If you're an entrepreneur and want to avoid the fate of 90% of startups that fail in the first year after launching, an MVP is a key way to do so. When starting with an MVP, entrepreneurs can receive feedback fast and efficiently, before launching a fully fleshed product or service. This approach allows entrepreneurs to accurately determine their target audience and save significant money. But how can you test your business idea with a minimally viable product? 

After studying the materials below, you'll know exactly how to do this!

Reasons to start your product with an MVP

An MVP is an early version of your software house. It's the foundation on which you assemble your product. Starting with an MVP can be helpful in both the case of first-time startups that want to test out their business idea quickly or when it comes to mature companies who are looking for ways to launch new products to validate their business ideas fast.

Netflix is a great example of how an MVP helps validate a business idea. The company started as a DVD rental website that was designed to validate two hypotheses: 

People do not like late fees for video rentals and 

People will love selecting films to watch through a website while sitting at home and then getting the film(s) delivered by mail. 

Netflix started as an MVP in 1997, operating only in a few blocks. The MVP was successful and the business expanded to deliver films to almost 300,000 customers by 2000. 

Here are more ways that an MVP can help you optimize your startup:

It might take a lot of time and money to develop a product with all the features you want. It’s not always the best idea to have every desired feature in your product from day one because if it doesn’t perform well, there would be no users. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a huge asset when planning out the initial release of your product that allows for fewer resources needed at the onset including both time and money. Some other ways an MVP can reduce costs are:

Fewer Bugs. The smaller you make your MVP, the less chance there is for things to go wrong. This becomes very helpful when launching a product because if something does happen consumers will be willing to overlook it or tell you about bugs in hopes that it will be corrected by the time they reformulate their thoughts on your solution (aka product). 

Fast Customer Feedback. When starting up your business idea with an MVP, you can put out real scenarios and test which ideas interest potential customers most and why that is or isn't what people want to see added into the product before the official launch occurs.

Reduced expenditures. Early feedback allows you to quickly understand which features are in or out for your MVP to save money on the cost of unnecessary functionality that does not add value. 

Re-purposed expenses. Because an MVP is cheaper to produce than a fully functional product, much of the development expenses are not needed upfront but are instead divided throughout the deployment period - oftentimes replacing money received early on when funding was still low.

A recent report by CB Insights concludes that 42% of startup ventures fail because there is no market need, and some even go as far as saying as many as 90% of startups fail. An MVP (minimum viable product) can be a great way to test your business idea on the marketplace and find out what people want most. This approach allows you to: 

define your target audience and its problems more distinctly and come up with a superior solution 

work through different challenges along the way and think about how your marketing campaign will resonate with prospective clients. 

run a marketing campaign that’s catered to customer needs.

Looking for an ideal niche market can be increasingly important at earlier stages in your business life cycle.

After identifying your target audience and market niche for a product, it’s much easier to determine what features should be included in the final version of the product. By developing a minimum viable product, or MVP, one learns whether an idea has potential value for end-users. Such a tool helps you to find out if a problem exists and if your solution is something that would make a difference to them. It also allows you to get immediate feedback from your early users so that you can see which changes or additions need to be made before launching the final version of the product into the market. As such, you can identify which functionality is necessary and eliminate unnecessary features from being included in the final version of the product.

Many startups began their journey as a service or an idea that they intend to turn into a full-fledged business. Consider Instagram for instance. 

Instagram, the most recent social media sensation which was acquired by Mark Zuckerburg’s Facebook online empire for $1 Billion, is known to have been created with just one feature in mind: allowing its users to upload square-shaped photos with filters on them to colour correct and add a dramatic texture! The problem many startups face is how to build user adoption and keep this going. The best way oftentimes is through offering a “minimum viable product” - something anyone visiting the website could test out and get an idea if it works or not. This can be done by offering this software for free on sites such as Product Hunt (the recently launched new forum) or ProductHunt (the site dedicated solely to finding great products).

As technology developed and smartphones got bigger, Instagram adapted and changed the size of its app. In 2012 it was originally available only for the iPad, but in 2013 Android users could get it too. Later it went through a few more changes: videos of up to 15 seconds were added; private messages were possible, and the ability to take photos in vertical format (in their original quality) was introduced.

Engage investors in further development 

Investors are cautious when it comes to investing their funds in new startups. If they are persuaded, investors are usually ready to write a check only after the investor gets full assurance that the startup is viable. 

An MVP with constantly increasing traction looks convincing and can persuade people to cut a check. Using your MVP you get the first feedback and pique the interest of potential customers who will then tell you if they would buy your product or not. 

You have already learned about the importance of MVP, so let's take a better look into that right now by taking a look at some useful ideas for testing the viability of an idea for an MVP.

Below, we list several beneficial ways to test your MVP so that you can be sure there is indeed demand for your product idea.

