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Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

214 points by zdw 5y ago

jasfi 5y ago
It's still a tried and trusted approach. It may not fit every situation, but there's a big emphasis on derisking and early marketing which can't be ignored. I'm incorporating options like that into https://cxo.industries https://cxo.industries, a web app to help founders with making informed choices.
adamnemecek 5y ago
Someone finally said it. Also not all things fit the mvp paradigm.
- hgomersall 5y ago
  The Lean Startup is very clear on both the why and the limitations of an MVP. Within that framework what constitutes an MVP is pretty obvious. In a nutshell you need to put something out that helps you learn as much as possible as quickly as possible. That is the primary purpose of an MVP and it should be considered both minimal and viable in that context.
drewcoo 5y ago
This seems to be arguing that the complete implementation is what matters most. That seems expensive and risky.
- izacus 5y ago
  Yes, a complete, well-rounded implementation is what makes for a successful product (where well-rounded == supports use-cases for customers well). It is expensive (which is why it costs a lot to create a startup) and it is very risky (which is why most startups fail because they mess this up).
  - altdataseller 5y ago
    Exactly, none of this stuff is easy. And it's not supposed to be easy and risk-free. Otherwise, anyone could build a successful startup/product
thinkingkong 5y ago
MVP as a concept suffers from the whole “implement the acronym” problem. At one point it was a helpful tool for understanding some repeatable patterns in startup product management, but its turned into something else. I suppose its mostly cargo culting startup advice these days.
- antupis 5y ago
  Yeah it has go kinda same way as "agile", where people use both terms without understanding what it actually means and how to implement those. But that does not mean that "agile" or "MVP" is death and you should not use those.
lmm 5y ago
> An example of too much minimalism would be failing to implement UI pagination and your UI falling over with more than 20 objects, because you didn’t think about the use case. Maybe you haven’t thought about scale-out or upgrades or you can install on only one operating system. A serious buyer can sniff out this incompleteness and won’t take you seriously, and only serious domain experience can fill in these gaps. You can’t expect your buyer to be like “hey, nice try with this prototype but I can tell this won’t scale to more than 20 objects”. They are looking to you to be the expert. IME this part is completely wrong, unless it's defining "serious buyer" in such a way that most of your market isn't one. > Time is short, funding is short (especially if you are running on your own money), and you don’t want to waste time. > Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build. Wait until you see the exact right thing, because you are about to put too much of your lifeforce into it, and if you don’t, you have a much harder road ahead. You want to know it will work, and this requires cultivated instinct. When the time is right and you know enough, that’s when you decide to have a product. Ok so what is the author advocating doing until then? Sitting around twiddling your thumbs until inspiration strikes? The whole point of the MVP is: build just enough to find out whether this is a viable business or not. And nothing in the article seems to be contrary to that. It's a whole lot of words but the only advice seems to be to have better instincts (how?) and just make a better product bro.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  > IME this part is completely wrong, unless it's defining "serious buyer" in such a way that most of your market isn't one. I used to be such a "serious buyer". I represented a large government agency with over 2,000 sites and several hundred thousand employees. Vendors would turn up with "cute" web apps that used drop downs to select objects like security groups or user accounts. This works great when you're developing in a toy environment in your dev lab. In the real world, merely clicking something like that will make both the server and client use gigabytes of memory until either one or both crash. Here's the thing though: if you can put just a modicum of engineering effort into making your software suitable for non-toy scenarios, then winning even just one enterprise customer like this could make your rich. Win two or three similar orgs in other states or countries and you can start subscribing to Superyacht Owners' Quarterly. But there will be no yacht because you used a drop-down. A simple control that can be implemented in minutes instead of a search box that takes a few extra lines of code. Sorry... PS: On a more serious note, I had a checklist that wasn't long or all that difficult to implement, and 90% of vendors would fail outright on most/all points. 1. Search-for-select 2. A provisioning API of some sort (REST, PowerShell, whatever) 3. Hierarchical permissions & delegation 4. Hierarchical policy & preferences 5. Single-sign-on support 6. Central audit & error logging 7. Clone-to-deploy and/or highly automated setup. 8. Don't demand Domain Admin rights for setup. 9. No quadratic (or worse) scaling issues. (USE INDEXES in the DB!!)
dzikimarian 5y ago
MVP is tool like any other. It might be used well (to validate an idea) or may be used poorly (to implement semi-functional piece of software, which is strictly worse than the peers). There's also nothing wrong with pivoting, because while you may implement working businesses case, along the way you may discover one, that's better for you and your customers. Of course it can be used in pathological manner as any tool again. I think, that what should be definitely busted in IT(or maybe in general?) is easily talking in absolutes (OOP best/bad, functional programming best/bad, k8s best/bad). Everything depends on the context. Especially would be great to see that altitude from members of academia, because they influence a lot of young engineers.
onion2k 5y ago
Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build. This is exactly what killed my first startup. We believed we fully understood what the customer needs and that we should build the right product before we started selling. We were actually trying to build the minimum viable product, but we were hilariously (with hindsight) wrong about what the customers wanted. Almost all our ideas were just wrong enough to make the product fail to solve the customers pains. They solved the pains we'd had in the past brilliantly, but sadly that wasn't relevant. We weren't buying our product. Starting out with the notion that you already know everything you need to know will kill your startup. Running a startup is as much about spotting and understanding the signals that you discover along the way as it is about building what you think you customers need. A minimum viable product is not "selling the least effort product you can get away with", it's spending the least amount of time you can to build something that you can use to gather more data than you can use to focus your product on what the customer wants rather than what you think they want. Building what you think the customer wants will very likely be wrong - customers lie, they're deluded, they don't understand their own problems, and they can't see value in solutions. But they do start to understand the problem when they see a solution to it, even if it's the minimum viable solution. And then they start having ideas about what else they can pay for to make it better...
- borski 5y ago
  I came here to say this. The author of the article does not understand what an MVP is. An MVP is the eventual answer to a metric fuckton of customer development, not what you go into customer development with. If you think you already know what the customer wants, I wish you luck at your next startup after this one fails; you don’t know that, and neither does your customer, or they would have built / bought it already. It’s your job to find the real problems they’re facing, and then build a solution that makes them rip it out of your hands before it’s even done. then, iterate.
  - rwmj 5y ago
    With Ansible, Mike already had a successful prototype (func) which had been developed and used by the Fedora infrastructure team for a while. He then left Red Hat and worked on Ansible. So he did in fact already know what the customer wanted! However that's an unusual case for a start-up. https://opensource.com/article/21/2/ansible-origin-story https://opensource.com/article/21/2/ansible-origin-story
arkitaip 5y ago
> What is there to be careful of MVP as a strategy? Well, to start, I don’t think MVP works. The risk is you’re going to build something and nobody will come (or stay), and then you’ll run out of money. MVPs don't exist in a vacuum, they are part of a larger effort to figure out your business model (what is the actual problem? Who are your customers? How will you make money?) in the most efficient way possible. For a MVP to make sense, you have to do user research and truly understand the problem domain. > Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build. This is wishful thinking. Tons of products and companies fail simply because founders think they "know" what their business model is when in fact it's just a bunch of unverified assumptions about the market.
danielovichdk 5y ago
Read "Bulid the Right It". Then an MVP makes perfect sense. A great session from the author here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njZ4H-5WRYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njZ4H-5WRYA
rmbyrro 5y ago
> The risk is you’re going to build something and nobody will come (or stay), and then you’ll run out of money. Maybe author is conflating MVP with "build and they'll come". They're quite different ideas, although are frequently seen together in the same minds. "Build and they'll come" is silly. 95% of businesses will need effort to bring products to consumers. Some form of marketing and/or sales. One great risk is whether you can market and or sell the product. That's where MVPs help. Simulating marketing/sales without any product usually is not a good predictor of reality.
- smilespray 5y ago
  > Maybe author is conflating MVP with "build and they'll come". They're quite different ideas, although are frequently seen together in the same minds. I think the author is pointing out that other people are conflating the ideas. I don't think the author advocates building a fully-fledged 1.0 product before getting real-world feedback. I've worked for startups that kept shouting "MVP, MVP" for each new feature (and customer) we built. What we got in return for that was a heap of half-finished features, lots of technical debt — and not a single happy customer.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    Then you weren’t building MVPs, because V stands for “viable”. Devs I’ve worked with will sometimes hear “MVP” and think “prototype”. Not really sure why. An MVP needs polish, it’s just a way of keeping a narrow focus and avoiding bike shedding.
    - smilespray 5y ago
      Absolutely agree. I was about to make an edit to my post pointing out that we missed the "viable" part. I work in UX, so I kept shouting to deaf ears. Unfortunately, it was seldom my decision to make.
- rob74 5y ago
  "Build it and they'll come" is pure survivor's bias. It's true that there are some products (Wordle, Minecraft, Undertale, lots of other indie games, ...) that were built by single developers or small teams with little to no marketing and became wildly successful anyway. But nobody is remembering the thousands of products that tried to follow this strategy and failed (or still exist in complete obscurity).
