the project and eventually running out of money before even launching. We recommend finding that sweet spot in the middle.
Want to build an MVP?
– Lack of funding
Bootstrapping is a great way to be in control of your project. Until you realize that your budget won’t cover your idea implementation. Seek some external investments. That way you will have a solid ground for your MVP development and for marketing.
– Off-target features
At first, many choose the wrong features. What they do next is come back and make the essential ones. Having spent on building all the necessary features, they start to get the picture that there is no money left for promotion. Decide on your MVP features in the very beginning. A good development team should help you make wise choices.
6. Not Using Feature Prioritization Frameworks
Many founders include too many features in their MVP, driven by excitement rather than strategy. This leads to:
- Longer development times
- Higher costs
- Diluted value proposition
- Difficulty measuring what actually works
Solution: Use frameworks like MoSCoW, RICE, or Value vs. Effort Matrix (detailed above) to make objective decisions about feature inclusion. Remember: an MVP should have the minimum features needed to test your core hypothesis—nothing more.
Related article: Deciding on MVP Features
What Tasks Can an MVP Solve?
Validation
One of the main reasons for MVP development is product validation. By getting honest feedback from your customers, you’ll find out what things to change and what to improve.
Fundraising
You might want to fundraise in the very beginning or later when you have traction. Whatever your plan is, it is going to influence the type of MVP you develop and what features you gonna need.
For instance, if you are going to seek investments in the very beginning of a closed beta stage, your implementation might need to be more simplistic and the UI & UX much more basic as you just need to show your idea.
At the same time, this approach won’t work for the later investment stages.
De-risking Product Development
MVP development systematically reduces uncertainty by testing your riskiest assumptions first. Instead of betting everything on untested hypotheses, you validate each critical assumption—market need, willingness to pay, technical feasibility—before moving forward.
Attracting initial customers
When your goal is actually to attract customers, it won’t be enough just to show your idea. Such an MVP has to:
- cope with lots of requests /high load
- have an appealing design.
Creating a Learning Culture
By embracing the Build-Measure-Learn loop, you build a culture of experimentation and data-driven decision-making. Teams learn to fail fast, iterate quickly, and make decisions based on evidence rather than opinions. This organizational capability becomes a lasting competitive advantage.
How to Build a Minimum Viable Product in 6 Core Steps
Step 1: Perform the Discovery Phase
Sloboda Studio has been focusing on MVP development for almost 10 years. Thus, we’ve seen the number of pitfalls waiting for founders at the very beginning.
A standard dialogue at the beginning of the project is often like:
- I have an awesome idea. Is it possible to implement it?
- Yes, it is. But let me ask you a question: what problem does your idea solve? Who is your target audience?
- I haven’t really thought about it. Is it that important now?
Surely, we can create great code without this information. But we do not want to – we aim to build successful products.
Related: The Project Discovery Phase or How to Avoid Failure
During the first step of MVP development, we recommend you find answers to the most crucial questions about your project idea.
Want to build an MVP?
Step 2: Conduct Market Research
Market research refers to a comparative analysis of direct and indirect competitors.
Here, researching your competitors will give you a sense of the market. Plus, whether there are analogs to the product you are about to build. Additionally, by doing market research, you’ll be able to study the main features of your competitors that you’ll have to beat.
Step 3: Map a customer journey
Customer journey mapping is a way to visualize the customer experience and their potential interaction with your product.
It will provide you with the best user experience on your platform and help you retain your users.
To map a customer journey, you need to know:
- Your target audience and buyer personas
- Actions that your users are going to take
- The target actions for your users
Buyer persona: a girl in her 20s wanting to fly to Paris. Actions: check for available dates and prices, register, and book a flight. Expected result: buy a ticket.
Step 4: Come Up with a UX Concept & Build Wireframes
The previous step will significantly help you in building your UX (User Experience). By outlining the UX on your project, you’ll be able to lead your customer seamlessly through the platform to the end result.
Wireframes will help you understand how the content will look on the platform. After building wireframes, you’ll move over to the UI (User Interface) and mockups.
Step 5: Define Core Product Features
The key concept here is maintaining the balance of minimalism and viability.
You need to have a minimal set of features to call your product ‘viable’. Read below on how to decide what features to include and what to leave out for now.
How To Come Up With MVP Features
When deciding which features to include in your MVP, focus on what’s truly essential. Your two guiding factors should be:
- Budget. Be clear about your financial and development time limits from the start—this will naturally reduce your options to those features that matter most.
- Priority. Identify must-have features (core to your product’s value) and unique features (those that differentiate your MVP). If you need more features than your resources allow, consider simplifying functionality or leveraging ready-made (out-of-the-box) solutions to launch faster.
The most important rule: build only what’s necessary for early users to achieve the product’s main goal. All other features can wait.
For a detailed step-by-step guide and a full comparison of the best techniques for selecting and prioritizing MVP features, check out our comprehensive article: How to Decide the Right MVP Features.
Step 6: Implement Measurement and Learning Systems
Before launching your MVP, establish systems to measure its performance and extract insights.