Crowdfunding can be a great way to not only get an idea to take flight but it can be a very insightful way for you as an entrepreneur to check your business concept’s appeal. When using a fundraising platform like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or Patreon there are a few steps one(you) could go about to not only get yourself the needed funds but also to ensure that your idea is interesting and unique enough to help it attract backers interested in helping you get the word out and take your brand/branding up off the ground!

For example, the startup Petcube, founded in 2012, set out to create an entertainment box and mobile app to allow pet owners to keep an eye on their pets while they’re out. This pet-related idea received such a good response from the crowdfunding community that it raised $500,000 via two Kickstarter campaigns – two times more than anticipated! 

However, a crowdfunding campaign isn’t always a success. If you see weak activity and don't get at least a slight investment then it may be worth revising your idea to keep going. Not all first-time founders have enough experience to make crowdfunding work for them.

If you choose this method to test the viability of your MVP, then you must track how active your backers are and what they say about your product. With promotional platforms like crowdfunding, you can also get valuable suggestions for improvements on your product by showing potential new markets that you hadn’t considered.

Although reaching out directly to customers would be ideal, there is still some level of anonymity between you and them when using crowdfunding platforms.

When it comes to MVP promotion, a blog is an effective option. To take advantage of blogging, choose a platform where you’ll share posts about your MVP with the world. There are several options. The first is to create a blog from scratch using tools like WordPress or Ghost. This method is convenient because you can create a simple blog without any technical background.

The second option is to publish information about your MVP on public websites like Medium. When you choose this option, you don’t need to build a blog; you can just share stories using a personal account.

A blog can be a powerful tool for businesses today. It enables companies to stay closer to their customers and potential clients through the use of more informal yet detailed content about recent developments in the company, but also on individual members of staff, behind-the-scenes stories on the creation of your product or service, details about what went into making your Minimum Viable Product, hiring new staff or any other aspect that might be newsworthy.

To conduct MVP tests, ask readers to subscribe to your newsletter via email. This will make it easier for you to understand how many people are interested in your product. Analyzes the data found in subscription lists and conclude who might want to move ahead with your product and want it so badly that they would not mind signing up for anything.

Landing pages are one-page sites that provide detailed information about a product and include various calls to action (CTAs) - buttons that nudge visitors to take the desired action. They're great tools for attracting organic traffic to your MVP, but only if the landing page contains useful and high-quality content on all of its pages.

When creating a landing page for your MVP, include a short description of what your product is and what it does as well as the benefits it can give to your users. To test your MVP idea, provide your software product in return for users’ emails. This will provide you with emails of your potential customers and a communication channel through which you can directly provide product information. -

A successful landing page example that shows how to use this method to validate an idea is Buffer's campaign. Joel Gascoigne, the founder of this start-up, decided to see if people wanted to have access to scheduling tweets earlier on in their process.

Joel has posted a message on Hacker News describing the idea behind Buffer. He’s got 20 visits to his landing page after 3 days. He’ll keep developing the landing page until he gets 100 visitors or until 4 weeks have passed.

A landing page may be one of the quickest, least expensive ways to get an understanding of idea validation. There are many platforms you can look into while creating your landing page. It's important to remember that getting people to signup for your newsletter or simply an email address is essentially validation in itself.

Choosing a platform for creating a landing page for your startup can be quite challenging. If there are financial limitations, you can start with Wix free version. However, to get access to more templates and tools, one would need to opt for paid subscription plans to save on costs. Another option is LaunchRock, which offers the upgraded premium package at $5 per month while the free version has all the features necessary to create your initial landing pages MVP.

Since social networks are a popular avenue for communication, they can be a useful tool in your MVP test-flight. Choose the platform that best suits your target customer base and promote your product or service there in a way that makes it easy to access. Evaluate the response to ensure the message about your product is coming across the way you want to present it. 

Demonstrate your MVP on social networks and include links for users to try it out. Post photos of your MVP. Explain its features and tell what kind of benefits users can expect when using this software solution. Thanks to the tools built into social networks, you can:

Analyze the number of likes, shares, likes, downloads, mentions, subscriptions etc., to find out if your target users are interested in your product. 

Communicate with your potential audience using comments or private messages to discover what features they want to add or what problems they encounter when using your MVP. 

Start focusing on your target audience by analyzing the whole picture of the audience based on collected data. 

Users are typically more active on social networks compared to blogs and landing pages. By promoting your MVP on social networks it will be easier for you to reach your potential audience and analyse their reaction to MPV.

To check how accessible your MVP is, you can use a technique called hallway testing. The main premise of this method is that you have a few friends stop random people who are passing by in the hallway and ask them to test the usability and intuitiveness of your product for the first time without prior notice. You should ask these people to complete several tasks to see how they cope with certain features or UI elements. If they have difficulties getting past a screen or step, it’s worth considering changing some features or UI elements of your MVP as a way to make it more accessible.

