Software Development With Limited Budget: The Way to Do It Right

Everyone who wants to develop software dreams that their product is versatile and impresses the audience with its abundance of features. Such thoughts are at the heart of the myth that software development requires huge funds and is the prerogative of technology companies and startups noticed by a rich investor. In reality, both medium and small businesses can afford to create successful applications on a relatively modest budget.

You can achieve this by developing a project incrementally. Instead of designing a system for years to come, you can make a practical solution that will gain a target audience. Think about it, the magic of Facebook was precisely to attract billions of users, and scaling the system is the easy part. Anyway, today let's talk about creating an MVP and why it's your best option on a small budget.

What is an MVP and why do you need one?

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a pilot version of an application. It's needed to understand how the audience perceives a product or service, with minimal cost to create. Everything there will work strictly for the product's business purpose. At the MVP stage, the product has users who can praise it or strongly criticize it, but still use it, thereby confirming the need that the product solves.
Thus, instead of hiring a whole team, you can hire just one developer, saving significantly on budget. After all, according to a study, out of 3,200 fast-growing Internet startups, 74% failed because they scaled prematurely.

So, why do you need an MVP:

• To see if potential users need your product
• To define your target audience in a more focused way
• To collect feedback, evaluate, and properly prioritize the need for improvement
• To understand the best direction for further development after all sorts of iterations
• Attract the first users of the product and monetize it
• Reduce time and cost of development by eliminating unnecessary features at the development stage

In order for the MVP to show the real picture, you need the right approach to its development. You must agree that a "raw" product created in a hurry hardly allows you to confirm a hypothesis about its demand. But on the other hand, you should create MVP as quickly as possible, with the minimum of money spent and it should include only the most key functions. It's the user demand which you want to check.

Where to start?

The first thing you need to determine before developing your MVP is what tools, features, and functionality will be key to your product. For example, if you are creating a system of remote learning, the key functionality will be a designer of courses, tests, polls, the ability to check the homework and the final assessment of the student, downloading notes and videos. And such tools as gamification, conversational simulators, the ability to customize classrooms, additional roles in the system, can be "completed" later when potential customers begin to test the system and give feedback.

Chasing the ideal and improving the product can be endless, and the Pareto rule is still relevant here. 80% of your customers are likely to use only 20% of the functionality. They may be satisfied with what they have or may need something completely different from what you have staked on. So it's important to focus on those 20% features.

The MVP strategy is appropriate when you need to release the application in time, understand that people will use it, and test all the hypotheses you formulated during the design phase. By choosing it, you won't spend money on a product that your audience isn't interested in. And if there is interest, you can develop the app further.

The first-time businessmen faced with the task of creating a website or app to promote their business usually get confused. Who do I choose for the production of the site, and most importantly, by what criteria? The budget is strict, the service is complicated, the number of development companies is high, the price of the same request may offer both four and six figures. Add here terms ranging from a few days to a couple of months. What should I do?

Luckily for you, there are companies that provide delivery services for companies all over the world, including in the United States. For example, if you contact Dallas-based UNITEDCODE, you will immediately have access to a lot of developers from Eastern Europe. In doing so, you will be matched with the right team or developer that fits your budget best. Contact us and we will show you how to use your budget efficiently for the development of your dream solution.