I agreed with everything right up until the "extra time for design" section. I spent last year building a startup and have thought a lot about MVPs. Coming from

I agreed with everything right up until the "extra time for design" section. I spent last year building a startup and have thought a lot about MVPs. Coming from a background of building big expensive systems, it took a lot to shake the mindset of "do it right from the ground up". My cofounder did a great job at pushing me towards the absolute minimal solution to learn what we wanted to learn - I don't need to spin up a backend and write CSS, I can use Wix to mock it up and see how that goes, THEN build it properly. The idea is to learn as much as possible (read The Lean Startup if you haven't). If you build too much in one go, you're going to have tied yourself to one vision of how your users will use the product and be more closed to learning from them what they actually need. Note that you were persuaded by a designer to make the design nicer, not a user, potential user or even product manager. What was the problem with launching, and then deciding that design was the next priority and working on it while your product was running? [disclaimer: I definitely haven't got this figured out as we shutdown the company and I'm back building Big Expensive Systems]