CipherThrowaway 5y ago
Bit of an arrogant and directionless rant with no concrete detail and many false dichotomies. "Just build the right product" is like saying "just don't write bugs" or "just have money." It feels like DeHaan is reacting to the idea of exploration because he thinks you should just know everything to begin with. Knowing everything upfront is definitely better than exploring your domain, product and market incrementally. The problem is that this rarely happens in practice. Founders who adopt DeHaan's attitude and think they can leapfrog the exploratory phase of their startup usually end up failing.
- smilespray 5y ago
  This wasn't what I got out of the article. Too many people focus on the Minimum, and don't care about the Viable or the Product. There are table stakes. MVP doesn't mean half-assed and buggy. They misuse the concept and release any old crap. As a result, MVP has become too much of a buzzword and the intention behind it got lost.
  - movedx 5y ago
    That doesn't mean the MVP is a bad idea, then. That means it's being poorly implemented.
    - da_chicken 5y ago
      If an idea is routinely implemented badly, then it is a bad idea to implement it at all.
      - kuraudoOishii 5y ago
        I don't think such an absolutism holds water: great ideas don't exist in vacuums. There is no magic bullet which makes startups successful: lots of things, big and small, need to come together to make it. I think the article touches on several failings which aren't actually the fault of mvps at all.
      - heuroci 5y ago
tome 5y ago
> The emphasis should be on viable and product, and getting there ASAP. So… a minimum viable product?
- milkers 5y ago
  It should be a viable product first. You need to build it fast. So you have to keep its size/feature-set minimum.
- zanellato19 5y ago
  This made me stopped reading this post. He says it shouldn't be on minimal, then goes on to describe... A MVP.
- ProAm 5y ago
  > So… a minimum viable product? For most companies a MVP is planting a fast growing seed of technical debt. It's rushed, not polished, full of bugs and used to see if you have any traction because your Product Owners and Sales teams usually have a significant disconnect and development is thought of as an after thought. If you can do a MVP in 1 month, but a minimal polished product in 2, I think that extra month will pay for itself if the product is worth anything. The worse thing a company can do is have your customers fund your products with a JIT development process. Sure some companies can get it right doing a true MVP, but most cant and it shows.
rozenmd 5y ago
In my experience, building into a "red ocean" of 200 competitors, the MVP concept is still valid, but the goalposts have shifted. Whereas before the advice might have been "just build a tiny solution to the problem you're solving, and see what people think", these days folks don't take you seriously without SaaS-like features around it, like inviting their team to the tool, auth, etc
robertlagrant 5y ago
I think this is a bit of a misread of what MVP means. It's not a prototype or a way to search for the right product to build. It's prioritising the minimum set of features to launch a viable product. That pretty obviously implies that you already know what to build, at least roughly, so that thinking has been done. If you need more than 20 objects and pagination, then that's part of the V in MVP. The difference is that you don't spend 2 years on 100 features you think people will want (or even, people tell you they want) - you boil that research down to 15 features that can work together as a product that you've defined will be useful, and then build the next set of features on top that will allow you to access more of the market, partly based on what you learned from the previous iteration, etc etc. You may still spend 2 years building (and you should definitely carve out budget assuming that) and you may still build 100 features, but you launched much earlier to get information, and you may have built 30 features differently due to the extra information you got, and you'll have got a pretty battle-tested product into the market by the end of the two years. You probably know all this. I'm restating because I read so many articles that confuse an idea with observed (or anecdotal) bad implementations, and this seems to do the same thing.
_448 5y ago
Lot of "processes" that comes out of silicon valley(and in general US) should be adopted with caution. "Try before you buy" approach should be used. First let it settle in the industry(at least in the US) and then test and adapt to your project on a case-by-case basis. Take any process, Lean, MVP, Agile, etc are paraded as if they are solution to every Mommy's and Daddy's problem. It is not. One size does not fit all. The only statement(which is an old wisdom out of the UK computing industry) is "There is no silver bullet". This applies to everything in life, even MVPs. MVPs works for most software startups(and some other creative industries), but it is not viable for everyone. So saying that it "always works" or "it is busted" are both wrong statements.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Building a viable product is of course something you need to do as a company to succeed. Building a minimum viable product on the other hand might just trap you into building a product quickly that isn't viable because you end up throwing away the baby with the bathwater. The problem is with the word minimum. How much of your product can you strip away without losing the value proposition? If you strip away too much, it won't be viable. This is where startup methodology of building something quickly and then failing is at odds with the traditional way of doing something well and then growing a business around that. It's a slower process but occasionally such companies become big. Investors are obsessed with taking short cuts to success. So they'll favor companies that build an MVP. Most of those will fail but occasionally they get lucky and the failures are relatively quick and painless (think acquihires). An MVP is easier if you eliminate all risk. Like the outcomes of potentially risky R&D or actually doing anything complicated and risky. Of course the intersection of low risk stuff and actually valuable stuff is pretty narrow. So investors love things like uber, air bnb, because all these things are are simple variations of market places and easy to understand. They are no-tech companies and their MVP is a simple website. All they needed early on is marketing, business development, some generic full stack coders and lots of cash to fake it until they make it. MVP thinking breeds generic no-tech startups. Some of these end up being valuable but most of them don't really do anything that is technically interesting. Or valuable. Or viable. There's a different class of companies that follow a very different pattern. These are tech companies that start with some hard core R&D. They are risky investments with a non linear payoff (relative to the investment) in case things work out. SpaceX is a good example. They got close to failing after spending many billions. And then they made it to orbit and with a lot more investment they eventually got the company profitable. The MVP for a rocket company is a rocket that makes it to orbit. The MVP for a nuclear fusion plant is building a plant that produces power. That has not happened yet of course but people are spending billions trying to make that happen. That's a different type of investor that does that. Usually, these investors will base their decisions on very early proofs of concept, founder reputation, or other signals of things looking promising.
chris_nielsen 5y ago
I think there’s two kinds of MVP in common use and they’re both valid tools in specific situations. In Lean Startup, Eric Ries argues that if your business has giant unknowns. Big leap of faith assumptions. Then you’re best off using the scientific process to validate those unknowns before you do anything else. Start with a theory, design experiments and analyse the results. Repeat. The MVP is the experiment. It’s a pity that he didn’t call it “quickest experiment”, because that’s what a Lean Startup MVP is, just the quickest experiment you can use to validate your businesses assumptions. And how can using a “quickest experiment” be old and broken? It’s a perfectly valid approach sometimes. The other common use of the term MVP is to ruthlessly cull a products features before the first release. To find the MINIMUM PRODUCT that would be VIABLE. People use the term that way because that’s what it sounds like an MVP would be. And again… it’s a perfectly valid approach. How could it be old and broken to pragmatically limit the scope of a first release to the minimum set of features that users find viable so that you can keep as much time as possible for responding to change. Anyway, I think the two kinds of MVPs are still good tools in the right hands when used in the right situations. I’d hate to throw away good tools just because they don’t work in every possible situation.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  > And again… it’s a perfectly valid approach. It's a valid approach in certain markets. But if you're FAANG and launch that sort of MVP going against mature products from your competitors, often replacing a more feature complete product with an existing user base that you try to port over... well, you're going to get destroyed. As keeps happening to Google because they don't seem to realise that the market has moved on and you can't launch things like Gmail any more.
  - another-dave 5y ago
    > But if you're FAANG and launch that sort of MVP going against mature products from your competitors, often replacing a more feature complete product with an existing user base that you try to port over... well, you're going to get destroyed. I think what you're describing though is if you cull too many features, i.e. if you try to launch _below_ the minimum that's viable for your product-market fit, you'll always get destroyed. You get some more leeway if you're the only offering in a problem space, but going up against incumbents really raises the bar of what the viable minimum is. That said, you _can_ offer less features but a better execution — e.g. there's a lot of challenge banks (Monzo, Revolut, Starling, etc.) doing well in the UK at the moment (in the sense of customer acquisition, at least). I remember when they were applying for their banking licences, a lot of people working in traditional fintech were saying that they'd be a flash in the pan & that customers wouldn't switch to these new businesses until they had parity in terms of offering things like loans and mortgages. But the offering of trad banks was _so bad_ that people were willing to overlook a lot of missing features for a better UX on their day-to-day banking.
smitty1e 5y ago
> The whole MVP process presumes you don’t know what you are making for a product... Then how can the minimum viabilty be judged? This seems a logical flaw, theoretically speaking. As a practical matter, inexperience may lead to not understanding what the term even means. But that has more to with people than the acronym. No term is immune to human debasement.
vinay_ys 5y ago