Hallway testing, otherwise known as "whiteboarding", allows us to determine whether the designs made by our app development company live up to your expectations and make sense to users.

One of the most effective ways to discover if your MVP is dealing with users’ pain points with high accuracy is to ask the right people. 

As an option, you can demonstrate your MVP at conferences and gather people's opinions about it in person. However, this approach is time-consuming and less informative. Here are several ways to collect comprehensive data at minimal cost:

You can start by compiling a list of potential users on social networks and you can offer them the chance to use your MVP. After you do, you can ask them several questions concerning your product and analyze their answers. 

 You additionally could employ built-in pop-up banners or notifications in your mobile or web MVP to ask users if they like your product. To conduct such a survey in a fast and non-intrusive way, make use of a star rating system or thumb ups and thumbs down symbols.

If your MVP is a mobile application released on the App Store or Play Store, try analyzing the number of downloads, your app ratings, and comments. This method allows you to find out if your audience likes your application, what features they don’t like, what features are lacking but expected, and what features are worth changing.

The main goal of this testing method is to collect a lot of data from real users. The more information you collect, the more chances you’ll have to find your niche and decide whether there is enough market demand for your product and avoid additional expenses.

MVP stands for a minimum viable product. These are the first steps you take that help you lead toward your creations' completion. You can't always predict how things will turn out, but only by investing time and effort into testing can you eventually discover whether there are still changes to be made. We've included valuable MVP test examples in this article so you can compare potential statistics of your website or a new app or create valuable sources for reference materials.

How to Test Your MVP without Significant Investments

Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal are all esteemed payment platforms. 

If you plan to add a payment platform to your web or mobile application, you’ll likely be choosing among these three options. 

To make an informed decision about which is best suited to you and your customers in any given situation, it’s important that we first look at the pros and cons of each one in comparison:

How can one choose between them? Let us take a look at what online payment platforms are popular now. Uber uses Braintree, as does Airbnb. But Stripe also works with major companies - Adidas, Best Buy, and the top crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter. PayPal is well known by now, but its competitor Shopify is worth mentioning as it supports both Stripe and PayPal plus a lot of other similar software solutions to make the experience of receiving and sending payments convenient for both buyers and sellers alike to enjoy!

Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal are three payment platforms that companies use to manage the flow of money for their services or products. Each supports multiple ways of accepting payments including credit cards, debit cards, ACH bank transfers, Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Bitcoin and several others. Both Stripe and Braintree charge a percentage of each payment processed with your account while PayPal charges flat fees for each transaction.

But before we jump to any comparisons, we should first clarify the relation between Braintree and PayPal. One could say that they both work in similar fields, but they provide different products at the same time. As you may know, Braintree belongs to PayPal. But when comparing these two it is best to consider them as two separate entities.

While some eCommerce websites can support Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diners Club, Discover, JCB cards, and Asian cards thanks to Stripe on the one hand. Other options like Braintree will often give you PayPal on the other hand. 

Besides payments via credit card or PayPal on an eCommerce website - you might also need to support other payment methods. This is where you’ll find important differences between Stripe and Braintree including relevant pros and cons.

One of the advantages of Stripe is that it works with PayPal. If you’re focusing on expanding in China, Stripe will be an excellent choice for your site. Another feature of Stripe is its ACH payments (direct charges to bank accounts), which Braintree does not provide. To compete with Stripe, Braintree provides customers with great integration options with Shopify and Paypal, including PayPal digital wallet Venmo.

If you’re planning to accept payments on your marketplace or storefront, PayPal isn’t the best choice for you because it doesn't support alternative payment methods such as bitcoin and other forms of cryptocurrency. If that's the case, we recommend using Braintree or Stripe.

The number of fees that a particular payment platform charges can be one of its most important features to consider when comparing it against another. Here, we are going to examine how three popular platforms - Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal - charge for various services, so you can see how each works.

Unlike Braintree, PayPal Payments Pro and Stripe, Shopify Payments doesn’t charge you monthly or yearly fees for using its system. Although there are no fees attached to using PayPal's Business/Pro account, if you want your customers to use an integrated shopping experience that will give you total control over how they pay, then ultimately you will end up paying more money. This is because this business account costs as much as $30 per month.

As we said above both PayPal and Braintree / Stripe sets their transaction fee at 2.9% + $0.30 for each transaction, but there is 1 additional factor to consider. For international transactions the fees go up to 3.9% + an additional standard fee associated with PayPal depending on what country you are in (e.g., Australia, 1.49%). 

