Market fit is a key aspect that startups and fast-growing organizations should consider while launching their products. When operating with limited budgets and resources, several companies try and test their apps by developing Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). The MVP-first approach allows you to experiment and iterate, gather user intelligence and feedback, focus on the core, perform market validation, and either create or fail fast without suffering costly setbacks.

Even the leading IT behemoths like Facebook and Amazon were launched as MVPs once. Facebook was founded as a social media website to connect the students at Harvard, while Amazon started as an online book-selling platform. It is incredible how these brands transformed from MVPs to million-dollar conglomerates.

The message is clear. When your MVP gets recognized and garners traction, you have a business opportunity to pursue. You will have to scale your MVP to a full-fledged product to realize this. Pressure from the topline forces your developers to opt for quick remedies such as using hardware to scale the application. But such solutions aren’t for the long term.

To successfully extend your application beyond the MVP stage, you need to adopt scalable MVPs and techniques.

Benefits of Scalable MVPs and Techniques

Building a minimal MVP will result in costly app rewrites if your MVP garners traction. Likewise, you cannot make an app that supports millions of users when you first develop your MVP. The best choice is to take a middle-of-the-road approach that allows developers to save their efforts and leave the door open for faster scalability. Listed below are the top benefits of scalable MVPs:

Horizontal Scalability

With a scalable MVP, you can enjoy the benefits of horizontal scaling. Horizontal scaling provides immense elasticity, enabling development teams to add resources on demand. It allows developers to manage server loads more economically and efficiently. Leading orchestration service providers such as Google and Amazon offer Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) software to build, host, and scale your applications on their infrastructure. For instance, Amazon Beanstalk can automatically handle capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring, with minimal human intervention. Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that allows you to deploy, manage, and scale container apps with automated node provisioning, patching, and updating.

NoSQL Database

The database used to build your MVP or app will highly influence your ability to scale out. Use a NoSQL database such as MongoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, or AWS DynamoDB to scale your app to a growing user base. NoSQL databases can handle a large number of requests simultaneously, especially for multi-tenant applications.

Cloud Power

Cloud widens your scope to experiment. Developers can focus on improving your MVP’s core features, while cloud services take care of capacity planning, load balancing, and provisioning. Choose your cloud provider at the stage of MVP development itself to conveniently scale your MVP solution to a full-scale product. Before choosing a cloud provider, analyze the storage terms, pricing, data security, tools and frameworks, and other computing specifics. Cloud lets you make meaningful enhancements to your MVP, reduce the risk of product failure, and enable faster experimentation cycles.

Minimal Re-architecting

Re-architecting is inevitable when your MVP scales. Scalable MVPs are built on the same building blocks that make your final product, following the same line of logic. Your product can retain its core functionality and deliver an enhanced user experience with minimal modifications. For instance, an MVP originally written in PhoneGap or Cordova can seamlessly work in native OS only when rewritten in native iOS and Android. Choosing the right web or mobile app development platform during the MVP stage will reduce your re-architecting efforts and increase your speed-to-market.

Differentiate with a USP

Instead of focusing on multiple functionalities that cater to a broader market early on, you can set a standard by creating specialized MVPs for specific industries. As your product scales, you can develop new and relevant use cases for multiple industries.

Testing Strategy

YOUR MVP’S independent UAT (User Acceptance Testing) helps uncover more bugs and provides more value for your developers. Scalable MVPs let you perform unit testing to ensure that your MVP’s code is correctly refactored. Hiring a team with the right experience in writing unit tests can help you scale out faster and hit the market successfully.

Setting up an experienced MVP team with highly skilled developers, project managers, business analysts, quality assurance specialists, designers, and other talented professionals is arduous. Travanleo makes it a breeze for you by identifying your business challenges and simplifying the technical information overload.

Do you want to know how we help businesses scale their MVPs? Get in touch with us.