Key point I agree with: - hire people with domain and technical expertise; don't stumble through without expertise and having to reinvent things poorly and fail. The author seems to be advising to wait till you have a fairly concrete business idea and the required technical and domain expertise for starting up – especially with your own money – because both time and money are in short supply. This is great advice if you want to build a new business with you own savings or with debt etc, but without funding from VCs. If it is VC funded, in the early rounds, you are basically an experimental bet for the VC – a small risk for a potential huge upside. For you too it should be the same – a small risk bet with a potential huge upside (you shouldn't starve yourself). By the time you get to bigger funding rounds, you have figured out – product market fit and execution – that you and VCs believe this is scalable and hence the bigger round. If you fail at the earlier rounds, that's an expected likely outcome. If you and VCs have a relationship of mutual admiration, then you continue to be funded to do something else – the pivot. When this happens, VCs and you should consider the previous investment as mostly a write-off and think of this as a new start. After a few such pivots, the VCs may lose confidence and hence you run out of funding. You may also be burnt out (from the high-stakes decision fueled execution stress) and choose to return the money and take a break. All this is perfectly normal and expected in VC land.
phlsa 5y ago
Like every method that gets condensed to an acronym, MVP has been used to justify lots of bad decisions. For example, I worked in very engineering-driven environments where “viable” meant nothing more than “it compiles”. Especially when combined with an over-reliance on quantitative metrics (and an under-appreciation of qualitative research) this leads to lots of ideas being killed prematurely. This meme has helped me a lot when communicating in these situations: https://imgur.com/a/pSY7IrF https://imgur.com/a/pSY7IrF From that point of view, I can understand the author, but “you should just know what’s going to be successful” isn’t a very useful alternative. Even with great knowledge of your customers and domain, your first (or second, or third) solution might not be the right fit. Just think of all the personal projects that never end up getting used, even by the author. In the end, the problem with MVPs and similar methods that get popular is that people think they can replace good judgement with a method. The methods can help, but they won’t do the thinking for you and they won’t make anything risk-free.
Khelavaster 5y ago
But...by definition, if the product isn't viable it isn't a minimum viable product.
punnerud 5y ago
Paul Graham had references to MVP before Lean Startup, he called it "release early" in 2006: http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html Quote: "By "release early" I don't mean you should release something full of bugs, but that you should release something minimal."
adrr 5y ago
Ability to pivot and agility is what separates the losers from the winners. In evolution, it is not the strongest that survives, it is the one that can adapt to changes. Building an MVP is being agile. I was leading engineering at a finance company that offered ways to invest in an ESG fund that the company managed. The product had no traction. We had 6 months of runway left in the bank and no investor would even touch us with near 0 growth. This was when Wells Fargo scandal hit and people were angry at their banks. We pivoted to online banking and released a banking app in 4 months. 10x our customer base and raised $40m in under a year. If we kept just building out the investment product, we would have failed.
wilde 5y ago
I think the way MVP is usually quoted at people is confusing. It should be something like “maximize the amount of feedback you’re getting from customers”.
- dncornholio 5y ago
  Or: do the least amount of work for a reasonable amount of return. You are not maximising anything (yet) imo.
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
The article separates 'Survey your Customers' and 'Know your Market' like they are two different things. Not sure how you can deprecate the customer input, and stress your own market knowledge without your head exploding.
blunte 5y ago
Every company/startup will be different in some way, so what MVP means for them -- and the reason they go that route -- will be unique. At least in some cases, MVP is the minimal product you made which illustrates your solution, your value proposition. You use that to get big investment to build "the real one". Unfortunately, some (many?) companies want to take that MVP and live with it indefinitely, organically (sloppily) growing it as they go. MVP can be seen as that thing you do which gives you the opportunity to exist but which gradually drags you to the bottom of the sea with technical debt.
bgroat 5y ago
Last year I tried to launch something like a dozen small companies based on an "MVP" or 80/20 approach. The hypothesis being that even if not a full 80/20 split, I could ~probably~ catch 50% of the value by catering to the core 20% of features. This was completely incorrect. I made 12 things that made ~no money. SaaS is by no means saturated, but it is mature enough that you can't just crank out crap and make money. Buyers are sophisticated
xwdv 5y ago
I think the problem with MVP today is that MVPs have such a shorter lifespan now compared to the past decade that by the time you iterate into a full product it should have happened so fast that it looks like you basically built the right product from the start. If you don’t go fast you will miss the opportunity and be beaten by a competitor.
cestith 5y ago
If it's not viable, it's not a minimum viable product because it's not viable. If it's not something you can sell or at least market to customers, it's not a minimum viable product because it's not a product. If it doesn't meet enough needs in a clear enough way, it's not a minimum viable product because you haven't met the minimum. MVP is not a longterm goal, but it can be an important stepping stone. All three of those words matter, though, not just the "minimum". It has to be a viable product. Once you have an product that is viable, you can start selling it as a solution to some problems and find out what else those paying customers want it to do. Don't give up three years of income making a product more than it has to be, but don't release that small starter version yet if it's buggy or confusing, either.
- garethrowlands 5y ago
  Absolutely! The "minimum" in MVP is about minimising the time until a viable product's in the market. It's not that worse is better, it's that - other things being equal - quicker is better.
mangoman 5y ago
I generally agree that MVP tends to be cargo-culted rather than chosen as an intentional strategy. Most people who tend to spew the term often don't even know what they mean. I also agree on people tending to focus way too much on the 'minimum' and not nearly enough on the 'viable'. for example, how can you know if investing in the UI or design of a product is necessary for viability? I've seen that any interesting UI is often cut in the effort to find an MVP... but, well, sometimes an interesting design actually increases viability.
niahmiah 5y ago
Seems to me that the author doesn’t understand what MVP means. Old maybe, but busted? Gtfo
Ologn 5y ago
In 2011 I released an app which was an education in MVP for me. I knew there was an free open source Java library that parsed Microsoft Access Library, so one day I had the idea to write an Android app for it. As there was no competition at all to parse Microsoft Access databases on the Android device(1) at that time, I figured I could release it without much features, so four days after having the idea I release the app - you can load one database and then one table from the disk and page forward (not backwards) through it. I had an immediate user base despite so few features as there was no alternative at the time. The education was in what the users wanted. I had ideas about what users might want next, like column sorting, and was thinking of what big O sorting method to use for doing that. My other ideas for features people might want were more technically complex than that. No one asked about column sorting in the first few months. First they asked if you could page backwards through the table. Then they wanted search. Then they wanted case insensitive search. Then they wanted wildcard search. Then someone said they always loaded the same database, and had to go through the filesystem to find it each new session, and could I have a recent files tab. I had no idea what features users thought were important. Some were probably important to more than one person, as I got multiple comments and e-mails asking for search. Pretty much everything I implemented was something asked by multiple users. The only exception to that is if one user asked for a feature, but it was simple and obviously a good idea. Some features multiple users asked for, but I put on the backlog because I knew it would take a lot of time to implement correctly. It was an unusual scenario in that I had a sizable user base who loved that they could look at their Microsoft Access databases on their phones, even though it initially was written in four days. The main lesson was all these ideas I had about the challenges of which big-O algorithm to use were for features users never asked for, and a lot of what they wanted was pretty simple. I knew users would probably want to read Microsoft Access databases on their phones, but I had no idea at all which features of doing that were most important to them until they told me.
dncornholio 5y ago
Let's come up with an edgy title, go on a rant that has nothing to do with the title and call it a productive day! > The whole MVP process presumes you don’t know what you are making for a product, and that is death This is not how MVP is defined. The MVP is the actually definition of a pre-determined product.
tqwhite 5y ago
This article isn't talking about MVP. It's talking about fools who don't know what they are doing. MVP doesn't suggest that you don't know what you want to do but that you understand that you are wrong and that you need to learn more.
nyellin 5y ago
Better to build a minimal version of the wrong thing than a full version of the wrong thing. Of course, if you can just build the right thing then do that. But you're more likely to mess up that way.
hackitup7 5y ago
I upvoted this for discussion purposes (and because it's well written) but I really disagree here. User needs are hard to predict in all sorts of businesses. In b2c consumers often don't know what they want. In b2b, the market often doesn't know how it needs its solution solved. In both cases MVP + iteration on traction is the fastest path to happy users.
victor106 5y ago
> The whole MVP process presumes you don’t know what you are making for a product, and that is death. I am not sure that is how everyone understand what an MVP is. I think of it as "I know what product I am developing, I just don't know what features within the product I should prioritize now vs later"
titzer 5y ago
> The risk is you’re going to build something and nobody will come (or stay), and then you’ll run out of money. I feel like the author missed the letter in the middle, V. V=viable. So you build an MVP missing the viable. Yep, that's a risk. How does that bust the concept of MVP? The author goes on to reason in circles several times, occasionally repeating some permutation of "it has to be viable", and "why didn't you start with something viable". "You're doing it wrong, you don't have the viable." This person isn't ranting about MVPs. This person is ranting about startups that obviously do not have MVPs and are stabbing blindly at one.
throwaway5752 5y ago
"The whole MVP process presumes you don’t know what you are making for a product, and that is death. You have no soul as a company at that point, you’re just trying to make money with other people, rather than help people with a problem that you know." People can argue about different beliefs about what MVP means, but regardless of semantics that line really resonated.