Key Metrics to Track
Acquisition Metrics:
- Traffic sources
- Sign-up conversion rate
- Cost per acquisition
Activation Metrics:
- Onboarding completion rate
- Time to first value
- Feature adoption rate
Retention Metrics:
- Daily/weekly/monthly active users
- Churn rate
- Return visit frequency
Revenue Metrics:
- Conversion to paid
- Average revenue per user
- Lifetime value
Qualitative Feedback Methods
- User interviews: Schedule 30-minute sessions with 5-10 users weekly
- In-app surveys: Ask specific questions at key moments
- Customer support analysis: Track common questions and complaints
- Session recordings: Watch how users actually interact with your product
When to Pivot vs. Persevere
Pivot if:
- Users don’t understand your value proposition
- Engagement metrics consistently fall below benchmarks
- Users ask for fundamentally different functionality
- You discover a more pressing problem to solve
Persevere if:
- Core metrics trend positively (even if slowly)
- Users express strong enthusiasm despite rough edges
- Retention is solid, even if acquisition is slow
- Feedback is about improvement, not fundamental change
Golden Rule: Give your MVP at least 3 months of real user testing before making major pivots. Some successful products had slow initial traction.
Minimum Viable Product Examples
Obviously, you are not the first startup founder to consider building an MVP. There are some truly great examples of very popular companies that started their journey with an MVP.
Notion
Notion began as an internal tool that founder Ivan Zhao built for his own team’s needs. By using it themselves first (dogfooding), they refined the concept before sharing it with a small group of beta users. This internal-first MVP approach enabled them to gain a deep understanding of the product before scaling. Today, Notion has over 30 million users and is valued at $10 billion.
Key lesson: Sometimes your best MVP is building for yourself first, then expanding to similar users.
Figma
Figma’s MVP was a web-based design tool that challenged the assumption that professional design software must be desktop-based. Their initial version focused on one core innovation: real-time collaboration in the browser. By validating this single breakthrough feature, they built confidence to expand. Figma was acquired by Adobe in 2022 for $20 billion.
Key lesson: Your MVP can challenge industry assumptions – test one radical idea at a time.
Spotify
Spotify is another example of how an MVP with only one unique feature can get you ahead of others.
Music streaming is what makes Spotify so special. At a time when buying CDs or paying for an album on iTunes seemed pretty expensive, Spotify decided to launch a website with a cheap monthly subscription for music streaming. While the platform was engaging early adopters, the founders of Spotify had multiple meetings with different music labels in order to broaden their music services. After its initial release, customers were immediately hooked on Spotify.
Spotify raised $2.6B and has $6.8B in estimated annual revenue.
Our Expertise in MVP Development
Sloboda Studio has been building MVPs for startups since day one of its existence. The company has been on the market for over 10 years. We have broad expertise in building MVPs for startups in such industries as:
- FinTech
- Food and Beverages
- Healthcare
- HR
- Marketing and Advertising
- Media and PR
- Transportation.
Here are a few examples of the longest projects that we’ve been working on which started from an MVP development.
Salita
Salita, a B2C platform that connects interpreters with customers across Norway, also started out as an MVP.
In fact, It was one of the first marketplace MVPs that Sloboda Studio created. The founder came to us with an idea to solve the language barrier for immigrants in Norway. After releasing an MVP, we received a lot of feedback and developed a fully-featured online marketplace.
Since then Salita has raised over $1M, and we are still working with them to polish the platform.
CityFalcon
CityFalcon is a financial news aggregator. When we met their Founder he had a goal of creating an MVP that had a clean and simple UX to show the huge potential of his idea of an aggregator.
After our team had launched the CityFalcon MVP, we got feedback from clients and realized that users required even more unique features. So we started working on adding even more cool features. Little by little, CityFalcon grew bigger and its scope grew wider.
Currently, City Falcon posts over 1M articles daily, has raised more than $2.5M and recently won the Amazon Growing Business Award.
Minimum Viable Product Template
We have prepared an awesome MVP Template to download for free. It has many questions and useful tips for you to go through step-by-step.
The bottom line: Nowadays it is almost unprecedented to release a product without an MVP. Examples of MVPs from such giants as Spotify, Zappos, Dropbox, and Facebook show that even large companies can start their journeys to success with pretty limited products.
And even though an MVP is a very popular concept, there are still many myths and misconceptions about it.
Some think that MVP is about implementing all the features they like, as long as they have a budget for them. Others treat an MVP mainly as a way to save costs on development and aim to build a product of high quality, in a short timeframe and very cheaply.
After developing the MVP projects for almost 10 years, we have 3 key recommendations for you:
- DO NOT start your MVP without a solid plan
- DO find a balance between minimal and viable features
- BE wise with the choice of your future team.
Whatever challenges you might face with your MVP, you are welcome to contact us for a consultation.
How to Build an MVP: Conclusion
Building an MVP involves:
- Identifying the core features required for your product.
- Creating a prototype with those features.
- Testing it with a target audience.
Key Takeaways from this Article:
- Start with assumptions, not features: Identify your riskiest hypotheses and test them first
- Use prioritization frameworks: Don’t rely on intuition—use MoSCoW, RICE, or Value vs. Effort Matrix
- Embrace the Build-Measure-Learn loop: Speed of iteration matters more than initial perfection
- Budget realistically: Expect $15,000-$150,000 for a quality MVP
- Plan your evolution: Understand the path from MVP to MLP to MMP
- Measure relentlessly: Set up analytics and feedback systems before launch
- Know when to pivot: Give your MVP 3 months, then decide based on data, not hope
The MVP approach has proven itself across thousands of successful startups – from Airbnb to Notion to Figma. By following the frameworks and strategies outlined in this guide, you significantly increase your chances of building a product that customers actually want.
Iterate based on feedback and focus on delivering core value while keeping development time and costs to a minimum.
