How We Helped Our Partner Build MVPs for Two Startups

Two years ago, we got an interesting request from our partner to help him with two startups implementation.

Who is the Partner?

Abdo Riani is the founder and CEO of AspireIT, a startup development company that helps entrepreneurs take ideas to market and profitability.

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Abdo writes for major publications like Entrepreneur and Forbes. He is a senior contributor at Forbes where he shares tips, insights and strategies about launching startups.

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Find more information about Abdo and AspireIT at AbdoRiani.com

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What were the business goals?

Two of the startups he was working on showed promise through the initial validation period. Next, his goal was to:

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• Find a reliable technical partner that can take over that part ofthe business
• Build good quality MVPs and get to the market quickly
• Quantitatively test the assumptions and ideas with the realusers
• Stay within the budget and meet the deadlines

What kind of challenges they faced?

Abdo has been involved in the launch of several startups throughout his career as a startup founder and as a partner to several early-stage startups. During this period, he got to hire and work with several teams all over the world. Some of the challenges he faced with his previous hires include:

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• Failed to meet agreed expectations
• Lacked honesty and clarity
• Required a lot of oversight, control, and management
• Did not have the knowledge and experience they initially sold

What type of products did they need?

Two products should have been developed from scratch:

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• Web application for on-demand goods delivery
• Mobile application for sharing economy (iOS and Android)

A few words about us…

We are Diversido (https://diversido.io/) - web and mobile development company from Ukraine with strong experience in Healthcare and Education solutions. Communication, responsibility, honesty, and transparency are our key values, that allow us to successfully deliver products since 2013.

Applied approach and solution

• As both clients needed to know budgets in advance, to plan their resources, we chose the fixed-price approach for the MVPs
• We chose Xamarin for mobile applications, as this framework allows to save up to 40% of development time due to business logic code re-use having the native user experience
• We used Ruby on Rails as the backend technology, making it possible to quickly build the elegant solution and has a good admin console from the box
• For the front-end we chose ReactJS as robust and effective technology, allowing us to create a responsive web application with the set of reusable components
• We applied Agile best practices in the work process, like daily meetings, regular status updates, control of the overall progress, continuous delivery and integration

Work process in details

Step 1 - Elaboration Phase

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• Devil is in details, so it is very important for the fixed price projects to understand the requirements and expectations indetail, to make sure we and the clients are on the same page. During the Elaboration Phase, we communicated a lot with the client, clarifying the scope to be done, edge cases, and different scenarios, doing all the needed technical investigations, creating the wireframes of the final product, mapping all the features to the screens.

Step 2 - UI/UX Design

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• Based on the wireframes, our designer created the UI mockups, having the usability in mind, creating every screen as it was going to look in the final product
• It allowed us to provide the accurate time and effort estimations of work to be done and split the full scope into intermediate deliverables and milestones.

Step 3 - Continuous development and delivery

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• Starting with the minimum functionality, Milestone 1 deliverable swas the working system, that each consequential milestone added the new functionality to. So, it was possible to release it at any time.
• We did QA together with the development, testing on the Development and Staging environments.

Step 4 - Release to Production

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• After all planned MVPs scope was completed and approved by clients, we helped to
  • Setup Production environments and deploy web applications to it
  • Prepare mobile application to release to AppStore and GooglePlay and publish them

Step 5 - Support

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• After release, we worked closely with the clients to address the early users’ feedback, fix any issues that appear, implement new features that were needed, answer the questions, and help with other tasks.
• Each milestone was also reviewed and approved by the clients, all feedbacks were addressed.

Results

• Both applications were released in time - it took 4 months to complete the first MVP and 6 - the second one.
• Clients worked on other aspects of the business, not overseeing the development process
• One client’s company later merged with an indirect competitor
• Another one is still at the market and self-sustaining
• Both companies attracted thousands of subscribers
• Both products generated revenue which is a great accomplishment considering that most startups fail

What next?

Why don’t we have a quick call, so I could share with you the common mistakes to avoid in building MVPs? I promise not to sell you anything :)

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You can book a meeting with me via my calendar below!‍

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