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5 Features You MUST HAVE In Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) 💡

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App Masters15:33Open on YouTube
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The bottom line

A minimum viable product needs only five features: analytics, re-engagement messaging, onboarding, a paywall and live chat or contact. They let a small app learn from real users and earn money without wasting time or money on extra features.

Key takeaways

  • Analytics comes first because without it a team is building blind. 0:50
    • Track where users drop off in onboarding, trial activations, time on each screen and retention.
    • Many clients add analytics only after losing months or a year of user engagement with no data.
  • Push, SMS and email bring users back to features they already have. 4:18
    • An event reminder two days, one day and half an hour ahead makes the app feel smart without building anything new.
    • Email matters because the team owns the customer contact, not Apple.
  • Onboarding and a paywall decide whether a new install turns into revenue. 7:25
    • Onboarding should state the one problem solved and use borrowed social proof, such as a pink noise stat of 27% better memory.
    • Showing the paywall before sign-up raised paywall views from 40% to 94%, trial activations by 190% and sales by 52%.
  • Live chat or a contact form catches problems before they become bad reviews. 10:55
    • Junk messages are a better price than bad store reviews, and the chat also surfaces bugs like a broken contact button.
    • A contact prompt on the delete screen reaches users just as they are about to leave.

I prefer junk before getting bad reviews.

Chaim, B7 Dev

Chapter summaries

0:00 Analytics shows what users actually do

Specific usage data, not a yes or no opinion, tells a team what to keep and what to fix.

  • Track the one event that solves the app's core problem. 1:14
    • Count how many users trigger it and how many reach it.
    • Tied to the earlier advice to solve one problem well.
    • Releasing the app and forgetting it leaves no way to know how much or how often it is used.
  • Detailed numbers beat a simple "like" or "don't like". 1:41
    • Details on how, when and how much show what to tweak, remove or change.
    • "I don't know if it's yes or no": a bare opinion gives nothing to act on.
  • Use a standard analytics tool, and learn to read it. 3:15
    • Firebase (Google Analytics) and Mixpanel are common choices.
    • Some teams install two packages to cross-check the data.
    • The data can also be compared with App Store and Google Play analytics.

4:18 Re-engagement brings users back

Push, SMS and email each pull users back in a different way, so use all three with care.

  • Push notifications make users open the app. 5:31
    • Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram send alerts like "another user interacted with you".
    • Push can also announce new features or send a happy birthday.
    • Push and email can point out hidden features users may not know about.
  • SMS adds a check that the user has a real phone number. 5:57
    • It can still be tricked, but most users are real.
    • Social login also helps when the app needs user accounts. 4:31
  • Email keeps a lasting copy in the inbox, but must not be spammed. 6:17
    • Owning the address lets a team sell a new app or website product later. 7:00
    • Steve's advice: if the app doesn't need email, don't collect it.

7:25 Onboarding sells the app's value

An onboarding screen should state the app's benefits and prove them before asking for money.

  • Onboarding covers the benefits, the one problem solved and social proof. 7:40
    • Steve's data says showing the paywall inside onboarding works, so it is counted as feature four.

7:47 Onboarding and the order of sign-up

A new user decides within moments, so onboarding must explain the app fast and put the paywall before the sign-up wall.

  • Onboarding gets one or two screens to explain the app. 8:19
    • Phones hold limited apps, so users give a new one only a few moments.
    • The screens say what the app does, why, and how it solves the problem.
    • Borrowed proof comes from searching the topic's published stats.
    • Better onboarding raises retention and usage.
  • Offer social login and ask for sign-up after the paywall. 9:11
    • About 90% of iOS users sign in with Apple, and about 95% of Android users use Google.
    • Calm lets users in, then asks for sign-up after a trial starts.
    • A fitness client's mockups showed the flipped order.
    • With 40% paywall views, 60% of users never get the chance to buy.

10:51 Live chat and contact us

A simple chat or contact option teaches a new product's team what confuses users, at almost no cost.

