How do you choose an MVP company for your startup?
What should I consider while choosing an MVP development company for my MVP project, except validate my idea on the market, gather feedback from my target audience and adjust product to achieve the best product-market fit?
Has anyone had a good experience working with https://danavero.com/?
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Things you should consider if you are building your MVP with a Product Development Co.
➜ Core-values - Trust? Transparency? Integrity?
➜ Get recommendation from their existing customers or talk to them (also see if the company is open to connect you with their existing/past customers)
➜ Their PMs and skill-set, request for a free session / strategy consulting
➜ UI / UX Skill-sets
➜ Technical Skills - MERN/MEAN/DevOps? If you are looking for a Mobile, then Native/React-Native or Cross Platform Development
➜ Timezone - Very important thing - honestly, it does not matter, if you and your partner company are on the same page, but moving forward, when it comes to support, ask them how they can provide you with customer support (in case you are in EST, they are in Europe and you find a issue around late in the evening?)
➜ Their Ability to Build Scalable products
➜ Any experience raising funds? or at least discussion etc.,
➜ Rates - What are the rates?
➜ Idea Budget - Ideally, you should invest around $30k to $60k in building your first MVP for Web-App and Mobile-App and not more than that. This investment should last for the next 12 months, and based on the traction, you can revise the road-map and so on!
In my opinion, an agency to develop your company makes sense if it's project based, as in, you expect a burst of development and then nothing.
If you expect to continuously iterate, I think hiring your own developer(s) is more cost effective. If you don't think you can do that yourself, I think finding a CTO (or fractional CTO) might be the way to go. If you want, I'm happy to jump on a call and discuss a bit more (disclaimer: I'm considering offering this kid of CTO services).
You need to look for a partner who specializes in agile MVP development. Someone who has a track record of taking ideas and building successful products in 3-4 development iterations.
Make sure that there is no compromise on the quality of the product they build. MVP may be a minimal version of your product, but it can’t have bugs and issues. The minimal version needs to work very well. Make sure the partner is able to deliver a bug-free application without charging you for time and material to fix those bugs.
If you are considering building an MVP, check out Creative Chaos. They are supporting founders by financing the MVP development as well, with a forgivable loan of $150,000. https://creativechaos.co/mvp/
First of all...MVP means you're at the very beginning and , I suppose, don't have a lot of money. Maybe try to search for help on reddit or smth like that. Or try talking to freelancers on Upwork or Fiverr.
If you are sure about engaging a development company, pay attention to:
-Adequate technical expertise
For successful project delivery, I’d recommend that you search for a software development company with technical expertise in creating and launching enterprise solutions with latest technologies and within diverse deployment ecosystems.
-Meeting Cybersecurity & Legal Requirements
It is worth checking whether a company has worked with projects from highly regulated industries and knows about their standards and security certificates.
-Expertise in required domain
With the huge caveat that I have no idea what you are working on:
I would argue that having to outsource the development by definition means it is not the minimum viable product. You might pay someone a lot of money to build something that no one wants.
What's stopping you from validating the idea yourself without outsourcing?
Core values
Find someone you can work with. Find someone you can joke with. Find someone you can trust. You are going to be spending a lot of time talking back and forth about stuff you haven't experienced before and decisions might need to be made quickly.
If you're roughly on the same wavelength in terms of what a good product is, how a business should be run, how other people should be treated, you'll save yourself a lot of headaches and arguments.
Communication skills
You are diving into a new area in which you have very little expertise, so you need someone who can explain things to you, guide you through their decision process. Their ability to communicate clearly and effectively is very important and is closely tied to the core values above.
Your partner is most likely not going to be located physically next to you, probably not in the same city, and probably not even in the same time zone. Written, asynchronous communication is going to be the name of the game, so you both need to be able to write with empathy and clarity.
## Ability to challenge you
Building an MVP - or any bootstrapped software business - is the art of doing less. Unfortunately the natural inclination of most product people is to do more. You need someone who is able to challenge your assumptions and make sure stuff is really, actually necessary. "Why" and "no" are imperative words, and you should want to hear them from your technical partner.
Well-rounded-ness
At the start of any business each person is going to be wearing way more than one hat, solving problems in many different categories. Whoever you choose needs to be able to cope with many different challenges, ranging from UI and UX decisions over programming to server hosting to evaluating external platforms and fielding technical customer questions.
You want jack of all trades that does many things well over a specialist that does one thing perfectly.
Technical ability
While it is naturally necessary for the partner to be able to deliver, this is likely to be the least relevant criteria. As long as they can move things along, you'll be able to get off the ground - remember, this is only an MVP, it's ultimately going to be tossed away or replaced anyways.
Generally speaking, if they have a track record of building and delivering stuff, that's good enough. Do pay attention to stuff they have done themselves, though, and not only as part of larger teams.
Hi there,
We might be able to help you out with no-code development. I've attached some of our work below for your reference.
https://bubble.io/contributor/no-code-venture-1489829298088x226903362898156030
Hello,
Let me know when can we talk. I am an IT service company specializing in web and mobile applications.
Thanks
Vimal
Skype - only.vimal
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
I mean, some of these points are valid, but I wouldn't take a deal where I only get stock if the project is successful. Pivots happen, and code rarely gets completely thrown away. Only fools will accept zero skin in the game until it hits "success"
This topic was added to 'Looking to Partner Up'. I think that's the reason for making the statements.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.