An MVP, or minimum viable product, is a version of your solution that contains only the features critical for validating your main business hypothesis. It is not a 'cut-down' or 'bad' product, but a strategic tool that allows you to enter the market with minimal costs, gather feedback from real users, and make an informed decision about further development. The main principle of an MVP is not to build everything at once, but to validate demand and offer value before investing significant resources in creating full functionality.
What is the difference between an MVP and a full product?
A full product is what you see in the final version: all integrations, complex algorithms, impeccable design, and support for dozens of use cases. An MVP, on the other hand, focuses on one key customer problem and offers a basic solution for it. If a full product answers the question 'How do we do it perfectly?', an MVP answers the question 'Does this work at all?'. The difference lies not in code quality, but in the scope of tasks being solved.
In our practice, we often encounter situations where a client comes with a 50-page technical specification describing an ideal system. However, 80% of these features are not needed at the start. For example, for a food delivery app, the MVP is the ability to select a dish, place an order, and pay via Kaspi Pay. Meanwhile, a loyalty system, referral programs, complex analytics for administrators, and integration with a dozen restaurants are development stages for after you have confirmed that people need the delivery service itself.
How to determine what exactly should go into the MVP?
The first step is to formulate your main hypothesis. What do you want to test? What are users willing to pay for? What problem will they solve with your tool? The entire list of requirements stems from this question. If the hypothesis is 'customers want to book a taxi quickly,' then the MVP must include: car booking, route display, and payment. Everything else—driver ratings, car type selection, ride history—can be postponed.
The second step is the 'must-have' vs. 'nice-to-have' method. Divide all features into two columns. The first column should contain what the product cannot function without or what does not solve the customer's task. The second column should include what makes the product convenient, beautiful, or advanced, but is not critical for the launch. Business owners often confuse these categories, believing that the absence of 'nice-to-have' features will kill the project. In reality, users will forgive rough edges if the product solves their pain point.
- Identify one key problem that the product solves.
- Formulate the hypothesis: 'If we build X, then Y% of users will perform action Z.'
- List the minimum set of features required to test this hypothesis.
- Move everything that does not affect hypothesis testing to the backlog (list of future tasks).
- Validate the list with the development team during the design phase.
Why does trying to do everything at once lead to failure?
Developing 'everything at once' carries three main risks. The first is time. While the team works on a dozen features, the market changes, competitors appear, and your idea becomes obsolete. By the time of launch, you may find that people are already using a different solution. The second is financial. The budget stretches over many months, and you receive no revenue and no customer feedback. The third is managerial. The more features, the harder it is to test the system, the higher the probability of errors, and the more difficult it is to maintain the product.
In our practice, we have seen projects where development lasted more than a year. During this time, the client spent significant funds but received no market feedback. When the product finally launched, it turned out that the target audience either did not exist or was using other tools. With an MVP, you enter the market in 1–3 months. If the hypothesis is confirmed, you scale the product. If not, you lose less time and money than with full development and can adjust your course.
How does an MVP help save budget?
Savings come not from lowering quality, but from reducing the volume of work. Development costs money based on the team's working hours: analysts, designers, developers, and testers. Fewer features mean fewer hours. For example, mobile app development in Kazakhstan starts from 1,000,000 ₸. If you remove half the features from the specification, the development timeline and cost decrease proportionally. This allows you to launch the project with less initial capital or use the freed-up funds for marketing and acquiring first users.
Besides direct savings, there is savings on errors. If you build a complex system from scratch and find out that the business logic is wrong, reworking it will cost many times more than if you had tested the logic on a simple prototype. An MVP allows you to 'fail' cheaply. If the product does not gain traction, you lose the budget for the minimum version, not for a full ecosystem. This is a classic approach from the startup world: fail fast, fail cheap.
| Criterion | Full development immediately | MVP approach |
|---|---|---|
| Time to launch | 6–12 months or more | 1–3 months |
| Initial costs | Maximum, entire budget upfront | Minimal, only for the core |
| Risk of failure | High (no feedback) | Reduced (hypothesis is tested) |
| Flexibility | Low (hard to change architecture) | High (can change direction) |
| Team focus | Scattered across many tasks | Focused on one goal |
Which features are best to postpone to the second stage?
The first thing to postpone is complex integrations with external systems that are not critical for the main scenario. For example, if you are building a CRM for small businesses, integration with 1C or accounting software may not be needed for the first customers. They can simply export data manually or use Excel. Integration can be added once it becomes clear that the customer base has grown and manual work has become a bottleneck.
Second—advanced analytics and reporting. At the start, it is important to know how many users visited and how many paid. Complex dashboards with sales forecasting and audience segmentation are needed when you already have statistics from several months. Third—multilingual support and adaptation for different regions. If you are testing the product in Almaty, you do not need an interface in Kazakh and English if your audience speaks Russian. Fourth—complex access rights systems. If the company has 5–10 employees, you can manage with simple 'admin' and 'user' roles, building a detailed hierarchy of permissions later.
How does working on an MVP go in a studio?
The process starts with analyzing the task. We do not jump straight into coding. First, there is a meeting where we determine what business problem you are solving and exactly how you plan to do it. At this stage, we help cut out the unnecessary. Often, clients come with ideas that seem important to them but do not actually provide value to the end user. We shift the conversation from the language of 'I want this button' to the language of 'what task does the user solve'.
Next comes design. We create a prototype—a clickable mockup that shows the workflow logic. This allows you to approve the structure before writing code. If something is wrong, fixing a mockup is cheaper than fixing code. After the prototype is approved, development begins in iterations. We show progress every 1–2 weeks. You see how the product is being built and can make adjustments. At the end, you receive a working product that can be published in the App Store, Google Play, or deployed on the internet.
When is an MVP not needed?
An MVP is not a universal pill. There are situations where it is inappropriate. The first is when the product does not carry an innovative load. If you are building a corporate brochure site or a product catalog with a known structure, there is no hypothesis to test. You know the site must work, be beautiful, and be fast. In this case, it is better to build a full site immediately to avoid reworking it later. The cost of a corporate site in Kazakhstan starts from 400,000 ₸, and this amount already implies a high-quality, finished product.
The second situation is when you are working in a regulated industry where security and functionality requirements are strictly defined by law. For example, banking apps or systems for government agencies. There, you cannot 'test a hypothesis' on a subset of features because the system must comply with standards from day one. In such cases, an MVP may not be suitable, and full development with compliance of all regulations is needed. However, even in these cases, you can break the project into stages, but each stage must be secure and functional within the law.
If you are unsure whether you need an MVP, look at the article 'How Development Works: From the First Call to Publication'. It describes in detail the stages where we help clients define the scope of work and avoid overpaying for unnecessary features. It is also useful to read 'How Much Does Mobile App Development Cost in Kazakhstan' to understand how the scope of functionality affects the final estimate.