  • Live chat is the least known feature and helps most early on. 10:51
    • One audited app linked straight to WhatsApp from its paywall.
    • Crisp.chat has a free plan and works on a website, in an app and on a paywall.
    • The speaker is not affiliated with Crisp and has used it for years.
    • Feedback arrives with the junk.
  • A small contact icon guides users without hurting the flow. 12:40
    • It can point users to a tutorial or promo video.
    • Once the app has scale, the chat can be moved somewhere less visible.
    • Watching users struggle shows where features were built wrong.
    • Telling a tester which buttons to press hides those mistakes.

13:22 Designing so the app explains itself

The five features exist to reach product-market fit quickly without wasting time or money.

  • Good design should need no explanation. 13:51
    • If you must explain what the app does, the experience design is wrong.
    • Time and money are tied together, so waste neither on the way to fit. 14:15
    • Wave AI shows a contact option when a user hard-presses the icon to delete.
    • With money, you don't want to waste time. Without it, you have time but should still stop wasting it.

In the growth library

Steve P. Young and Chaim, Steve P. Young, founder of App Masters; Chaim, app development partner at B7 Dev. Five features an app MVP needs to reach product market fit without overspending: analytics, re-engagement channels, onboarding, a paywall and live chat or contact us. Flipping the order of paywall and sign-up in one onboarding flow raised paywall views from 40% to 94% and trial activations by 190%.

Lessons that draw on this:

More from App Masters · The whole library, and ask it anything

Transcript408 lines
0:00

coming up we're going to talk about the absolutely necessary features that you need to include in your MVP stay tuned what is up app Nation it is Steve p young founder of app masters.com and we're going to talk all about the key features the things that you actually need in your app you don't need everything especially when you're just trying to get going you don't need everything we're going to break down all the things you actually absolutely need to help you scale and get product Market fit and joining me today again is Heim from B7 Dev my trusted partner we've been working together for over 10 years when it comes to app development and we're going to break it down from the technical and the marketing side so without further Ado I'm welcome back to the show hi Steve thank you for having me all right him let's talk about number one and we both agree on this one it's definitely analytics you won't know if you're not

0:58

tracking so you know him I love your Insight on this but for me the key things under analytics that I'm really paying attention to is onboarding where there's falling off on boarding screens trial activations and then similar to part one of our video where we really talked about the biggest mistakes and you said solve that one problem right so how many people track the event I should say this the event that solves that one problem and how many people are going to that event as well anything on the analytics side I'm that you want to add here you want to release your up and then release and forget okay you need to know how when how much for how many time and Etc minutes seconds on every screen the users are using it okay because otherwise it's like the difference between do you like the app and they say I don't like that but how when you don't like the app how is that you don't like the app or you like the app yes how I

1:53

perfect it I don't know is yes or no no you need specific details a specific data that Weck tell you how when how much Etc you need to tweak your adap your app to improve what you are doing well and to remove or to change what you are doing bad it's as simple as that without analytics and specific analytics some points are the ones that you are mentioning I will add time on each screen where you can track the flow of the users through the app Etc to see where they are dropping out I need to know how much time they are using the app okay what is called the retention I need to know otherwise it's like flying on blind okay you don't know what is happening between your users and the app so you have a lot of tools you have a lot of analytic packages but please please please from the one at analytics a lot of customers or a lot of new customers a lot of people with already working apps they come to me or to to

2:54

you and they say can we add analytics yes they already waste like months or one year or more time of Engagement with the users without knowing anything okay so if you have not analytics you are practically blind on how users are interacting with the app itself yeah completely agree with that too him do you have a favorite analytics platform that you like to use mix panel Firebase post hog I've heard is really good too yeah Firebase what is called the Google analytics and and fire race is one I mean the ones that we most use and the one that the technical packages they are working with most Technologies but again mix panel and other are really I mean you have a lot of tools today at least have something and furthermore sometimes we even install two packages differ to cross the information okay so even again you can cross this information with the the Apple store information per se so you can deduct forther information you

