How We Helped Two Startups Build MVPs and Get to Market in No Time

A while ago, our team received an interesting offer — to help our partner with two startups and their implementation.

Who Is the Partner We’re Talking About?

AspireIT focuses on startup development. In other words, it helps entrepreneurs market their ideas and turn them into a profit.

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Abdo Riani is the company’s founder and a writer for reputable magazines such as Forbes and Entrepreneur. His articles mainly cover tips, strategies, and insights related to launching startups.

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To learn more about Abdo Riani and AspireIT, check his official site — AbdoRiani.com.

What Were Our Business Goals?

During the validation period, both startups that Abdo was working with turned out to be very promising. Their main goals were:

To find a reliable partner who would focus on the tech side of the business
To develop a high-quality MVP and enter the market as soon as possible
To test all assumptions and ideas quantitatively with real users
To do it all within the budget limits and meet all the deadlines

The Challenges Along the Way

Abdo Riani has had an opportunity to launch several startups himself and work as a partner to numerous early-stage startups. He gained experience by working with several teams around the globe and faced certain challenges from time to time. The challenges of working with outsourcing teams include:

Not being able to meet the expectations
The lack of clarity and honesty
Additional management, control, and oversight
Insufficient knowledge and experience of teams

What Types of Products Did They Require?

Web apps for the delivery of on-demand goods
Mobile apps for economy sharing (iOS and Android)

Both clients planned their budgets in advance, so we decided to go with the fixed-price MVP development approach.
The two teams worked on two different projects, and we started developing their respective products at the same time.
Our framework of choice for mobile apps was Xamarin. It allowed us to save up to 40% of the development time due to the business logic code reuse with keeping native user experience.
Our backend technology was Ruby on Rails. It has a great admin console out of the box and helped us build elegant solutions in no time.
The frontend technology we decided to go with was ReactJS. It is robust and effective, making it possible to create a responsive web app along with several reusable components.
All work processes were conducted with the best Agile practices in mind. We had daily meetings, regular updates, control of the progress, and continuous delivery & integration.

The Work Process Explained Step-by-Step

Step 1 — The Elaboration Phase

Fixed-price projects require paying additional attention to detail to make sure that both sides are on the same page. The elaboration phase mainly involved communicating with the client in order to clarify the scope of work to be done. We went through various scenarios and conducted a technical investigation to create the final product’s wireframes, with all features mapped to the screens.

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By doing this, we were able to make time and effort estimation as accurate as possible. Moreover, we split the work into various milestones and intermediate deliverables.

Step 2 — Designing UI/UX

Our designer studied the wireframe and came up with UI mockups, paying close attention to usability and creating every single screen as it would look in the final product.

Step 3 — Continuous Development & Delivery

Building a minimum viable product (MVP) means creating a product with basic functionality. This was the first milestone for us. It had a working system, and we were adding additional features with every new milestone. Simply put, the product was ready for release at any time.

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We performed QA along with the development as we tested on the Development and Staging environments.

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It goes without saying that we reported on each milestone to our clients who reviewed and approved them, providing adequate feedback that we would address.

Step 4 — Release to Production

As soon as our clients approved the planned MVP scope, we assisted them with:

Setting up production environments and deploying web apps to them
Preparing mobile apps for publishing on AppStore and Google Play

Step 5 — Support

After the product was released, we joined forces with our clients once again to help them address the feedback from early adopters. Moreover, we helped them fix any additional issues and implement new features into their product. Finally, we answered all their questions and assisted them with several other tasks.

The Results

Both apps were launched in time. It took four months for one and six for the other app.
Clients had the freedom to focus on other aspects of their respective businesses, leaving the development process to us.
One of the clients merged with an indirect competitor later on.
The other client is still active on the market and is self-sustaining.
Both companies gained thousands of active subscribers.
Both products resulted in revenue, which is a huge accomplishment if we take into account that most startups fail to reach that achievement.

Feedback from Our Partner

What Now?

Let’s chat! We’d like to meet you and point out some of the common mistakes you should be aware of when building an MVP. If it sounds interesting, drop us a line at contact@diversido.io!

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