Top SaaS MVP Development Mistakes to Avoid

Developing powerful digital products for today’s market takes time, commitment, and attention to detail. Unfortunately, the first of these three factors is often in relatively short supply. Markets move fast and competitors are constantly convincing new customers to do business with them. Confronting this dilemma comes down to thinking out of the box a bit and bringing value to customers more quickly than traditional methods might have allowed. Enter MVP development!

What is MVP development?

Minimum viable product or “MVP” development centers on the creation of a streamlined digital product designed to immediately capture consumer interest and generate profits. Unlike traditional development strategies, MVP development does not regard the first product as perfect upon release. In fact, all possible assumptions about a product’s design are minimized through this approach. Instead, a product with just the features needed to get positive results is put together and further enhanced over time.

Why does MVP development matter?

The main benefits of MVP development are the time and cost savings it can bring, but the process helps in many more ways. Here are a few of the main reasons devs and team leaders everywhere should consider MVP development:

• An MVP makes it possible for your team to gauge user interest long before finishing a full-featured product build.
• MVPs shorten initial development time (and spend) considerably.
• Your MVP can pull in profits from the moment it is first launched.

Of course, the benefits listed above are all but unreachable if you fall into any of the pitfalls that plague so many dev teams. Mistakes made while fleshing out an MVP can have catastrophic consequences on your business’s survival. You should first learn what to avoid while working on your MVP before you start putting it together.

MVP development mistakes to avoid

Each of the mistakes mentioned below carries the potential to completely derail your MVP development efforts. Thankfully, these mistakes are fairly easy to avoid once you know what they are.

1. Too many features

Clarity and focus are critical when you set about developing an MVP. A lack of clarity on what your product actually needs to do and who it’s meant to appeal to can quickly cause your team to overextend. This translates directly to overspending and taking much longer to complete initial development. A lack of focus on your product’s core features can also fluff up its scope, leading to feature inclusions that simply don’t matter and may even make it less attractive to your intended audience.

When you include too many features, you deviate from the must-haves. Ideally, an MVP team should follow the MosCoW prioritization method. Here’s how it works:

• M: Must-Have
• S: Should-Have
• C: Could-Have
• W: Won’t-Have

For MVP, including the must-have features is enough. However, many companies make the error of including could-have and should-have features too.

Many new users mainly focus on the MVP’s performance. But when companies focus on other features, such as visual design, they often do it at the cost of performance. As a result, the MVP does not deliver the results users want.

2. Undefined goals

One of the most common MVP mistakes is a lack of clarity in project goals. Without clear goals, it’s challenging to determine which functionalities and features you need to add to your MVP.

Undefined goals also result in scope creep. Since the plans are ambiguous, there’s a risk of adding unnecessary features in the MVP.

Defining your product goals and objectives is a foolproof way to avoid scope creep. When everyone in the development team follows the same interpretation, they can prevent design and functionality inconsistencies.

Organizing a scoping workshop is a great way to ensure everyone is on the same page. It’s a full-day session in which all parties sit together to discuss the project vision and details.

3. Poor project management

Poor project management results in missed deadlines and delays in delivering the minimum viable product. But what counts as poor project management? Some common issues include:

• Ineffective planning
• Inadequate resources
• Poor scheduling
• Inefficient resource use
• Missed project milestones

Missed timelines also lead to cost overruns, which can further strain the project financially. It may also jeopardize project viability.

Ineffective project management also becomes the root cause of team disengagement. When roles and responsibilities are not adequately designed, and there needs to be more support and guidance from managers, a lack of motivation creeps in.

4. Limited budget

Limited financial resources also create hurdles in app development, leading to compromised features and quality. Here are some components you should include in your budget:

• Development Costs: These include costs like bug fixing, coding, and testing. You may have to hire developers or work with a development agency.
• Infrastructure Costs: You’ll have to spend money on cloud services like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Consider the additional costs of server capacity, bandwidth, and storage.
• Technology and Tools: Factor in the costs of third-party frameworks, tools, and libraries you’ll need for development. You may also have to spend money on payment gateways and analytics platforms. Don’t forget about customer support tools.
• User Experience/Design: It’s also important to allocate some of your budgets to user experience and design. Hire a UX specialist or designer for the job.

