Proof of Concept vs Prototype vs MVP (Key Differences)

In today's mobile-first world, people spend an average of 4.40 hours daily on their smartphones, immersed in apps that touch every aspect of life from ordering meals to finding love. With an app for virtually every need, this saturated digital marketplace presents both opportunities and challenges for businesses entering the space.

Yet success in this competitive landscape demands more than just a brilliant idea. The evolution of app development has taught us a crucial lesson: methodical validation at each development stage can mean the difference between market success and costly failure. This is where understanding three distinct validation approaches becomes essential: Proof of Concept (PoC), Prototype, and Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

Each of these approaches serves a unique purpose in your product's journey from concept to launch. While they might sound similar, they answer fundamentally different questions about your product's viability. What's technically possible? How will users interact with it? Will the market embrace it? Choosing the right approach at the right time can save precious resources while maximizing your chances of market success.

In the following sections, we'll break down the key differences between PoC, Prototype, and MVP, helping you understand when and why to use each approach. By understanding these distinctions, you'll be better equipped to navigate your product's development journey in today's competitive digital landscape.

What is PoC?

PoC stands for Proof Of Concept. The term in itself asks you what is your “Proof of your concept or the idea”. It is to know the feasibility of an idea. This may sometimes not involve any technical work, or might not involve any user feedback. This feasibility study could be technical feasibility or a business model feasibility for your new idea and testing to ensure that the idea is practically possible and will be accepted by your potential users.

It could be a detailed survey with a few hundred prospective users or hundreds of user interviews, or it could even be a technical build of some features.

A PoC will help you understand much quicker and for much cheaper if the idea is worth investing further time and money into.

Example:

Let’s say you want to build a subscription model for EV charging This is a similar business model to ClassPass where on one single subscription users could access various gyms and fitness studios/classes.
However for the EV charging subscription, here are some things a PoC could help you better understand :

Business Model Feasibility Check

1. Identify who your target users would be
2. Average miles were driven in a month
3. Initial, overhead & maintenance costs to run the business
4. What’s the price that’d be attractive for both the user and the business?
5. Why would they pay a subscription, when they could pay per charge?
6. At what scale would charging companies be interested in partnering with you and what bulk rates can you get from them?

Technical feasibility check

1. Is the charging infrastructure interoperable?
2. Can an EV car use the charge from any EV charging network?
3. Do EV charging networks provide an API or
4. Does the car provide an API to get the usage data?

Benefits of Building a PoC

• Validate the concept - It’s no longer an idea in your head. You’ve done some research and have validated the core underlying idea.
• Helps understand potential hurdles or blocks - In building the PoC, you might face various challenges (technical/business/people, etc), and doing the PoC helps you become aware of the challenges that lie ahead when you build the MVP, and how to solve them.
• Increases chances of getting investment - It reduces risks for investors, as they see that sound research has been done on the idea, and if it is built right, it can become a successful venture.
• Saves time, money, and energy - In case the idea is just not viable, the PoC, for a fraction of the cost, would help you save a lot of time, money, and energy as you were able to ‘Hit abort’ much earlier than instead when you had taken investment or built out a full-fledged product with your own money.
• Attract talent - It’s a lot harder to attract talent to join you in building your idea if it's just an idea in your head. With a thorough PoC, top talent (who have ample choices) would see the validation and might find it less risky to take a bet and join you on your mission.

When Should You Build a PoC?

• When the business model of your idea is really unique and there are no competitors or similar products in the market doing something similar.
• When there are technical integrations that might need to be done and they’ve not been done before.
• Alternatively, when there are too many competitors doing something similar, and you want to validate if there’s enough space in the market for your product. And how hard/costly would it be for your product to capture the market?

How to build a PoC?

Try to use as many readily available and off-the-shelf tools for your PoC as possible. Remember the goal of the PoC is to prove the idea has legs, and this is not the end product.

1. Use Survey tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms, etc to run surveys.
2. Use Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to slice and dice data from the surveys.
3. Use Zoom for detailed user interviews to gather more insight.
4. Use as many No-code tools as possible.

Checkout our AI Pocs!

Is Proof of Concept the same as Prototype?

Proof of concept is about understanding your users, and their problems and seeing how your solution sits with them. A clickable prototype is more iterative where you involve your users over multiple rounds of feedback, and they have something visual to give feedback on.

