The Importance of Scalability in Minimum Viable Products

Validating a business model is more important than ever for startups in today’s mobile app marketplace. Over a thousand apps are added to the Apple App Store alone every day, meaning stiff competition for even the most cutting-edge concepts. iPhone app developers have to remain flexible and nimble as they build out a minimum viable product (MVP), outpacing existing competition as well as imitators.

While lowering the time to market can translate to sacrifices on the design side, it should never translate to sacrifices in scalability. Iffy UX is fixable in some cases, but messy databases and hacky basic value propositions are usually irreparable. Look at the launch trajectory of pretty much any successful startup launched in the past two years and you’re likely to a minimal, laser-focussed product slowly turn into a multi-featured national offering. London iPhone app development companies like GoCardless, for example, demonstrate how to pair a unique MVP value proposition (online debit payments) with a staged growth plan (starting small and local, then building out).

Luckily, the current development ecosystem offers iPhone app developers a staggering amount of tools to accelerate growth and manage traditionally time-consuming elements like databases. Leveraging cloud resources such as Amazon DynamaoDB can offset time spent on traditional self-managed NoSQL databases, freeing up time to spend on what matters: fine-tuning the core product. If it gains traction, scalability is built in — if not, hundreds of back-end development hours have already been saved, making it a less risky move for the iPhone app developer.

Another strategy iPhone app developers should consider is launching their MVP locally, validating the initial concept on the AWS Free Tier and moving up to a paid option only if user validation supports it. With 200 million requests monthly included, this strategy stands to save time-strapped iPhone app developers the overhead of self-managing a NoSQL database without sacrificing scalability. Re-architecture can spell disaster for a rapidly growing userbase, so it’s important that requests are granted quickly at all growth stages. After all, studies show that wait times over a minute are virtually guaranteed to garner bad reviews for your app.