rmah 5y ago
The author writes "who would give you money if you didn’t know what product you were making". Which is a very good point. And is the point of an creating an MVP first. You create an MVP before you seek outside financing, not after. You know, so that you know what product you're making when you ask for money.
karaterobot 5y ago
I'm ready to just say MVPs as a concept shouldn't be taught. In theory they should work fine, but I've never worked at a startup where they helped us. It's one of those things that's so easy to get wrong that it's dangerous and should be probably be avoided. He nails it when he says people focus on the "minimum" part too much. The last startup I worked at insisted on making the minimum version of every piece of a huge system. This resulted in a shallow, unpolished platform that did everything, but didn't do anything well. At every step, we'd say "this feature set sucks, and the UI is embarrassing. We need to flesh this out," and the response from PMs would be "this is the minimum viable product that might work". Well, it didn't. In the end, we made something nobody inside or outside the company wanted. We made the minimum, but it wasn't viable, and it wasn't a product. You might say "well, the fact that people don't employ it correctly is not a strike against the concept of MVP" but I've seen this happen over and over. I've only ever seen MVP go wrong, and I've only heard anecdotes about it working. Using it doesn't seem to change your odds of success as a startup. I think it may be one of those theoretically good ideas most people aren't ready for.
vmception 5y ago
If its perfect, you took too long and its too late You can tell me that’s a “startup religion” while I collect investment based on a random metric I made up simply because I have the data from a product I released
jollybean 5y ago
I think what people miss with MVP is how it fits into the product lifecycle. There's inherently a not of 'gray' in the situation, so don't take more steps than you need to. Do the 'first thing' and then adjust before the 'second thing' and just don't get too far ahead of yourselves. Even if people loathe the MVP you'll find out why. Going from 'Slides' to 'Something Material' is a big deal, so to it in steps. It's almost another way of saying 'build your product incrementally' - and I you do that, the 'first increment' is an MVP. That's it.
MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
This article is entirely about startups, which means the title is too click-baity. The idea of MVP makes a lot more sense in its more common setting: mundane corporate backoffice applications. In such a setting your audience is not millions of people; sometimes it can be one person. When you have a small audience you aren't afforded the freedom to decide what the product should be. Of course you control the eventual product, but the stakeholder has a huge say in what must be done, and they often have a fairly clear idea of what they want. That's where MVP comes in. You and the "customer" (stakeholder) come to an agreement on the eventual product, and you deliver an MVP to them as a milestone. The point of this MVP is to give the customer something that delivers a bit of value early on, and gives them a way to try out their initial idea to see if it really holds water. Through their time using the MVP they are able to sooner refine and readjust their wish list. Maybe the end product they initially asked for wasn't quite right after all. In the case of startups, I sort of agree with the author, but he's still missing something: the first customer is you. Yes you should have a crystalline idea of your eventual product (similar to corporate stakeholders) because that is what separates you from your competition. But you should still use MVP! MVP doesn't mean delivering unfinished garbage. MVP just means there's more to come later. "Viable" is completely subjective, and in the case of a startup with a grand vision it should absolutely be a much higher bar than usual. You the customer/entrepreneur need the MVP because you need to see how your product performs when you present it to millions of people. The whole point is just to avoid the morass of never-ending vaporware with years of missed deadlines, only to finally deliver something nobody wants. If "MVP" is too much of a trigger word you're welcome to call it whatever you want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
gilgad13 5y ago
Contra to most of the comments here, I found a lot to agree with in this article: > You have no soul as a company at that point, you’re just trying to make money with other people, rather than help people with a problem that you know. You may think you have an idea, but it’s not good enough yet. I think this is the crux of the difference. If you want to have a successful startup, you have to believe that you deserve to exist and believe you have something unique to offer. You cannot just "show up and listen" and get paid the big bucks.
nowherebeen 5y ago
I was recently watching a YT lecture from Geoffrey Moore, and one student raise their question about MVP. Their argument is that MVP doesn't work in B2C because no one wants to use your shitty product. Everyone expected everything to be complete. I think this makes sense from my experience. If you have web, people will ask if you have mobile. If you have iOS, they will ask if you have Android. And given the YC have shifted their focus to mainly B2B Saas companies, I couldn't help be think the student was right in some way. B2C is so much harder to crack because expectations are high and attention spans are very low. If it doesn't click within 5 seconds, customers just move on. People's tolerance for trying new products compared to a decade again has decreased substantially. This isn't the case for B2B. If there is a business need, people are much more willing to tolerate your shitty product as long as they receive a net gain. Of course, B2B comes with its challenges. It was an interesting perspective.
- anaccountexists 5y ago
  I don’t think it’s necessarily true for B2C. It just depends on who your target audience is. It’s pretty normal for a game, shopping app, etc. to start on iOS and make its way over to Android months later. The only place where you need more completeness is if you’re building a social app, in my experience. People want to be able to respond to messages everywhere.
  - nowherebeen 5y ago
    Completeness isn't just about cross platform. It is just one example. Completeness can also mean content. If your shopping app doesn't have vendors, no one is going to use it. Try getting vendors to join your no-name shopping app and I bet you will be 100% ignored other than desperate mom and pop shops. And for games, it requires a huge investment of talent to develop, and very few games succeed. So completeness here would be getting game designers, graphic designer, software engineers to work together for low pay and high possibility of failure. The only games that don't require huge investments are puzzle games like tetris and 2048. Completeness is the bar where the end users feel there is sufficient value to use. If Uber Eats only had 10 restaurants, very few people would ever use it. So the bar is very high to get people to start using it consistently.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
> The whole MVP process presumes you don’t know what you are making for a product, and that is death. No, the MVP process presumes that you are not omniscient. Just because you think you know what a customer wants, doesn't mean that anything you make will satisfy the customer. They need to actually get their hands on it, so they can tell you if it works for them. 99% of the time they will be unhappy about something. And that is fine; nothing is ever perfect! But if there is a big expensive time-consuming problem, you won't know that until the customer gets their hands on it, so you don't want to wait long to find those problems. You want to find those problems as early as possible, so you can fix things early, to reduce the time/cost/complexity of "fixing" things down the line, so your time and money is spent building things right the first time. This reduces cost, speeds up delivery, and improves quality. This concept is called Shift Left. MVP is intended to get something in the hands of the earliest customers so they can give you feedback. Some people use this just to figure out if they have a market or a product to sell at all, but you don't have to use it that way. You can use as a "minimum customer-acceptable prototype with feedback".
meerita 5y ago
> The whole MVP process presumes you don’t know what you are making for a product, and that is death. I don't agree at all with this statement. It's not that you don't know, you know, but you are realistic with the pretentions: you will not go for huge product to hit the market, you want to focus on your best strenght and then grow faster until you complete your idea.
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jakey_bakey 5y ago
This article appears to conflate the role of a pre-product/market fit startup (nailing the problem) with the role of a post-product/market fit startup (executing on a solution). I disagree with “know what problem you’re solving exactly before you start a company”. The entire point of an early startup is working out exactly what problem to solve. A pivot is realising your hypothesis is flawed and redefining the problem based on some new information. Great execution at the early stage is table stakes for survival.
simonswords82 5y ago
Could not disagree more with the article. Sounds like Michael just isn't very good at building customer engagement and then using empathy driven engagement to understand pain points and ideate solutions. For exmaple, he says: > What is there to be careful of MVP as a strategy? Well, to start, I don’t think MVP works. The risk is you’re going to build something and nobody will come (or stay), and then you’ll run out of money. This has nothing to do with a MVP approach and everything to do with ensuring you are building the MVP with and for a specific customer or customers who have pain points you understand, and then iterating on their feedback as you go. You could make the mistake of not having customers ready to share their feedback with you with and without an MVP. He also says: > But no - who would give you money if you didn’t know what product you were making? The product should be in your DNA Utter tosh - I've had success building software that started as MVPs in two completely different industries that prior to building the software I had zero experience in. I could go on...but I've made my point. Don't listen to anybody who says MVPs are old and busted - especially but not limited to this guy.
zomglings 5y ago
Every time I read something like this, I am reminded of the story of the blind men and the elephant [0]. It sounds like the author had some success and, now that they had that success, they are going around imposing their world view on others whose paths to success may necessarily require different strategies and patterns of thoughts. Because they are different fucking people from the author, under different conditions, and with different interests and passions. This articles is meant to advertise the author's endeavors as a speaker and perhaps as a coach. Nothing more. If you are struggling with your business, please disregard this article as drivel. You have many paths to success or failure. None of them are universal. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