These fees are identical for most credit card payments except American Express cards, with PayPal setting their fees at 4.4% + a local currency fee depending on the country you are conducting business in (eg, Australia, 4.49%). When it comes to AMEX vs Bankcard transactions, there is no difference with either vendor - which means that both will charge 4.4%.

Sometimes, you have sellers that are sometimes fraudulent. The three major payment platforms - Stripe, Braintree and PayPal - will gladly assist with dispute processing at your expense. Stripe charges $15 to process an individual dispute while Braintree charges $10. 

PayPal also charges $20 but also tacks on a tiny fee of $0.30 for each transaction. Thankfully if disputes are resolved in my favour, they will return the disputed amount to me with Square and Stripe along with the original fees charged.

Whenever you issue a refund, both Stripe and Braintree are responsible for returning the transaction fee they took earlier, which is very convenient. What about PayPal though? PayPal will also return the transaction fee for a refund, but will also charge you $0.30 for processing this return – it’s a new transaction, after all. 

Keep in mind that if your merchant account doesn’t have enough money on hand to cover the chargeback and $15 fee, then each of these payment platforms will take the money directly from your bank account.

As we mentioned in the comparison table, Stripe and Braintree work with different kinds of payments. Both services support Bitcoin transactions through Stripe or directly through Braintree. 

-With Bitcoin transactions, Stripe charges 0.8 %-5 per transaction for all Bitcoin payments. Braintree is offering better rates on Bitcoin transactions – it doesn't charge anything for the transaction fees if the volume of your Bitcoin payments is under $1 million ($1M). Above this threshold, these companies will charge 1% for their Bitcoin transactions.

Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal all have different fees. Stripe charges a 2.9% processing fee plus a $0.30 transaction charge for AMEX transactions. Braintree charges 3.25% plus a $0.30 transaction fee for AMEX transactions while PayPal is the most expensive at 3.5% + $0.30 per transaction charge when customers use AMEX with them.

Stripe, Braintree, or PayPal for an Online Marketplace

Marketplaces require special methods for managing payments, as both the marketplace owner and the seller get part of what the buyer pays for an item. Stripe and Braintree introduced split payments several years ago to address this problem – dividing payments two ways. The marketplace owner receives a relatively small amount – the fee that the seller has agreed to pay for using the marketplace. The seller gets the rest.

To allow split payments, PayPal, Braintree and Stripe all have their plugins. Stripe comes with Connect, Braintree offers Marketplace and PayPal has Adaptive Payments. We must warn you right away that PayPal only offers Adaptive Payments to select partners. That's why they bought Braintree in the first place: to provide a modern solution for marketplaces. In other words, don't try to use Adaptive Payments in a new marketplace product - instead go with Braintree right from the start!

Besides splitting payments, Braintree and Stripe can also take care of creating a merchant account for marketplace sellers. This is especially useful since it saves you from having to go through the process manually.

Platforms That Support PayPal, Stripe, and Braintree

You can create a modern storefront or marketplace application using many programming languages such as C#, Java and PHP. These platforms, however, must offer payment platforms via APIs to work with your website’s backend language. Using an API, your application will be able to communicate directly with the payment platform. What’s great about the payment platforms that we review here is that they each come with several APIs for you to choose from.

Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal have developed well-integrated APIs for the top programming languages, including Ruby/Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, and Node.js. We can attest to the detail orientation of all three of these integration modes as we’ve integrated Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal payment systems into our own Ruby on Rails-based applications. The sheer level of detail included in each platform's documentation was paramount to our integration efforts.

Here’s one more thing you have to take into consideration: You may need to develop a mobile application for your eCommerce website(such as Shopify). As the many popular operating systems for smartphones are iOS and Android, your payment platform must provide those APIs as well. Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal all have these APIs as well. 

One of the things every payment platform has high standards for is security. To ensure that any transactions you make on your store are as safe as possible, each answer we gave makes it clear how they handle security issues.

Deciding which payment platform to use for your company's customers may seem daunting, but you can’t go wrong if you stick with a familiar option like Stripe and Braintree – both of which are used by companies including Lyft. Your choice should be based on your business needs as well as customer preference regarding payment methods and the availability of services in markets where you'd like to do business.

Stripe vs PayPal vs Braintree: How do these payment platforms compare?

The only way to know if your team’s estimates are reasonable is to compare them with industry standards. One way of doing this would be by looking at similar projects and their actual timelines and costs or talking with industry peers about their projects and the pros and cons they’ve faced.

You have probably been given a web or mobile application development estimate before. And, if you're like most people, the final price came to more than you expected. That's why it's better to understand how these things happen. Knowing your options can help you make a better decision moving forward whether to bring on a freelancer or hire a company for an app project. But whatever you choose, make sure you know what to look out for and set a realistic budget from the start! We would love to help!

