VEYGO
Mobile App MVP To Validate a New Business Idea - Veygo Car Insurance
CHALLENGE
To deliver a mobile app MVP in 4 - 6 weeks.
About the Client
Veygo is part of Admiral Group - one of the top and leading car insurance companies in the UK, voted Best Car Insurance Provider seven years in a row!
Veygo is a temporary car insurance company that enables you to easily activate car insurance in minutes. You can get it instantly, no matter if you need it for a few hours, a day, a week. However you like it, from 1 hour to 30 days.
Why Build the MVP?
You might already know that one of the reasons why startups fail is the lack of product-market fit. And building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a great way to build not only web and mobile apps, but also digital business around them with relatively small risk (or highly efficient risk mitigation).
Building an MVP is also close to the iteration cycle, which means that you take the core functionality of your app, and you arrive at the market without any additional functionalities to get as much feedback from users as possible and adapt to it. This way, you don’t have to spend too much investment on things that are not needed at the beginning, as well as you won’t get too attached to the idea if it’s not going to work out. One of the main benefits of using the MVP approach is that you can immediately get wonderful feedback straight from the users and validate your idea quite easily. And that’s exactly the goal Veygo had in mind.
To find out more on how to build an MVP, check the video below:
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The MVP Development Process
TYPE OF PRODUCT | TIME | TECHNOLOGY | PRIORITY |
MVP | 4-6 WEEKS | REACT NATIVE | TIME TO MARKET |
Veygo’s business requirements
Time To Market (4-6 weeks to build crucial functionalities)
Idea Validation (check the assumptions)
Recognize Market Signals (uncover needs and potential opportunities)
Risk Mitigation (Minimize financial loss if we decide to abandon the idea)
MVP functional objectives
Track learning progress
Schedule lessons/practice/tests
Send push notifications with reminders about upcoming lessons, important dates,etc.
Display content in an attractive form.
MVP functional requirements
The ability to track each customer event to understand which features they engage with most and least
The ability to upload and link educational material such as articles and videos
The ability to serve third party educational material within the app (e.g. Youtube videos)
The ability to capture customer data as they tell us more about their learning to drive journey and store it in places such as Mailchimp (for customer email)
Each customer must agree to the privacy policy statement before they give us any data and we should have a record to show that they have
The ability to push scheduled messages / notifications to customers based on the lesson dates they give us
Record of notification settings chosen (at user level) that we can access and see
The ability to trigger and serve rewards (like discount codes)
The ability to save customer progress locally (for them) and externally (for us)
The ability to tailor and serve content relative to the customer’s progress
Technologies Used in the MVP Development
React Native & Expo
TypeScript
Firebase
Styled Components
Node.js
Sanity as a Headless CMS
Choosing the Right Technology: Native vs Pwa vs React Native
While gathering the initial requirements, we also took part in the process of choosing the right technology. There were three different technologies on the table:
Native Development
Progressive Web App (PWA)
We went through all the proposals, starting from the main criteria: time to market.
Features | Native Development | Progressive Web App PWA | Cross-platform development |
PROS |
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CONS |
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VERDICT | Since the MVP doesn’t require, nor contain any heavy functionalities the cost of hiring a native developer (or two to appear on both platforms) and the future cost of maintaining, as well as the speed of implementing new features - the native approach is mismatched. | Because of lacking core features like push notifications a PWA approach was also a mismatch. | The MVP is a perfect use case for React Native. Thanks to React Native we could achieve all current and future project objectives in a shorter time, as well as it appeared to be much more cost-efficient choice. |
Why not Native Development?
Veygo believes that if you put a shorter deadline on delivery, you will have to shrink the functionalities to the absolute minimum, and that’s exactly what they wanted.
All they need the prototype for, is to check the assumptions, and the MVP concept was perfectly enough to do so. If the feedback doesn't fit the assumptions, they won’t be going further with the development.
However, native development didn’t appear to be the fastest, nor the cheapest way to build the MVP, especially if you want to launch the app on both iOS and Android platforms.
On top of that, they were ready to abandon the idea, if it didn’t meet the market fit, so native development seemed to be too much time and cost consuming for such an initiative.
Why not a Progressive Web App (PWA)?
As an alternative, they were considering using Progressive Web App (PWA) development.
“We need a simple advice, like: these things are really complicated, and these things are not, so that we can weight specific functionalities and prioritise"
And as we started talking about functionalities we found that one of the most important functionalities are push notifications. Unfortunately, with PWA you cannot have the iOS push notifications. Even more, you cannot publish a PWA app on the AppStore.
The winner: Cross-platform approach with React Native
In summary, to:
keep the short development time,
get to market faster,
get the most important functionalities working,
be on both App Store and Google Play,
and make a quality MVP that we can easily reuse in the final product,
React Native appeared to be an ultimate, and a perfect solution.
Choosing a Technology Partner
In general, it’s really helpful to find someone who is able to understand your business and strategy objectives. It’s also great if the partner is able to translate those objectives into technical requirements in a clear and easy-to-understand way. This is why Veygo decided to use the help of external tech consultant to help them find the right resources.
In short, they wanted “to deliver a good quality MVP in 4-6 weeks”. As Hannah explained in her Clutch review, one of the deciding factors was clarity.
“We reached out to 2–3 development companies, but we were really struck by how Pagepro was able to keep things simple while still explaining to us how they would deliver the idea that we had. They checked all the boxes and also were very affordable — for us, it just made perfect sense to work with them.”
Veygo’s Top Deciding Factors While Choosing an Agency
SIMPLICITY IN COMMUNICATION
ABILITY TO WORK WITH TIGHT DEADLINE
WORK ETHIC AND QUALITY ASSURANCE
COST-EFFICIENCY
Results
After a few weeks of ork, we’ve arrived with the MVP, ready to test the assumptions. There were quite a few that Veygo wanted to check:
Are people willing to tell us about their journey?
Can we analyze the data they give us?
Can we tailor content in a meaningful way?
Does our app fit into the traditional learning to drive journey?
Do learners want to track their progress?
Quite unexpectedly, before Veygo even checked all the assumptions, they were already quite sure that the app was a great idea. They were able to acquire enough happy users to recognize the potential, and this is why (just after a few weeks) they decided to move into further development.
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That’s an underrated skill that Pagepro has. They are able to simplify things. They’ve been quick, and they always deliver at the end of each two-week sprint. On top of that, the quality was excellent from the first time.
Hannah ScottProduct Owner, Veygo
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