214 points by zdw 5y ago

It's still a tried and trusted approach. It may not fit every situation, but there's a big emphasis on derisking and early marketing which can't be ignored. I'm incorporating options like that into https://cxo.industries https://cxo.industries, a web app to help founders with making informed choices.

adamnemecek 5y ago

Someone finally said it. Also not all things fit the mvp paradigm.

hgomersall 5y ago
The Lean Startup is very clear on both the why and the limitations of an MVP. Within that framework what constitutes an MVP is pretty obvious. In a nutshell you need to put something out that helps you learn as much as possible as quickly as possible. That is the primary purpose of an MVP and it should be considered both minimal and viable in that context.

drewcoo 5y ago

This seems to be arguing that the complete implementation is what matters most. That seems expensive and risky.

izacus 5y ago
Yes, a complete, well-rounded implementation is what makes for a successful product (where well-rounded == supports use-cases for customers well). It is expensive (which is why it costs a lot to create a startup) and it is very risky (which is why most startups fail because they mess this up).
- altdataseller 5y ago
  Exactly, none of this stuff is easy. And it's not supposed to be easy and risk-free. Otherwise, anyone could build a successful startup/product

thinkingkong 5y ago

MVP as a concept suffers from the whole “implement the acronym” problem. At one point it was a helpful tool for understanding some repeatable patterns in startup product management, but its turned into something else. I suppose its mostly cargo culting startup advice these days.

antupis 5y ago
Yeah it has go kinda same way as "agile", where people use both terms without understanding what it actually means and how to implement those. But that does not mean that "agile" or "MVP" is death and you should not use those.

lmm 5y ago

> An example of too much minimalism would be failing to implement UI pagination and your UI falling over with more than 20 objects, because you didn’t think about the use case. Maybe you haven’t thought about scale-out or upgrades or you can install on only one operating system. A serious buyer can sniff out this incompleteness and won’t take you seriously, and only serious domain experience can fill in these gaps. You can’t expect your buyer to be like “hey, nice try with this prototype but I can tell this won’t scale to more than 20 objects”. They are looking to you to be the expert. IME this part is completely wrong, unless it's defining "serious buyer" in such a way that most of your market isn't one. > Time is short, funding is short (especially if you are running on your own money), and you don’t want to waste time. > Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build. Wait until you see the exact right thing, because you are about to put too much of your lifeforce into it, and if you don’t, you have a much harder road ahead. You want to know it will work, and this requires cultivated instinct. When the time is right and you know enough, that’s when you decide to have a product. Ok so what is the author advocating doing until then? Sitting around twiddling your thumbs until inspiration strikes? The whole point of the MVP is: build just enough to find out whether this is a viable business or not. And nothing in the article seems to be contrary to that. It's a whole lot of words but the only advice seems to be to have better instincts (how?) and just make a better product bro.

jiggawatts 5y ago
> IME this part is completely wrong, unless it's defining "serious buyer" in such a way that most of your market isn't one. I used to be such a "serious buyer". I represented a large government agency with over 2,000 sites and several hundred thousand employees. Vendors would turn up with "cute" web apps that used drop downs to select objects like security groups or user accounts. This works great when you're developing in a toy environment in your dev lab. In the real world, merely clicking something like that will make both the server and client use gigabytes of memory until either one or both crash. Here's the thing though: if you can put just a modicum of engineering effort into making your software suitable for non-toy scenarios, then winning even just one enterprise customer like this could make your rich. Win two or three similar orgs in other states or countries and you can start subscribing to Superyacht Owners' Quarterly. But there will be no yacht because you used a drop-down. A simple control that can be implemented in minutes instead of a search box that takes a few extra lines of code. Sorry... PS: On a more serious note, I had a checklist that wasn't long or all that difficult to implement, and 90% of vendors would fail outright on most/all points. 1. Search-for-select 2. A provisioning API of some sort (REST, PowerShell, whatever) 3. Hierarchical permissions & delegation 4. Hierarchical policy & preferences 5. Single-sign-on support 6. Central audit & error logging 7. Clone-to-deploy and/or highly automated setup. 8. Don't demand Domain Admin rights for setup. 9. No quadratic (or worse) scaling issues. (USE INDEXES in the DB!!)

dzikimarian 5y ago

MVP is tool like any other. It might be used well (to validate an idea) or may be used poorly (to implement semi-functional piece of software, which is strictly worse than the peers). There's also nothing wrong with pivoting, because while you may implement working businesses case, along the way you may discover one, that's better for you and your customers. Of course it can be used in pathological manner as any tool again. I think, that what should be definitely busted in IT(or maybe in general?) is easily talking in absolutes (OOP best/bad, functional programming best/bad, k8s best/bad). Everything depends on the context. Especially would be great to see that altitude from members of academia, because they influence a lot of young engineers.

onion2k 5y ago

Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build. This is exactly what killed my first startup. We believed we fully understood what the customer needs and that we should build the right product before we started selling. We were actually trying to build the minimum viable product, but we were hilariously (with hindsight) wrong about what the customers wanted. Almost all our ideas were just wrong enough to make the product fail to solve the customers pains. They solved the pains we'd had in the past brilliantly, but sadly that wasn't relevant. We weren't buying our product. Starting out with the notion that you already know everything you need to know will kill your startup. Running a startup is as much about spotting and understanding the signals that you discover along the way as it is about building what you think you customers need. A minimum viable product is not "selling the least effort product you can get away with", it's spending the least amount of time you can to build something that you can use to gather more data than you can use to focus your product on what the customer wants rather than what you think they want. Building what you think the customer wants will very likely be wrong - customers lie, they're deluded, they don't understand their own problems, and they can't see value in solutions. But they do start to understand the problem when they see a solution to it, even if it's the minimum viable solution. And then they start having ideas about what else they can pay for to make it better...

borski 5y ago
I came here to say this. The author of the article does not understand what an MVP is. An MVP is the eventual answer to a metric fuckton of customer development, not what you go into customer development with. If you think you already know what the customer wants, I wish you luck at your next startup after this one fails; you don’t know that, and neither does your customer, or they would have built / bought it already. It’s your job to find the real problems they’re facing, and then build a solution that makes them rip it out of your hands before it’s even done. then, iterate.
- rwmj 5y ago
  With Ansible, Mike already had a successful prototype (func) which had been developed and used by the Fedora infrastructure team for a while. He then left Red Hat and worked on Ansible. So he did in fact already know what the customer wanted! However that's an unusual case for a start-up. https://opensource.com/article/21/2/ansible-origin-story https://opensource.com/article/21/2/ansible-origin-story

arkitaip 5y ago

> What is there to be careful of MVP as a strategy? Well, to start, I don’t think MVP works. The risk is you’re going to build something and nobody will come (or stay), and then you’ll run out of money. MVPs don't exist in a vacuum, they are part of a larger effort to figure out your business model (what is the actual problem? Who are your customers? How will you make money?) in the most efficient way possible. For a MVP to make sense, you have to do user research and truly understand the problem domain. > Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build. This is wishful thinking. Tons of products and companies fail simply because founders think they "know" what their business model is when in fact it's just a bunch of unverified assumptions about the market.

danielovichdk 5y ago

Read "Bulid the Right It". Then an MVP makes perfect sense. A great session from the author here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njZ4H-5WRYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njZ4H-5WRYA

rmbyrro 5y ago

> The risk is you’re going to build something and nobody will come (or stay), and then you’ll run out of money. Maybe author is conflating MVP with "build and they'll come". They're quite different ideas, although are frequently seen together in the same minds. "Build and they'll come" is silly. 95% of businesses will need effort to bring products to consumers. Some form of marketing and/or sales. One great risk is whether you can market and or sell the product. That's where MVPs help. Simulating marketing/sales without any product usually is not a good predictor of reality.

smilespray 5y ago
> Maybe author is conflating MVP with "build and they'll come". They're quite different ideas, although are frequently seen together in the same minds. I think the author is pointing out that other people are conflating the ideas. I don't think the author advocates building a fully-fledged 1.0 product before getting real-world feedback. I've worked for startups that kept shouting "MVP, MVP" for each new feature (and customer) we built. What we got in return for that was a heap of half-finished features, lots of technical debt — and not a single happy customer.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Then you weren’t building MVPs, because V stands for “viable”. Devs I’ve worked with will sometimes hear “MVP” and think “prototype”. Not really sure why. An MVP needs polish, it’s just a way of keeping a narrow focus and avoiding bike shedding.
  - smilespray 5y ago
    Absolutely agree. I was about to make an edit to my post pointing out that we missed the "viable" part. I work in UX, so I kept shouting to deaf ears. Unfortunately, it was seldom my decision to make.
rob74 5y ago
"Build it and they'll come" is pure survivor's bias. It's true that there are some products (Wordle, Minecraft, Undertale, lots of other indie games, ...) that were built by single developers or small teams with little to no marketing and became wildly successful anyway. But nobody is remembering the thousands of products that tried to follow this strategy and failed (or still exist in complete obscurity).