3:57

can cross it with Google plays in analy itics into deducting in stuff because after very important when you have the analytics already you need to learn how to read it you need to learn what you deduct from those details let's move on to number two you guys got to let me know in the comments if you're enjoying these whiteboard sessions I personally like doing them but obviously I would love you guys' feedback all right number two I'm and I agree have some way to re-engage with your users and that's either through SMS push notifications is an obvious one and even email and I like the email thing you know we talked about this before we hit record about having some social login so if your app needs to have some user creation tools definitely have the social login but it's all tied into how do you re-engage with your users you get that initial download how do you reengage with them it's like a magical tool this

4:48

communication back and forth between the app itself and the user or the admin in this case the the user owner with the users is a magical way to re-engage with your users for example I was having a conversation with a customer last week when he told me again I want to add this feature and that feature and I say hold on you already have the features for example to manage an event why instead of adding new stuff just don't remind the users that in two days they have this event that in one day that in half an hour you have this event for them will open the app will use the app they will feel that the app is kind of smart Okay and reminds them and then you send a push notification another user like Facebook does like WhatsApp does like telegram no Instagram does that they will send you a push notification that says another user interacted with you go open the app so increase the redention you stay on the app you do other stuff

5:49

you discover new features oh we release this new feature and then they open the app happy birthday to you you open the app etc etc etc you can communicate by SMS and SMS is an extra layer to verify that the user has a real mobile I mean everything could be trick but at least most of the people you are guaranteed that they have a real number push notifications you re-engage with the users they have to open the app okay that increases a lot engagement an email in any case just for keeping a hard copy I ha up in an email inbox don't overuse it okay don't overuse it don't spam the user but is a magical tool for increasing the retention of the app suddenly I agree and I think emails the most underutilized push notifications one of the things we like to do this worked well in email to time is we go here's our most popular features right back to our other previous video where we talked about solving that one simple

6:47

problem well you can also use push to be like hey did you know we actually do this too so some of your hidden features that people might not know about that you feel like really strongly about you can also use push to try to re-engage your users so there's a lot of clever ways to use push an email and I think look my data says if you don't need the email don't take it but it's I think it's important because now you own your customer Apple doesn't own it you own it so you have their email addresses so that if you build a new app or you want to re-engage with them or you want to sell them on the website to buy your product you can do that and you need email to do just that let's go into number three all right it moved good job canva all right for me it's definitely having an onboarding we have data that obviously says if you just show your pay ball on the onboarding it will work that's number four so we're just going

7:35

to put that in here for pay wall but have an onboarding screen so talk about the benefits of your app talk about that one problem you're trying to solve have some social proof during the onboarding and I know I'm when people say hey I've got a new app and how do I have social proof you can always borrow social proof so one of our sleep sounds apps it has like p pink noise if you just Google pink noise and stats or something they'll say you know pink noise helps improve memory by 27% so I borrow that social proof and put that into the onboarding process but three and four are closely tied you want your onboarding and you definitely want a pay ball yeah you did already a great job into getting someone to download your app okay now is the most crucial moment they will open it and they will use it or not you know that you cannot have unlimited number of apps in your phone even even if you try harder you will use

8:34

it I mean just a few moments so this is a very critical moment explain what you are doing why you are doing why you are solving this problem and how and then increase the time of retention increase the usage and the success of the app just through a simple one two screens or or details that you can show the user why your app is so important I'm going to pull up something him that talks about the criticalness of your onboarding and having analytics so there's one client it was a fitness Bas these are all figma files so don't these aren't the real clients we have some onboarding screens we force them to sign up and kind of like what Heim said you want your social logins because the data I got from a past guest of ours is 90% of iOS users use apple to sign in and about like 95 if I remember correctly on Google they use Google so if they're on Android definitely have a Google if you're on iOS definitely have apple and

9:29

then we showed the pay wall and this is where it's key so all we did was we flipped it you can see we asked them to sign up and then we showed the pay wall then we just flipped it we showed the paywall and then ask them to sign in right and here's what happened this is why metrics are so important the onboarding stuff when the install happens we want to see how many people get to the pay wall View and we want that number to be as close to 100% as possible so when we made that switch we saw his pay wall views went up from 40 to 94% up here and guess what happened to that we saw triala activations go up by 190% and a 52% increase in sales and I'm this is what you should tell your clients too because some people I get this feedback they're like hey Steve I need people to sign up before they can buy anything I'm like look at calm okay obviously you don't need to sign up you can get into it the app but after you

