Building your MVP App

Lollipop Media — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 21:47:42 +0000

We love working with startups, we’ve seen them come to us a varied stages of idea development and continue with varied range of success.
One of the common behaviours we see is the temptation to develop as much as possible before showing the world and getting that valuable albeit daunting feedback on your precious idea.

This is quite understandable, good founders are very passionate about their idea and will have probably formed a perfectly vivid view of what their product will do and how it will handle even the most obscure scenarios.

Even before you get to the point of developing your app, avoiding this temptation is very important as it helps you explain to others and even clarify to yourselves what the core problem you’re trying to solve.

At such a crucial point in your business it’s important not to burning up time and money developing things that will not make a huge difference in terms of the overall business. Challenge every feature as an opportunity cost and aim for the smallest thing that you can build that delivers maximum customer value and insights.

Being frugal during this decision making can put you in a much better position:

You can test your idea and gain feedback from customers without needing massive amounts of resource.
You give your idea a chance to evolve along the way by getting feedback as early as possible.
You can get your development team concentrating on these core features and really nailing them.
That time saved not dwelling on less important features could mean you beat your competitor to market.

With these benefits in mind, here are some high level steps to planning out your
MVP.

Step 1 — define your business

Answer, in simple terms “What does your project do, and how will it benefit me?”. Not only is it good to nail a good elevator pitch for talking investors and potential customers, clarifying your USP internally is a good start to focusing your MVP.
Define what would make this project a success, what milestones are you looking to achieve during the initial stages of development ? Questions like this could help shape what would be needed for an initial app build, is it a throwaway prototype to impress an investor or is it to go to market quickly with the intention to scale.

Step 2 — define your audience

Who are the people that would use your product, what would be a typical user journey?
How can you market to these people, are there any free ways to get their attention?
Talk to them, ask what they think of your idea before it’s built — it might help you better define the problem you’re trying to solve.

Step 3— define what you need to build

Using the information that you’ve attained decide what features you need in your app to have.
List out of features and identify which of those are absolutely necessary for MVP, breaking features down into small chunks and evaluating their cost/benefit can often help with this.
Split out these features into individual sprints of work, do this in an order that gets you and beta users trying out end to end user journeys as quickly as possible.

Choose the right tools to do it.

Since being early adopters of React Native, of the most noticeable characteristics we’ve found other frameworks that come and go is it’s ability to have a great affect on getting your idea to market quicker and cheaper than other alternatives without sacrificing quality. A lot of tech savvy entrepreneurs have clocked onto this and often demand their app be built with this technology.

At Lollipop Media we’ve our fair share of MVP apps. We've even taken a few a bit further, check out some of our most recent apps on our site here: www.lollipop.media/work.

About Lollipop Media

Lollipop Media are a digital agency, based in London. We bring your ideas to life using our extensive experience working with large companies as well as start-ups. We design the perfect user experience for your target audience and get your product to market on any platform.

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The benefits of building your app with React Native

Lollipop Media — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 20:03:40 +0000

At Lollipop Media, we love React Native. We recently
built a mobile app for AccaApp, a new way of social
betting, using React Native.

Like most apps these days, the guys at AccaApp wanted to
build for both iOS and Android, and release simultaneously.
We’ve been using
React Native for years now, so we felt this was perfect for them.

We could build the app once, and share the codebase across iOS and Android.

So, What is React-Native?

React Native is a programming
language that allows developers to build cross-platform mobile apps using
JavaScript. With React Native you develop an app once and deploy it on both iOS
and Android (and maybe Windows Phone). Although the apps are written in
JavaScript, the apps use the native features of your device, and truly feel
native. This is done by bridging these features to JavaScript.

Huge companies are getting behind React Native

React Native is developed by Facebook and used by massive enterprise
companies such as
Instagram, Bloomberg, Wix, Airbnb, Tesla and Uber. With a large community behind
React Native the platform is evolving every day.

What are the benefits to me?

There are lots of benefits to using React Native, but here are our favourites.

1. Release Simultaneously

Where ‘normal’ development of an app you need to have two separate code bases.
You develop one iOS app (Swift) and a separate Android app (Java).

React-Native enables developers to work from one codebase while developing for
both the iOS and Android platform at the same time, so there’s no catchup
between each app.

2. It’s fast

Because React Native shares a common code base between both apps, you can
develop fast.
Some of our internal apps have been built in just 7 hours.
That’s taking an app from design to release, in 7 hours, so you save shed loads
of time (and money).

3. You only need Javascript developers

Whether you’re building in-house or with an Agency (like
us), you only need to find one type of developer.
Most Front-end web developers are skilled in JavaScript and therefore able to
work on the apps with React Native, and then there’s the bonus that they can
maintain your website.
This is very cost-effective for your business.

4. Live Updates

If you’re like us, you hate those notifications telling you how many updates you
have to download.With React Native, it is possible to do live updates to your
app without going through the App Store.

Since the bulk of the app is in JavaScript, you can push updates just using a
network connection. There are already services to help with this like
AppHub or Microsoft’s
CodePush. As long as your app is aware
of what version it is running and knows how to check the server for a newer
version, you can publish updates to your app whenever you like.

Looking to build your own App?

At Lollipop Media we’ve built hundreds of React Native
apps. Check out some of our most recent apps on out site here:
www.lollipop.media/work.

About Lollipop Media

Lollipop Media are a digital agency, based in London.

We bring your ideas to life using our extensive experience working with
large companies as well as start-ups. We design the perfect user experience for
your target audience and get your product to market on any platform.

DEV Community: Lollipop Media

Building your MVP App

Step 1 — define your business

Step 2 — define your audience

Step 3— define what you need to build

Choose the right tools to do it.

About Lollipop Media

The benefits of building your app with React Native

So, What is React-Native?

What are the benefits to me?

1. Release Simultaneously

2. It’s fast

3. You only need Javascript developers

4. Live Updates

Looking to build your own App?

About Lollipop Media