CipherThrowaway 5y ago

Bit of an arrogant and directionless rant with no concrete detail and many false dichotomies. "Just build the right product" is like saying "just don't write bugs" or "just have money." It feels like DeHaan is reacting to the idea of exploration because he thinks you should just know everything to begin with. Knowing everything upfront is definitely better than exploring your domain, product and market incrementally. The problem is that this rarely happens in practice. Founders who adopt DeHaan's attitude and think they can leapfrog the exploratory phase of their startup usually end up failing.

smilespray 5y ago
This wasn't what I got out of the article. Too many people focus on the Minimum, and don't care about the Viable or the Product. There are table stakes. MVP doesn't mean half-assed and buggy. They misuse the concept and release any old crap. As a result, MVP has become too much of a buzzword and the intention behind it got lost.
- movedx 5y ago
  That doesn't mean the MVP is a bad idea, then. That means it's being poorly implemented.
  - da_chicken 5y ago
    If an idea is routinely implemented badly, then it is a bad idea to implement it at all.
    - kuraudoOishii 5y ago
      I don't think such an absolutism holds water: great ideas don't exist in vacuums. There is no magic bullet which makes startups successful: lots of things, big and small, need to come together to make it. I think the article touches on several failings which aren't actually the fault of mvps at all.
    - heuroci 5y ago

tome 5y ago

> The emphasis should be on viable and product, and getting there ASAP. So… a minimum viable product?

milkers 5y ago
It should be a viable product first. You need to build it fast. So you have to keep its size/feature-set minimum.
zanellato19 5y ago
This made me stopped reading this post. He says it shouldn't be on minimal, then goes on to describe... A MVP.
ProAm 5y ago
> So… a minimum viable product? For most companies a MVP is planting a fast growing seed of technical debt. It's rushed, not polished, full of bugs and used to see if you have any traction because your Product Owners and Sales teams usually have a significant disconnect and development is thought of as an after thought. If you can do a MVP in 1 month, but a minimal polished product in 2, I think that extra month will pay for itself if the product is worth anything. The worse thing a company can do is have your customers fund your products with a JIT development process. Sure some companies can get it right doing a true MVP, but most cant and it shows.

rozenmd 5y ago

In my experience, building into a "red ocean" of 200 competitors, the MVP concept is still valid, but the goalposts have shifted. Whereas before the advice might have been "just build a tiny solution to the problem you're solving, and see what people think", these days folks don't take you seriously without SaaS-like features around it, like inviting their team to the tool, auth, etc

robertlagrant 5y ago

I think this is a bit of a misread of what MVP means. It's not a prototype or a way to search for the right product to build. It's prioritising the minimum set of features to launch a viable product. That pretty obviously implies that you already know what to build, at least roughly, so that thinking has been done. If you need more than 20 objects and pagination, then that's part of the V in MVP. The difference is that you don't spend 2 years on 100 features you think people will want (or even, people tell you they want) - you boil that research down to 15 features that can work together as a product that you've defined will be useful, and then build the next set of features on top that will allow you to access more of the market, partly based on what you learned from the previous iteration, etc etc. You may still spend 2 years building (and you should definitely carve out budget assuming that) and you may still build 100 features, but you launched much earlier to get information, and you may have built 30 features differently due to the extra information you got, and you'll have got a pretty battle-tested product into the market by the end of the two years. You probably know all this. I'm restating because I read so many articles that confuse an idea with observed (or anecdotal) bad implementations, and this seems to do the same thing.

_448 5y ago

Lot of "processes" that comes out of silicon valley(and in general US) should be adopted with caution. "Try before you buy" approach should be used. First let it settle in the industry(at least in the US) and then test and adapt to your project on a case-by-case basis. Take any process, Lean, MVP, Agile, etc are paraded as if they are solution to every Mommy's and Daddy's problem. It is not. One size does not fit all. The only statement(which is an old wisdom out of the UK computing industry) is "There is no silver bullet". This applies to everything in life, even MVPs. MVPs works for most software startups(and some other creative industries), but it is not viable for everyone. So saying that it "always works" or "it is busted" are both wrong statements.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Building a viable product is of course something you need to do as a company to succeed. Building a minimum viable product on the other hand might just trap you into building a product quickly that isn't viable because you end up throwing away the baby with the bathwater. The problem is with the word minimum. How much of your product can you strip away without losing the value proposition? If you strip away too much, it won't be viable. This is where startup methodology of building something quickly and then failing is at odds with the traditional way of doing something well and then growing a business around that. It's a slower process but occasionally such companies become big. Investors are obsessed with taking short cuts to success. So they'll favor companies that build an MVP. Most of those will fail but occasionally they get lucky and the failures are relatively quick and painless (think acquihires). An MVP is easier if you eliminate all risk. Like the outcomes of potentially risky R&D or actually doing anything complicated and risky. Of course the intersection of low risk stuff and actually valuable stuff is pretty narrow. So investors love things like uber, air bnb, because all these things are are simple variations of market places and easy to understand. They are no-tech companies and their MVP is a simple website. All they needed early on is marketing, business development, some generic full stack coders and lots of cash to fake it until they make it. MVP thinking breeds generic no-tech startups. Some of these end up being valuable but most of them don't really do anything that is technically interesting. Or valuable. Or viable. There's a different class of companies that follow a very different pattern. These are tech companies that start with some hard core R&D. They are risky investments with a non linear payoff (relative to the investment) in case things work out. SpaceX is a good example. They got close to failing after spending many billions. And then they made it to orbit and with a lot more investment they eventually got the company profitable. The MVP for a rocket company is a rocket that makes it to orbit. The MVP for a nuclear fusion plant is building a plant that produces power. That has not happened yet of course but people are spending billions trying to make that happen. That's a different type of investor that does that. Usually, these investors will base their decisions on very early proofs of concept, founder reputation, or other signals of things looking promising.

chris_nielsen 5y ago

I think there’s two kinds of MVP in common use and they’re both valid tools in specific situations. In Lean Startup, Eric Ries argues that if your business has giant unknowns. Big leap of faith assumptions. Then you’re best off using the scientific process to validate those unknowns before you do anything else. Start with a theory, design experiments and analyse the results. Repeat. The MVP is the experiment. It’s a pity that he didn’t call it “quickest experiment”, because that’s what a Lean Startup MVP is, just the quickest experiment you can use to validate your businesses assumptions. And how can using a “quickest experiment” be old and broken? It’s a perfectly valid approach sometimes. The other common use of the term MVP is to ruthlessly cull a products features before the first release. To find the MINIMUM PRODUCT that would be VIABLE. People use the term that way because that’s what it sounds like an MVP would be. And again… it’s a perfectly valid approach. How could it be old and broken to pragmatically limit the scope of a first release to the minimum set of features that users find viable so that you can keep as much time as possible for responding to change. Anyway, I think the two kinds of MVPs are still good tools in the right hands when used in the right situations. I’d hate to throw away good tools just because they don’t work in every possible situation.