10:17

activate a trial right here they force you to sign up and continue so that's the way to do it because again you're going to miss 100% of the shots you don't take so if you're not showing your pay wall to 60% of your users guess what they're not going to do is buy so just by making sure that your pay wall views are as close 100% to the install that's how you're going to make more money too and that's what analytics that's why it's the number one point right number one point is analytics that's why it's so important for users and then understanding what you do with the analytics is also very important seems that the people of Karm they have it very clear all right let's move on to the last one and I feel like the last one is the most little known one but I think it can do wonders as especially in the beginning and that's a way to do some live chatting chat or at least at the very least a contact us feature

11:07

where people can get in touch with it andhe I saw an app that I did an audit earlier and they had a WhatsApp Chat thing that took them to right straight to WhatsApp on their pay wall and I really like that right like I have on my website we have a chat feature and this is the chat feature I would recommend it's crisp. chat and you can do it in the App Store in your app too right here and I get so much great feedback on here now I get a lot of junk too I'm but I also get a lot of feedback I mean like Steve hey your contact us thing is broken oh cool thanks we had to fix it recently right so that's in it's called crisp. chat but check them out I'm not affiliate with them anywhere but I've just been using them for a long time and they do have a free plan that I'm currently on right here and so really great product and you can incorporate into your website into your app into your pay wall everywhere in between the

11:57

main point here is of course that you will get a lot of junk but I prefer junk before getting bad reviews okay because the junk will harm you just psychologically maybe I don't know waste of time but you won't get the bad reviews B review so live chat or at least a form contact us if you don't like something or you need help with the app just let me know and bent your anger or ask me something before you actually write it at the stores okay that will help us a lot with the SEO and Etc so I mean is something minimal that doesn't hurt a lot you see a small icon there that doesn't harm the flow but helps a lot in terms of bad reviews avoiding or at least guiding the user like hey did you you went into our website look at the tutorial or look at the the promo video how the app works and that solves a lot of prrs and I'm the biggest thing I hate when people show me app Steve show me here's my app can check it out

12:58

and they tell me what to do they press this button press this button like don't do that let me just use your app and you can see where I'm messing up and if you messed up and you build some features the wrong way that's what these features allow you to and I'm said it best better to get junk than onear reviews so especially in the early days if they're not familiar with your product and how to use your product that's what live chat and contact us does and then once you get to a certain scale you can bury it somewhere else but it is very very helpful all right another cool feature that you can put this chat feature on I saw this with wave AI so pass guess Josh shout out to you but if you hard press this to delete it they're like hey why don't you contact us and you can contact them and get feedback on anything that they might need help with so but here is the little chat feature and you can

13:42

easily take them here contact us and then it shows up it's another great way because you're catching people right as they're about to delete your app so I really like this feature anything I miss if you have to explain what the app does instead of Designing the app through a user experience and true UI intuitively something is wrong all right guys that is it so here I'm going to summarize this look there it is there's the big board these are the features that we feel like you must have and obviously if you feel like we're missing anything leave a comment below so the theme for him and I getting together is to help you guys get to product Market fit fast so you don't waste a lot of time and more importantly you don't waste a lot of money those two are tied together when you have money you don't want to waste time when you don't have money you have all the time to invest but stop wasting time and money those are your

14:34

most valuable resources all right I'm if the audience wants to connect with you I'm going to send them to bev.com the letter B the number sd.com if you're looking for an app agency that can help you develop the right features the right products the right everything so that you don't waste money and time go check out b7d dev.com and him's got a new YouTube channel that he's going to be be sharing a lot of his knowledge on and it is called the rational startup on YouTube so go search for it or click on the link in the YouTube description as well I'm if the audience wants to connect with you in any other way do you want to send them anywhere else contact me through the website or or My Name Chim bev.com is my email okay B7 Dev we have a form of contact what we talking about so it's the easiest way to contact thank you so much him for doing this and we'll see you on the next video