What is a Prototype?

A Prototype or a clickable prototype is a visual representation of your idea, the various useful features, and workflows that would exist in the product. This isn’t the actual product, and it consists of dummy data. There’s mostly no software development done. It will showcase how your product will look and feel if it is deployed. It’s really useful to show it around to potential users, stakeholders, and investors so they can get a better understanding of your idea.

When should you build a prototype?

Building a clickable prototype is the next logical step after validating the PoC. It ensures others “get it” when you’re explaining your idea. It makes it a lot easier to understand.

The prototype is always necessary to showcase what your product will look like. It’s also a lot easier to iterate and perfect your clickable prototype than the final product as moving things around on a screen or tearing down screens or flows altogether is much easier on just design than on the software side.

Examples: Include three clickable prototype links.

Benefits of building a Prototype?

• Quick and constructive feedback - Showing users a clickable prototype is a much better way to get feedback from them than just asking them questions.
• Easy and fast Iteration - Based on feedback from your future users, you can easily and very quickly iterate on the clickable prototype till you and your users feel it’s right.
• Expand your idea reach - Sharing a link to a clickable prototype is a lot easier for your future users. This way, you can start asking some of your users to share the clickable prototype link with their friends to gather more feedback.
• Get the Investors piqued - Investors like seeing that early-stage founders have put in the work. It’s no longer easier to raise funds on just an idea unless you’re a serial entrepreneur with a history of good exits. Your clickable prototype can ensure investors clearly understand your product idea.

How to build a Clickable Prototype?

You can build it on your own using tools like Invision, Balsamiq, Figma, or Sketch to design some of the core workflows of your idea. However, that can take up a lot of time to get you up to the skillset of a solid designer. Hence It’s ideal to work with a good UI / UX designer who can help you quickly put together a beautiful-looking clickable prototype.

What is MVP?

MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. MVP software development is the absolute minimum product that you need to build to solve the user’s problem. It's a no bells, no whistles watered-down version of your end product, that just solves the core problem.

Don’t worry, this again isn’t your end product and this doesn’t have to stay his way. But building an MVP helps you launch a lot faster, get feedback much earlier and make corrections (if needed) quickly, before a whole lot of users start using your product.

What is the difference between Prototype & MVP?

MVP is a functional product that is built using code. It stores actual user data and shows real-world results. It’s not a dummy data prototype. MVP is the next step after you’ve gathered feedback from your users on your clickable prototype. Feedback for MVP is to check if the problem is solved thoroughly, but the feedback on the clickable prototype is about how the problem should be solved.

PoC vs. Prototypes Vs Mvp: What's the difference?

Imagine you're planning to open a restaurant. You have this brilliant idea for a fusion cuisine that combines traditional Italian dishes with Japanese flavours. Before investing your life savings and signing a lease, you'll want to validate your concept – but how? This is where understanding the differences between a Proof of Concept, Prototype, and MVP becomes crucial, not just for restaurants but for any product or service.

The Proof of Concept: Testing Your Core Idea

Think of a PoC like testing your signature dish in your home kitchen first. Before you worry about restaurant décor or menu design, you need to know if your fusion recipes actually work. Can you consistently create dishes that blend these cuisines successfully? Will the ingredients work together? Can you prepare them efficiently?

In the tech world, this is similar to testing whether your innovative feature or technology actually works. For example, when Snapchat first conceived the idea of disappearing messages, they needed to prove they could create messages that would genuinely delete themselves after viewing. This technical validation was crucial before thinking about the app's design or user interface.

The Prototype: Visualizing the Experience

Now, let's say your fusion recipes work perfectly. The next step would be creating a prototype – similar to hosting a small dinner party where you're not just testing the food, but the entire dining experience. How do people react to the presentation? Is the portion size right? How do they interact with the menu?

This is exactly what companies do when they create product prototypes. When Netflix was transitioning from DVD rentals to streaming, they first created prototypes of their streaming interface. These weren't fully functional – think of them as interactive mockups that showed how users would browse and select movies, without actually streaming anything. This helped them refine the user experience before building the complete streaming infrastructure.