Mindwipe 5y ago
> And again… it’s a perfectly valid approach. It's a valid approach in certain markets. But if you're FAANG and launch that sort of MVP going against mature products from your competitors, often replacing a more feature complete product with an existing user base that you try to port over... well, you're going to get destroyed. As keeps happening to Google because they don't seem to realise that the market has moved on and you can't launch things like Gmail any more.
- another-dave 5y ago
  > But if you're FAANG and launch that sort of MVP going against mature products from your competitors, often replacing a more feature complete product with an existing user base that you try to port over... well, you're going to get destroyed. I think what you're describing though is if you cull too many features, i.e. if you try to launch _below_ the minimum that's viable for your product-market fit, you'll always get destroyed. You get some more leeway if you're the only offering in a problem space, but going up against incumbents really raises the bar of what the viable minimum is. That said, you _can_ offer less features but a better execution — e.g. there's a lot of challenge banks (Monzo, Revolut, Starling, etc.) doing well in the UK at the moment (in the sense of customer acquisition, at least). I remember when they were applying for their banking licences, a lot of people working in traditional fintech were saying that they'd be a flash in the pan & that customers wouldn't switch to these new businesses until they had parity in terms of offering things like loans and mortgages. But the offering of trad banks was _so bad_ that people were willing to overlook a lot of missing features for a better UX on their day-to-day banking.

smitty1e 5y ago

> The whole MVP process presumes you don’t know what you are making for a product... Then how can the minimum viabilty be judged? This seems a logical flaw, theoretically speaking. As a practical matter, inexperience may lead to not understanding what the term even means. But that has more to with people than the acronym. No term is immune to human debasement.

vinay_ys 5y ago

Key point I agree with: - hire people with domain and technical expertise; don't stumble through without expertise and having to reinvent things poorly and fail. The author seems to be advising to wait till you have a fairly concrete business idea and the required technical and domain expertise for starting up – especially with your own money – because both time and money are in short supply. This is great advice if you want to build a new business with you own savings or with debt etc, but without funding from VCs. If it is VC funded, in the early rounds, you are basically an experimental bet for the VC – a small risk for a potential huge upside. For you too it should be the same – a small risk bet with a potential huge upside (you shouldn't starve yourself). By the time you get to bigger funding rounds, you have figured out – product market fit and execution – that you and VCs believe this is scalable and hence the bigger round. If you fail at the earlier rounds, that's an expected likely outcome. If you and VCs have a relationship of mutual admiration, then you continue to be funded to do something else – the pivot. When this happens, VCs and you should consider the previous investment as mostly a write-off and think of this as a new start. After a few such pivots, the VCs may lose confidence and hence you run out of funding. You may also be burnt out (from the high-stakes decision fueled execution stress) and choose to return the money and take a break. All this is perfectly normal and expected in VC land.

phlsa 5y ago

Like every method that gets condensed to an acronym, MVP has been used to justify lots of bad decisions. For example, I worked in very engineering-driven environments where “viable” meant nothing more than “it compiles”. Especially when combined with an over-reliance on quantitative metrics (and an under-appreciation of qualitative research) this leads to lots of ideas being killed prematurely. This meme has helped me a lot when communicating in these situations: https://imgur.com/a/pSY7IrF https://imgur.com/a/pSY7IrF From that point of view, I can understand the author, but “you should just know what’s going to be successful” isn’t a very useful alternative. Even with great knowledge of your customers and domain, your first (or second, or third) solution might not be the right fit. Just think of all the personal projects that never end up getting used, even by the author. In the end, the problem with MVPs and similar methods that get popular is that people think they can replace good judgement with a method. The methods can help, but they won’t do the thinking for you and they won’t make anything risk-free.

Khelavaster 5y ago

But...by definition, if the product isn't viable it isn't a minimum viable product.

punnerud 5y ago

Paul Graham had references to MVP before Lean Startup, he called it "release early" in 2006: http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html Quote: "By "release early" I don't mean you should release something full of bugs, but that you should release something minimal."

adrr 5y ago

Ability to pivot and agility is what separates the losers from the winners. In evolution, it is not the strongest that survives, it is the one that can adapt to changes. Building an MVP is being agile. I was leading engineering at a finance company that offered ways to invest in an ESG fund that the company managed. The product had no traction. We had 6 months of runway left in the bank and no investor would even touch us with near 0 growth. This was when Wells Fargo scandal hit and people were angry at their banks. We pivoted to online banking and released a banking app in 4 months. 10x our customer base and raised $40m in under a year. If we kept just building out the investment product, we would have failed.

wilde 5y ago

I think the way MVP is usually quoted at people is confusing. It should be something like “maximize the amount of feedback you’re getting from customers”.

dncornholio 5y ago
Or: do the least amount of work for a reasonable amount of return. You are not maximising anything (yet) imo.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

The article separates 'Survey your Customers' and 'Know your Market' like they are two different things. Not sure how you can deprecate the customer input, and stress your own market knowledge without your head exploding.

blunte 5y ago

Every company/startup will be different in some way, so what MVP means for them -- and the reason they go that route -- will be unique. At least in some cases, MVP is the minimal product you made which illustrates your solution, your value proposition. You use that to get big investment to build "the real one". Unfortunately, some (many?) companies want to take that MVP and live with it indefinitely, organically (sloppily) growing it as they go. MVP can be seen as that thing you do which gives you the opportunity to exist but which gradually drags you to the bottom of the sea with technical debt.

bgroat 5y ago

Last year I tried to launch something like a dozen small companies based on an "MVP" or 80/20 approach. The hypothesis being that even if not a full 80/20 split, I could ~probably~ catch 50% of the value by catering to the core 20% of features. This was completely incorrect. I made 12 things that made ~no money. SaaS is by no means saturated, but it is mature enough that you can't just crank out crap and make money. Buyers are sophisticated

xwdv 5y ago

I think the problem with MVP today is that MVPs have such a shorter lifespan now compared to the past decade that by the time you iterate into a full product it should have happened so fast that it looks like you basically built the right product from the start. If you don’t go fast you will miss the opportunity and be beaten by a competitor.

cestith 5y ago

If it's not viable, it's not a minimum viable product because it's not viable. If it's not something you can sell or at least market to customers, it's not a minimum viable product because it's not a product. If it doesn't meet enough needs in a clear enough way, it's not a minimum viable product because you haven't met the minimum. MVP is not a longterm goal, but it can be an important stepping stone. All three of those words matter, though, not just the "minimum". It has to be a viable product. Once you have an product that is viable, you can start selling it as a solution to some problems and find out what else those paying customers want it to do. Don't give up three years of income making a product more than it has to be, but don't release that small starter version yet if it's buggy or confusing, either.

garethrowlands 5y ago
Absolutely! The "minimum" in MVP is about minimising the time until a viable product's in the market. It's not that worse is better, it's that - other things being equal - quicker is better.

mangoman 5y ago

I generally agree that MVP tends to be cargo-culted rather than chosen as an intentional strategy. Most people who tend to spew the term often don't even know what they mean. I also agree on people tending to focus way too much on the 'minimum' and not nearly enough on the 'viable'. for example, how can you know if investing in the UI or design of a product is necessary for viability? I've seen that any interesting UI is often cut in the effort to find an MVP... but, well, sometimes an interesting design actually increases viability.

niahmiah 5y ago

Seems to me that the author doesn’t understand what MVP means. Old maybe, but busted? Gtfo

Ologn 5y ago

In 2011 I released an app which was an education in MVP for me. I knew there was an free open source Java library that parsed Microsoft Access Library, so one day I had the idea to write an Android app for it. As there was no competition at all to parse Microsoft Access databases on the Android device(1) at that time, I figured I could release it without much features, so four days after having the idea I release the app - you can load one database and then one table from the disk and page forward (not backwards) through it. I had an immediate user base despite so few features as there was no alternative at the time. The education was in what the users wanted. I had ideas about what users might want next, like column sorting, and was thinking of what big O sorting method to use for doing that. My other ideas for features people might want were more technically complex than that. No one asked about column sorting in the first few months. First they asked if you could page backwards through the table. Then they wanted search. Then they wanted case insensitive search. Then they wanted wildcard search. Then someone said they always loaded the same database, and had to go through the filesystem to find it each new session, and could I have a recent files tab. I had no idea what features users thought were important. Some were probably important to more than one person, as I got multiple comments and e-mails asking for search. Pretty much everything I implemented was something asked by multiple users. The only exception to that is if one user asked for a feature, but it was simple and obviously a good idea. Some features multiple users asked for, but I put on the backlog because I knew it would take a lot of time to implement correctly. It was an unusual scenario in that I had a sizable user base who loved that they could look at their Microsoft Access databases on their phones, even though it initially was written in four days. The main lesson was all these ideas I had about the challenges of which big-O algorithm to use were for features users never asked for, and a lot of what they wanted was pretty simple. I knew users would probably want to read Microsoft Access databases on their phones, but I had no idea at all which features of doing that were most important to them until they told me.

dncornholio 5y ago

Let's come up with an edgy title, go on a rant that has nothing to do with the title and call it a productive day! > The whole MVP process presumes you don’t know what you are making for a product, and that is death This is not how MVP is defined. The MVP is the actually definition of a pre-determined product.

tqwhite 5y ago

This article isn't talking about MVP. It's talking about fools who don't know what they are doing. MVP doesn't suggest that you don't know what you want to do but that you understand that you are wrong and that you need to learn more.