Most software developers find it difficult to accurately estimate the timeframe and cost for implementing a set of functionalities. However, there are various reasons that we could consider to get deeper into this matter and why app development projects might take longer than initially thought. Let's look at the five most common reasons why app development projects can exceed initial estimates:

5 common reasons for exceeding app development estimates

Obscure project requirements. If project requirements are not fully understood by a software development company that doesn't follow best practices for eliciting requirements, the company may leave some of the required functionalities out of the initial estimate and can sometimes cause complications and delays in meetings and plans. 

Lack of estimation experience. When non-programmers provide an estimate, or when managers or executives don't have sufficient development expertise or experience, they may also be prone to providing overestimates on time and cost commitments.

The app developer who estimated the project isn't always available to follow through with their idea. For example, the development team you'd like to hire built an amazing WordPress website for an e-commerce company using Google Maps integration before, but if they're not selling them on the idea of including Maps in their mobile version of the app, you'll need to work with someone else. Things can get even more complicated when this team consists of lower-level developers (middle or junior). Typically these developers take more time than expected to implement a given feature open up the possibility.

Under-estimating project complexity. Sometimes it can be easy to overlook the challenges faced when working on an app, but if you do not give the topic your full attention, some very real complexities can lead to increased costs and a longer timeline than expected.

Some companies are dishonest about the amount of time they need to complete a project. These companies typically charge lower rates and promise to deliver software faster than their competitors. Be wary of that temptation to go with the lower price. If you receive an estimate for your project that is much more optimistic than estimates provided by other software development firms, this company may be trying to trick you.

Developers providing you with poor app development estimates can be like falling into a black hole. Estimates aren't always indicative of the actual time it will take to develop your product. As a result, you could lose control over your budget and deadlines (which can both get out of hand). 

How do you know if the estimation is reasonable? The best way to figure this out is by looking at how developers construct their estimations.

What’s the right approach to estimating project development time and cost?

Several different options can help software development teams offer reasonable price ranges for their products. However, most app development agencies apply one approach to all of their jobs without taking into account particular circumstances. Is it realistic to have the same approach applied to pricing estimates for a personal blog and an enterprise marketing automation system? 

We at Distinct Cloud combine various approaches to ensure our clients receive price estimates that give them an accurate picture of what they'll need to do to complete their projects on time and within budget.

Imagine you want to make an online shop for cosmetics. The website will be like the model of Cult Beauty, which is a fantastic online store and advice resource specially designed for women’s beauty products. 

To proceed with the development of your website, we would approach it in such a way:

Before moving forward with you, we need to have a clear picture of your website idea. We need to understand who your target audience is, why they come to your site and what problems they will need to solve when visiting. 

We’ll ask you to provide us with a list of features on your site, a list of any competitors, and some details about how you plan for users to interact with each other on the site. 

This information-gathering process might take some time, but as a result, we can better assess what you want from us which will demonstrate our potential work in the form of user stories or an outline.

You may find this case study on how we approached the process of decomposing features for a large shopping cart project interesting. In the first step, we need to gather all the information we can (if some of it is already available then that's even better!). 

Once we have all the necessary information, we move on to creating our tasks and breaking down those tasks into smaller ones:

Epics – User Stories – Use Cases. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

As I already told you, our Distinct Cloud team uses several estimation approaches to arrive at precise estimates. Let's take a look at one of them. 

The analogous estimating approach is used at the first stage of estimation for your online store that sells cosmetics because analogous estimating uses a measure from a similar earlier project to estimate the cost and duration of the current project.

You can use analogous estimation to create a preliminary estimate for the hours it will take to complete work on your project. To do so, you need to find a project that is roughly similar to yours and has the same feature set within comparable client demographics (like for example your hypothetical “Cult Beauty” eCommerce store.) 

Once you've found an analogous project, plug the hour's estimates into the corresponding fields in your estimation spreadsheet under ‘Pain Points.’ You can then be reasonably certain about how long it will take for us to complete your project.

Relying on past experiences helps us to arrive at more precise estimates. 

However, we can only use analogous estimation methods when a previous product contains tasks that are very similar to those in the project we’re estimating. 

In some cases, our new projects may require features that we haven’t implemented before. For example, in addition to categorized products and a shopping cart, you want your online cosmetics store to offer a bulk purchasing option and automatic subscription ordering. 

Since we haven’t built these features before, we have no choice but to rely on expert judgment for this estimate.

Expert judgment estimation relies on input from experts and industry leaders to estimate projects based on their industry experience. The formula is complex and includes an expert opinion as well as other factors such as:

Our expert (or group of experts) research the features that need to be estimated. In our hypothetical project, those features are bulk purchasing and subscription orders.

A project manager sets up a meeting with an expert group to clarify the scope of the work. 

The expert group starts to break down each feature into smaller pieces - Epics, User Stories, Use Cases, Tasks etc for bulk purchasing and subscription orders.