Additionally, allocate the budget to marketing, promotion, legal and compliance, contingency, support, and maintenance.

5. Hiring the wrong team

One of the overlooked MVP development mistakes is having the wrong team onboard. Your team forms the backbone of the development process. So, it must be competent, experienced, and have the proper skill set.

Make sure your team has the right mix of non-tech and tech professionals. These include product managers, marketers, project managers, designers, and developers.

Plus, the team should have a lean structure for Agile development.

A competent team and cohesive structure is necessary to ensure timely development, good quality product, and increased costs. Moreover, the team needs to understand your business vision and objectives to meet your target audience’s needs.

When preventing MVP mistakes, make hiring the right software development company your priority. Make sure the development company has a decent record of delivering high-quality products within time.

It also helps to choose a company with a past record of creating MVPs in your industry and niche. Share your project objectives and visions with your partner to prevent ambiguity.

6. Inadequate infrastructure

When building an MVP, it’s important to have infrastructure elements such as:

• Cloud platforms, like AWS or Microsoft Azure
• Virtual machines or containers, like Azure Virtual Machine and Docker
• Database management systems, like Amazon RDS and MySQL
• Networking components, such as firewalls, domain name configuration, virtual networks, and load balancers
• Authentication mechanisms like Azure Active Directory
• Auto-scaling groups and load-balancing tools
• Monitoring and logging solutions like Azure Monitor and Amazon CloudWatch

Lack of adequate infrastructure leads to downtime, security issues, and poor performance. For example, your data could be vulnerable to malicious attacks if you do not have a reliable database management system.

Likewise, the absence of cloud-based services reduces security and scalability.

7. Scope creep

Scope creep means adding new features continuously to the initial project scope. In MVP development, the primary goal is to quickly create a minimal product version to get early validation and user feedback.

But scope creep prolongs this process, lengthening the time-to-market. Since the product doesn’t enter the market in due time, there’s a lag in feedback collection.

Scope creep also causes resource drain. When you expand the project scope without proper resource allocation, it can impact the budget and timeline. One way to speed up software development is to minimize or eliminate scope creep.

8. Technology limitations

Technology constraints limit your development team’s ability to build specific features, resulting in delays. For instance, SaaS products require technology stacks that handle large data volumes and user loads. But in the absence of this infrastructure and technology, it becomes difficult to accommodate a growing user base.

Also, users want your SaaS product to have excellent performance. But if the underlying technology is not up to par, the resulting performance will also suffer. Users will experience inefficient data processing and slow response times, resulting in negative user feedback.

Most importantly, if your product tech lacks robust integration capabilities, it will not be able to exchange data or connect with other platforms. That further limits an MVP’s performance and functionality.

9. Regulatory compliance

Regulatory compliance is a two-edged sword in the MVP development process. On the one hand, a lack of compliance results in legal consequences and reputational damage.

On the other hand, compliance adds more time and cost to your project. For instance, if you need to comply with HIPAA and GDPR, you must create security measures such as encryption and authentication procedures that must be met.

How do you ensure regulatory compliance without breaking the bank? There are two main options.

First, you can use a compliance-ready platform. For instance, you may use a cloud service that’s already compliant with your relevant framework.

Secondly, you can use open-source and accessible solutions. Also, hire experienced external consultants and IT teams that can help you stay compliant without overspending.

Lack of testing and quality assurance

Inefficient quality assurance and testing can be the most debilitating of all MVP creation pitfalls. Here are some problems lack of testing can cause:

• User Experience Issues: If you do not test the product properly, it may have performance, bugs, or usability issues. These problems result in poor user experience, driving away potential users.
• Functionality Gaps: Without proper testing, you won’t be able to identify functionality gaps in your product. For example, you may not realize the shortcomings in your data processing or other critical product operations.
• Security Vulnerabilities: Lack of quality assurance also increases the risk of security. Your product may be susceptible to unauthorized access, data breaches, attacks, etc. These incidents tarnish your reputation and lower product performance.