The MVP: Your Soft Opening

Finally, we reach the MVP stage, in our restaurant analogy, this would be like opening a food truck or a pop-up restaurant. It's not your final vision of a full-service restaurant, but it's a real, working business serving actual customers. You're offering a limited menu of your best dishes, learning from real customer feedback, and generating actual revenue.

Airbnb's MVP story perfectly illustrates this concept. The founders simply put an air mattress in their living room and created a basic website to offer cheap accommodation during a design conference. They weren't trying to build a global hospitality empire yet – they just wanted to test if people would pay to stay in someone's home.

Why These Differences Matter

Understanding these distinctions helps you save time and money while reducing risk. Think about it:

- A PoC saves you from investing heavily in an idea that might not be technically feasible

- A prototype prevents you from building something people find confusing or difficult to use

- An MVP helps you avoid creating a full-featured product that nobody wants to buy

Just as you wouldn't sign a five-year restaurant lease before knowing if people enjoy your food, you shouldn't invest significant resources in product development before validating your core assumptions. Each step builds upon the previous one, providing different types of crucial feedback that help shape your final product.

Remember, even tech giants like Google and Facebook started with simpler versions of their current products. Google began as a basic search engine without ads or additional services, while Facebook was initially just a way for college students to connect. They used these early versions to validate their ideas before expanding into the comprehensive platforms we know today.

The key is choosing the right validation method for your current stage and needs. Whether you're launching a new restaurant, developing an app, or creating any new product, understanding these differences helps you make smarter decisions about how to test and validate your ideas effectively.

Is MVP the same as the Beta Version?

MVP is more of an early-stage product than the Beta version. MVP is when you have brought the essential part of your product in front of the user for the first time. It is the starting stage of building your idea. Beta is more of various early versions of the complete product. The beta will come only after the MVP is validated.

Benefits of building an MVP

• Cost & Time Saving - Instead of investing heavily in getting a full-fledged product developed, you can invest in the minimum version of your product which can solve the major pain point of your user. It may cost a fraction of the full-fledged product cost and helps in launching faster than the overall product
• Let your users guide you - It is quite easy to fall victim to over-engineering. When you launch your MVP, let your users tell you what they want next on the product, and that’s the best way to build a product that will be loved and used, and paid for by your customers.
• Reduce risk - Once you’ve built the MVP and got good feedback and traction, you become a very lucrative product that investors would want to fund the further development of. This reduces your own risk of putting more of your own money into the development and also gives you the benefits of good PR and trust that comes with venture funding.
• Gain Market share - If your product is innovative, you should aim to get to market quickly to prevent others from launching before you and grabbing the market share.

How to Build an MVP?

1. Partner with an MVP Development Service- Creating a comprehensive MVP requires diverse expertise, from backend and frontend developers to designers, product managers, and quality analysts. Building an in-house team with all these specialists can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Collaborating with an experienced development partner can streamline this process, providing access to a complete team while optimizing both time and costs. This approach allows you to focus on your business vision while technical experts handle the development process.
2. Hire a CTO- If you do not have a background in software engineering, it’s recommended to hire a CTO or get a friend with a background in software engineering to oversee your MVP development as a consultant till you’re able to hire a full-time CTO. It’s quite unlikely that the CTO can build the entire product themselves (though such ninjas do exist, we have some on our team as well), so the CTO would be helpful in picking the right outsourced team and collaborating with them on the MVP development.
3. Build your in-house team- This is ideal to do once you’ve built your MVP and have launched and raised funding. Hiring your own in-house team would make sense and be a lot easier when you have a runway($) and product roadmap of at least 18-24 months, as you do not want to be in a position to fire your employees a few months after you’ve just hired them. Also hiring an in-house team can be a lot expensive as there are other overheads beyond salary like Insurance covers, paid vacation, Office, Laptops and other devices, Internet infrastructure, and other costs. Plus you would end up giving away equity to your early employees.

When Should You Build an MVP?

When you’ve done your homework with the PoC and have gotten strong positive feedback on the clickable prototype, then you should be moving forward with the MVP development at full speed.

It is not a written rule that you have to follow the process of first building a PoC, then a clickable prototype & then the MVP. You could skip the PoC and clickable prototype if there are similar products already on the market.

The most important aspect is to understand what is the right way forward for you. At F22 Labs, we love working with and guiding first-time entrepreneurs to build their MVPs and build startups that solve problems!