Our expert estimates the number of hours needed for implementing bulk purchasing and subscription order - which totals around 60 hours for both full-time developers over 1 week based on these assumptions: _a_ 30% time estimation error margin; _b_ After the initial kick-off 1 developer can complete 20-25hrs/week case studies; _c_ No interruptions during this phase. 

Product Managers often use average and expert judgments to come up with the ideal solution to the problem they are dealing with. Once this solution is decided upon, they make a final decision about their product requirements using task breakdowns. 

We collect all of these requirements in a spreadsheet and share them with our clients where we then receive feedback in the form of corrections or modifications. If any changes need to be made to the spreadsheet, we will have to provide a re-estimate moving forward.

At Distinct Cloud, we combine both qualitative and quantitative estimation approaches to offer accurate project estimates on time spent for each feature. Both parallel approaches are based on real-world data that enables us to provide an excellent estimate of schedule duration. Thus, we reduce the risk of exceeding your cost limits which is essential for your budget constraints. As a reliable partner, who values our reputation, we always strive to stay within your budget limits.

How to Accurately Estimate Project Cost and Duration

When you are starting up with creating your very own online product, whether it's a simple drop shipping store or an intricate budget software system, you will no doubt find the use of wireframing to be tremendously helpful for all areas of its design. And here at Distinct Cloud, we will use wireframes in any given development project to clearly understand how the product is supposed to work and thus how it should be implemented.

However, sometimes clients do not know what wireframes are. There may be instances where they prefer to skip them, sometimes they underestimate the importance of wireframing which essentially takes place even before the actual work on developing the product has started. In this article, we will discuss how important wireframes are and why every company should implement them.

So what's the big deal about wireframing? 

In short, it's a blueprint of your product. Usually, people think of it as devices screens filled with various functions and features, but real-life experience has taught us that wireframes can be much more than that. Wireframes may include: 

Design — Design includes the sketches and drawings that help you imagine how your final product will act and look. 

User Stories — User stories are insights into why someone would want to use your product in the first place.

Scope definition —As the name suggests, scope definition comes with a list of all the requirements that will go into making your product. It also includes deadlines for when certain parts of the project should be finished and any other specific details. 

Prototype —A prototype design is used to explore ways in which your product can interact with your audience. It can be anything from early sketches to running interactive programs used only to show how certain features on your website might work or what they'll look like if developed further.

In short, wireframing enables you to visualize how your end product will look and function. 

Planning is key, but what exactly are the advantages of wireframing for a digital product?

Since all of the necessary visual documentation, functions, and specifications for your product are already defined, you can avoid lots of unnecessary work when getting to the creation of an actual product. If properly documented, wireframes also save time on the silly communication required to clear out prior agreements and decisions.

By having a list of the things to do each day, each member of the team can better evaluate the time they require to do a particular task. The Lean Startup methodology, as well as Agile development, assume interactively working on a product.

You should constantly make hypotheses and check them in order to be flexible. It also helps if people can talk about their experiences and what they learned.

Wireframing is one of the most productive tools often used in an iterative development process, allowing iterations to be defined precisely. This enables easier testing and provides better insight into the problems of each iteration. And this reduces the amount of time needed for decision-making by building consensus with stakeholders at each stage of development, ensuring that all parties are aware of any significant changes throughout the project life cycle!

UX designers thrive on details because they're the ones who stand behind the product, and while wireframes help early in the process, visuals can leave a great impact. Graphic designers take wireframes and elevate them to the next level to attract interest and then developers take that design and apply it to code and bring it into reality.

Wireframing is the best way to illustrate your vision for a product that you plan on making after you've outlined everything. It's also an excellent way to bring your idea to life because it doesn't cost anything to make sketches. Finally, wireframing can be used as a tool when pitching your business or investment idea and looking for new partners and clients that might want to invest in your company.

In one of our previous blog posts, we took special care to define the "Idea Phase" which, as the name suggests, defines the very beginning steps necessary for starting your product. 

Things like gathering user feedback or putting together a "minimum viable product", an essential version of your final product that you can release and start getting some fresh ideas on how it can be improved. This stage of development is critical since it allows you to refine your tracking methods into metrics that gauge each specific step of this process during design planning.

Wireframing is a great way to plan out your project visually. Having a precise vision of what you'd like to make helps make sure that every detail and particular about your application is fully realized.

When beginning to work on a product at any stage of development, it's vital to have the product's scope well-defined. It allows for avoiding delays and cost overruns which can ruin a company’s chances for survival. To compare, if a product is fully developed but on even later in the process it gets too big, then take into consideration how much more difficult it would be to refuse an in-house feature in the middle of development given that one would have already spent so much money on developing it.