Not performing quality assurance also puts you in technical debt. It means that the issues that were not addressed in the past will become problems in the future.

Consequently, they introduce complexity to the product. They also increase project costs and may expose you to nasty surprises down the line.

10. Lack of user feedback

Not getting sufficient user feedback is one of the most common minimum viable product mistakes. User feedback can shape your product design, aligning it to user needs.

In the absence of proper user feedback, you end up with an inaccurate product-market fit. Instead of hearing what users are saying, you will tailor your product to your assumptions, which can be wrong.

Without user feedback, you also don’t know which features to prioritize. Suppose you’re creating an app for ride-hailing. You might focus on the user interface and look and feel, but if users are more interested in ride options, you’re wasting your time.

Lack of user feedback also gives you nothing to work with in terms of product improvements. If you don’t know what users are struggling with, how would you know what to change, add, or improve?

That’s why it’s essential to use user feedback to improve your product. You can leverage user feedback to:

• Optimize product functionality
• Improve customer retention
• Identify pain points and improve them
• Validate product-market fit
• Enhance customer engagement and satisfaction
• Allow iterative product development
• Address user requirements

11. Rigidity with your idea

Another MVP development mistake you need to keep in mind is obsessing too much over your idea. Let’s say you’re hell-bent on perfecting your vision. You think your idea is perfect.

You may over-engineer and over-feature your idea, creating an over-expensive product. But what if the consumers want something different? After all, who are you creating the product for?

If the end user is not happy with it, there’s no point in creating even the ‘best’ MVP per your standard. So, being rigid with your idea is not the right approach.

Instead, be ready to steer from pre-determined plans and adapt to the feedback. It will help you cater your product to the end user’s needs.

Avoiding these MVP mistakes is critical to ensuring MVP creation within time, budget, and in accordance with user feedback.

12. Lack of prototyping

Many teams make the mistake of assuming minimum viable products require no working prototypes before being pushed out to the public. Others travel even further in the wrong direction and assume the two concepts are interchangeable.

Unfortunately, this mistake can result in irreparable damage to your brand image if things go wrong with your initial build. Prototyping helps avoid this by emphasizing the actual viability of your MVP before it reaches the market.

13. Targeting the wrong user segment

There’s no use trying to sell a great product to a group of people who don’t want or need it. Instead of making this major mistake and jeopardizing your business model, you should first validate the market demand for your proposed product and proceed only if there’s enough demand for your product to thrive.

This involves interviewing your target customers and carefully analyzing the niche for its potential before putting any code together.

14. Choosing an unsustainable business model

Even a magnificent MVP targeting the perfect audience will produce poor profits if your business model just doesn’t make sense. Pricing can be anything from too high to too inflexible—the result remains the same: poor sales, low profits, and underperformance at market.

Your product might benefit from a subscription-based pricing model or tiered offerings for different types of customers. Choosing the model that can make your product a success involves learning as much as possible about potential customers and catering to their actual interests.

15. Waiting too long or “until it’s perfect”

It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of perfectionism. Plucking out potential problems before you drop your fledgling product out of the nest may seem like the right thing to do, but there is such a thing as doing too much too soon.

Working under the assumption that you can create a perfect product right out of the gate is a recipe for disappointment and disaster, neither of which are particularly appetizing.

Without actual feedback from living, breathing customers, your assumptions are little more than educated guesses, and your “perfect” product (should you ever succeed in completing it) could prove to be significantly more flawed than you could ever have foreseen.

Planning to make mistakes and adjust iteratively to feedback is a much more practical approach to development than pushing for perfection from the start.

Simplify MVP development

MVP development involves many moving parts, but it doesn’t need to be a slog from start to finish. Your MVP development process can go as smoothly as you are willing to allow it to, especially when you have the right guidance to get you from concept to launch.

With years of experience under our belt, we’ve become experts in SaaS product development. We understand the challenges and have crafted a unique, risk-managed methodology to build successful MVPs.

Ready to put your idea in the hands of the experts? Visit our MVP Development Service page, and see why so many trust us with their vision.