How to redevelop a custom mobile app with Lean Startup?

Posted on April 11, 2019 |

or VPN Zone Redevelop app Story

Hi there. Previously, we wrote about how we launched The Pregnancy Yoga app and The Weight Loss app. This time, we would like to highlight some small tricks that we used to redevelop the VPN-based app.

VPN Zone by RBCOM, at a first glance, is one more VPN app in the UK. But the key points of it are numerous VPN spots, high speed, and minimal app design.

The app got some average feedback and based on this they decided to attract more users. So, they worked on app redesign.

Intro

Rohan B. (app product manager) reached us within talent on-demand service with a request for app redesign once the design was ready. As it was legacy code, we’ve provided a free code review service. So, we could see what we were in need to work with. As they required app development support, there was no other option except to move forward with Time & Material work format. So, we used a pretty common Atlassian Kanban board for task management and Slack for communication.

Work Scope

We had a quite simple work scope: – redesign the app; – dynamic pricing within AppStore payment; and – add analytics.

We would like to highlight that the main point for any startup/digital project is analytics. It is crucial as you need to hear and analyze the behavior of your customers. That’s what the VPN Zone app owner did – they added analytics to each button and user behavior in the app. As Steven Blank said:

“In a startup, the founders define the product vision and then use customer discovery to find customers and a market for that vision.”

— The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

VPN Zone shows a nice Lean Startup move:

“A core component of Lean Startup methodology is the build-measure-learn feedback loop. The first step is figuring out the problem that needs to be solved and then developing a minimum viable product (MVP) to begin the process of learning as quickly as possible. Once the MVP is established, a startup can work on tuning the engine. This will involve measurement and learning and must include actionable metrics that can demonstrate cause and effect questions.”

— TheLeanStartup.com

In other words, they made the MVP app with the main value. They gathered some feedback. And now, they are implementing changes that customers are asking for (Sure mainly they fixed the speed on the server-side). But, they also made an app redesign, added some iOS app animations, and injected analytics regarding user behavior in the app.