A critical requirement to work with Distinct Cloud is your website or application is to be functionally and aesthetically sound - which means you need a wireframe. We know that many companies like yours may not be aware of these details and we also understand that having such a resource is not always available when needed — therefore we're here to provide the solution you need. We at Distinct Cloud aspire to bring great ideas and solutions to life through effective web development tools in the shortest amount of time whilst getting the job done correctly in the end!

Why wireframing is important for your project

There are more options than ever when it comes to choosing a technology stack for your project. However, the easiest way to decide is by looking into what companies that have already succeeded use to build their products. For example, this article explains why Namely has used React for their enterprise product and covers there benefits of using it in depth. 

The appearance of React™ changed the process of creating user interfaces significantly through built-in libraries that allow you to create complex user interface interactions from small code known as components. Each component can contain its distinctive style and functionality all without refactoring the rest of the development codebase because it’s created using JavaScript™ making developing highly reactive UIs easier than ever before!

The history of React is a long and exciting one, beginning in 2011 when Facebook officials realized they needed a solution to the complicated code that was being used for the Facebook Ads app. A new JavaScript library was what they needed! As rapid growth ensued, so did an urgent need for updates to the growing application. This is how JSX modules came to be!

Today, "React" technology is on the rise. With more than 146,000 followers and more than 1,365 contributors on GitHub.

There are more than 1.5 million websites that use React, and this number is increasing as time goes on. The reasons for its popularity has a lot to do with the benefits of React:

Unlike Angular.js and Ember.js, which incorporate additional components and functionalities to ease the development process, Facebook’s React is a front-end library that makes it easy for customers to develop user interfaces quickly and effectively without making it very difficult. Thanks to its simple and minimalist design, even novice front-end programmers can add functionality such as AJAX changes or add-ons without much hassle.

Effortlessly getting things done on time matters. This is especially important for startups, who need to launch their products and test them on the market as quickly as possible, which is why everyone is looking for ways to make it easier on themselves. React has a considerable advantage in this respect since it allows you to create reusable code fragments called components.

#3 Allows for creating fast, high-performance, scalable apps

One of the most important features of React is its virtual DOM. 

The virtual DOM is a dummy copy of the real DOM and helps to keep track of whether (and which) parts of your website need to change and how this particular set-up has to be displayed. This way, only the part that’s been coded changes, whereas the rest remains intact. In terms of being able to offer instant access, React allows users to browse instantaneously.

Your site has many components, and when it comes to your website’s content and structure being assessed so you can be ranked by search engines, SEO is very important! 

React is thorough in addressing all of these different parts. Server-side rendering (SSR), which is the method used with React whenever rendering of your site occurs, makes sure that each page or element of your site is guaranteed to be completely rendered on the server before sending out the content for indexing by various search engines, giving you more accurate search engine results.

React allows developers to create reusable components. This results in fewer bugs and improves code stability. The possibility to reuse components also cuts down the time needed for app testing. Once unit tests have proved a certain component to work without crashing, it can be reused in other parts of the app with no additional testing.

The majority of reacting developers prefer to use JSX, a syntax extension for JavaScript. JSX makes it easier to alter the DOM by allowing developers to create JavaScript objects with HTML-like syntax that is more readable. This way the code is written slicker making React more user-friendly. An element rewritten in JSX may look something like this:

<h2 className="greeting">Hello, world!</h2>

Same element written in pure JavaScript will look something like this:

This is a simple example, but the same rules apply when you have lots of components nested within one another. The code can get even more tedious to read.

The benefits of React have helped it earn a reputation as one of the most powerful front-end frameworks for web application development. Below is a list of popular websites that use React.

Facebook is a social network that was created for Harvard students. It has since grown to be the most popular of its kind. Facebook released the React library, which makes software engineers wonder why they ever bothered with anything else at all. Since React is so incredibly easy to use, Facebook has made it part of every product it creates. 

Using React helps Facebook create responsive user interfaces so their users can enjoy high-powered websites and receive unparalleled customer service experienced by billions of users worldwide daily!

As of 30 September 2019, Facebook had 2.45 billion monthly active users and this number continues to increase by 8% every year. According to data from the Pew Research Center, 74% of Facebook users visit Facebook regularly. 

The Facebook team puts a lot of effort into growing React and provides tons of helpful information for new developers who want to get started with it.

An app created in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram is a social network where users share pictures and videos of different scenes from their own lives. In 2012, Instagram was purchased by Facebook for 1 billion dollars. They decided there were two steps to get more attention from the internet: developing a web application and creating an Android version of the app.

As React proved its worth for Facebook, the company used it for the Instagram web application. According to internal Instagram statistics, there were over one billion monthly active users on Instagram as of June 2018. 

This means that React has proven itself worthy for just one startup but many companies have found that it's powerfully versatile too!

Netflix is a streaming service that allows users to watch online TV, movies, documentaries and other video content. In 2018, Netflix accounted for 15% of the total downstream traffic globally. 

As of 2019, Netflix has more than 167 million subscribers. A streaming giant like Netflix must maintain high product performance as this is one of the most critical challenges of a provider like them.

In 2015, Netflix wanted to modernize its TV user interface. To achieve the company's goals, they decided to use more advanced tools and techniques as React which helped improve performance as well as upgrade the UI.

Uber launched in 2009 as a peer-to-peer ridesharing application for the iPhone. It has since expanded to offer services including food delivery, grocery delivery, bike-sharing, bus service, pooling services and other transportation services. 

As of 2018, it operates in 88% of markets globally with several billion-dollar investments from prominent technology players. Uber is also responsible for the development of the open-source React framework which helps engineers build site features rapidly. 

One of Uber’s main goals is to provide seamless service across multiple devices without extended load times or dropped connections -- all while maximizing profit by lowering costs and reducing prices.

The New York Times is among the leading newspapers around the globe.

 In 2017, the newspaper set out to refresh its online presence and adopt a new interface to help promote a better browsing experience for users. React was one of the key technologies used to develop this new design. 

As of 2018, The New York Times boasts more than 3.8 million subscribers who have signed up for their premium paid service to access readers' favourite publications from its growing archive.

Reddit is like a social network, but it includes additional functionality related to content sharing (such as images, videos, and more). Users can vote on whether or not they agree with the content that has been posted in any given Subreddit. The website was founded in 2005 by former roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian when they were in college at the University of Virginia. 

Reddit became so popular that in November 2017 its users numbered over 430 million each month! To create this seamless user experience, Reddit relies on React content sharing software.

Airbnb is an online community marketplace for people looking to rent out their homes. Airbnb claims to have registered over half a billion guests since its launch and is accessible in more than 220 countries. 

Since 2015, the engineers at Airbnb have been using React for web application development. To make React even better, they’ve created additional tools (like Enzyme) that are built around React. 

The open-source community has access to these tools as well, increasing popularity among developers who might not be savvy with creating powerful testing suites on their own or who appreciate having an established workflow for their projects so they don't continually waste time on reinventing the wheel!

Salesforce is a customer relationship management system with a service-oriented architecture (SOA). It allows businesses to connect with their customers, partners, and prospects. 

In 2019, more than 150,000 companies were using Salesforce to manage their businesses. 

The Salesforce team uses the React library along with the Visualforce framework to speed up the complex rendering process for Visualforce pages. The Visualforce framework is part of Salesforce’s Force.com platform as a service (PaaS). Salesforce engineers use React along with the Visualforce framework to improve the performance of their products.

Dropbox is a cloud storage service that helps save and transfer data online. 

They pride themselves on their elegant interface, intuitive controls, and the ability to view the content from any device with an internet connection. In 2019 alone they have been able to reach nearly 600 million users worldwide across 180 countries. Around 14 million of those users were premium subscribers who receive special extra benefits for a small monthly fee. 

The Dropbox engineering team benefit from reusable React components. These components help with accessibility for their dropdown menus and tree views among other things – as they can be implemented in different parts of the website interface – which helps expedite development time as opposed to having to reinvent the wheel for each required component!

CNN is a news organization that reaches millions of people all over the globe. 

In October 2019, CNN Digital had more than 200 million monthly subscribers. 

CNN's website uses React combined with other bleeding-edge technologies to provide breaking news details and a superior UX to its readers.

In this article, we talked about the many benefits of React and why so many people have started using it to build their websites. Now it’s your turn to decide whether React is worth your attention. For those of you who have been thinking about getting started with React, now is as good a time as any!

Archive - Entrepreneurship

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Stripe vs PayPal vs Braintree: How do these payment platforms compare?

How to Accurately Estimate Project Cost and Duration

Why wireframing is important for your project

The 10 Most Famous Websites Built with React

What You Need to Know About ReactJS Before Using It in Your Project

How to Explain Your Business Idea to Your Development Team

Guide on Hiring a React Native Developer [Skills and Knowledge Breakdown]

Top Features of a B2B Ecommerce Platform: A Complete Guide

Time & Material model in software development

Software Release Planning: Tips and Tricks by the Distinct Clouds Team

How to reduce software development costs of your MVP

From idea to fully-fledged product: All MVP stages

Moving Your Business Online: A Detailed Roadmap

How to Build a Website Like Thumbtack: Business Model, MVP Features, Monetization

How to Start a B2B Marketplace: Five Steps You Should Take

Marketplace Liquidity: Why Is It Important and How to Measure It?

Startup Roles and Responsibilities: Key Positions in a Tech Startup

How to Make a Product Roadmap for Your Startup

A Guide on Driving Traffic to Your Ecommerce Website