nyellin 5y ago

Better to build a minimal version of the wrong thing than a full version of the wrong thing. Of course, if you can just build the right thing then do that. But you're more likely to mess up that way.

hackitup7 5y ago

I upvoted this for discussion purposes (and because it's well written) but I really disagree here. User needs are hard to predict in all sorts of businesses. In b2c consumers often don't know what they want. In b2b, the market often doesn't know how it needs its solution solved. In both cases MVP + iteration on traction is the fastest path to happy users.

victor106 5y ago

> The whole MVP process presumes you don’t know what you are making for a product, and that is death. I am not sure that is how everyone understand what an MVP is. I think of it as "I know what product I am developing, I just don't know what features within the product I should prioritize now vs later"

titzer 5y ago

> The risk is you’re going to build something and nobody will come (or stay), and then you’ll run out of money. I feel like the author missed the letter in the middle, V. V=viable. So you build an MVP missing the viable. Yep, that's a risk. How does that bust the concept of MVP? The author goes on to reason in circles several times, occasionally repeating some permutation of "it has to be viable", and "why didn't you start with something viable". "You're doing it wrong, you don't have the viable." This person isn't ranting about MVPs. This person is ranting about startups that obviously do not have MVPs and are stabbing blindly at one.

throwaway5752 5y ago

"The whole MVP process presumes you don’t know what you are making for a product, and that is death. You have no soul as a company at that point, you’re just trying to make money with other people, rather than help people with a problem that you know." People can argue about different beliefs about what MVP means, but regardless of semantics that line really resonated.

rmah 5y ago

The author writes "who would give you money if you didn’t know what product you were making". Which is a very good point. And is the point of an creating an MVP first. You create an MVP before you seek outside financing, not after. You know, so that you know what product you're making when you ask for money.

karaterobot 5y ago

I'm ready to just say MVPs as a concept shouldn't be taught. In theory they should work fine, but I've never worked at a startup where they helped us. It's one of those things that's so easy to get wrong that it's dangerous and should be probably be avoided. He nails it when he says people focus on the "minimum" part too much. The last startup I worked at insisted on making the minimum version of every piece of a huge system. This resulted in a shallow, unpolished platform that did everything, but didn't do anything well. At every step, we'd say "this feature set sucks, and the UI is embarrassing. We need to flesh this out," and the response from PMs would be "this is the minimum viable product that might work". Well, it didn't. In the end, we made something nobody inside or outside the company wanted. We made the minimum, but it wasn't viable, and it wasn't a product. You might say "well, the fact that people don't employ it correctly is not a strike against the concept of MVP" but I've seen this happen over and over. I've only ever seen MVP go wrong, and I've only heard anecdotes about it working. Using it doesn't seem to change your odds of success as a startup. I think it may be one of those theoretically good ideas most people aren't ready for.

vmception 5y ago

If its perfect, you took too long and its too late You can tell me that’s a “startup religion” while I collect investment based on a random metric I made up simply because I have the data from a product I released

jollybean 5y ago

I think what people miss with MVP is how it fits into the product lifecycle. There's inherently a not of 'gray' in the situation, so don't take more steps than you need to. Do the 'first thing' and then adjust before the 'second thing' and just don't get too far ahead of yourselves. Even if people loathe the MVP you'll find out why. Going from 'Slides' to 'Something Material' is a big deal, so to it in steps. It's almost another way of saying 'build your product incrementally' - and I you do that, the 'first increment' is an MVP. That's it.

MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago

This article is entirely about startups, which means the title is too click-baity. The idea of MVP makes a lot more sense in its more common setting: mundane corporate backoffice applications. In such a setting your audience is not millions of people; sometimes it can be one person. When you have a small audience you aren't afforded the freedom to decide what the product should be. Of course you control the eventual product, but the stakeholder has a huge say in what must be done, and they often have a fairly clear idea of what they want. That's where MVP comes in. You and the "customer" (stakeholder) come to an agreement on the eventual product, and you deliver an MVP to them as a milestone. The point of this MVP is to give the customer something that delivers a bit of value early on, and gives them a way to try out their initial idea to see if it really holds water. Through their time using the MVP they are able to sooner refine and readjust their wish list. Maybe the end product they initially asked for wasn't quite right after all. In the case of startups, I sort of agree with the author, but he's still missing something: the first customer is you. Yes you should have a crystalline idea of your eventual product (similar to corporate stakeholders) because that is what separates you from your competition. But you should still use MVP! MVP doesn't mean delivering unfinished garbage. MVP just means there's more to come later. "Viable" is completely subjective, and in the case of a startup with a grand vision it should absolutely be a much higher bar than usual. You the customer/entrepreneur need the MVP because you need to see how your product performs when you present it to millions of people. The whole point is just to avoid the morass of never-ending vaporware with years of missed deadlines, only to finally deliver something nobody wants. If "MVP" is too much of a trigger word you're welcome to call it whatever you want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

gilgad13 5y ago

Contra to most of the comments here, I found a lot to agree with in this article: > You have no soul as a company at that point, you’re just trying to make money with other people, rather than help people with a problem that you know. You may think you have an idea, but it’s not good enough yet. I think this is the crux of the difference. If you want to have a successful startup, you have to believe that you deserve to exist and believe you have something unique to offer. You cannot just "show up and listen" and get paid the big bucks.

nowherebeen 5y ago

I was recently watching a YT lecture from Geoffrey Moore, and one student raise their question about MVP. Their argument is that MVP doesn't work in B2C because no one wants to use your shitty product. Everyone expected everything to be complete. I think this makes sense from my experience. If you have web, people will ask if you have mobile. If you have iOS, they will ask if you have Android. And given the YC have shifted their focus to mainly B2B Saas companies, I couldn't help be think the student was right in some way. B2C is so much harder to crack because expectations are high and attention spans are very low. If it doesn't click within 5 seconds, customers just move on. People's tolerance for trying new products compared to a decade again has decreased substantially. This isn't the case for B2B. If there is a business need, people are much more willing to tolerate your shitty product as long as they receive a net gain. Of course, B2B comes with its challenges. It was an interesting perspective.

anaccountexists 5y ago
I don’t think it’s necessarily true for B2C. It just depends on who your target audience is. It’s pretty normal for a game, shopping app, etc. to start on iOS and make its way over to Android months later. The only place where you need more completeness is if you’re building a social app, in my experience. People want to be able to respond to messages everywhere.
- nowherebeen 5y ago
  Completeness isn't just about cross platform. It is just one example. Completeness can also mean content. If your shopping app doesn't have vendors, no one is going to use it. Try getting vendors to join your no-name shopping app and I bet you will be 100% ignored other than desperate mom and pop shops. And for games, it requires a huge investment of talent to develop, and very few games succeed. So completeness here would be getting game designers, graphic designer, software engineers to work together for low pay and high possibility of failure. The only games that don't require huge investments are puzzle games like tetris and 2048. Completeness is the bar where the end users feel there is sufficient value to use. If Uber Eats only had 10 restaurants, very few people would ever use it. So the bar is very high to get people to start using it consistently.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

> The whole MVP process presumes you don’t know what you are making for a product, and that is death. No, the MVP process presumes that you are not omniscient. Just because you think you know what a customer wants, doesn't mean that anything you make will satisfy the customer. They need to actually get their hands on it, so they can tell you if it works for them. 99% of the time they will be unhappy about something. And that is fine; nothing is ever perfect! But if there is a big expensive time-consuming problem, you won't know that until the customer gets their hands on it, so you don't want to wait long to find those problems. You want to find those problems as early as possible, so you can fix things early, to reduce the time/cost/complexity of "fixing" things down the line, so your time and money is spent building things right the first time. This reduces cost, speeds up delivery, and improves quality. This concept is called Shift Left. MVP is intended to get something in the hands of the earliest customers so they can give you feedback. Some people use this just to figure out if they have a market or a product to sell at all, but you don't have to use it that way. You can use as a "minimum customer-acceptable prototype with feedback".

meerita 5y ago

> The whole MVP process presumes you don’t know what you are making for a product, and that is death. I don't agree at all with this statement. It's not that you don't know, you know, but you are realistic with the pretentions: you will not go for huge product to hit the market, you want to focus on your best strenght and then grow faster until you complete your idea.

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jakey_bakey 5y ago

This article appears to conflate the role of a pre-product/market fit startup (nailing the problem) with the role of a post-product/market fit startup (executing on a solution). I disagree with “know what problem you’re solving exactly before you start a company”. The entire point of an early startup is working out exactly what problem to solve. A pivot is realising your hypothesis is flawed and redefining the problem based on some new information. Great execution at the early stage is table stakes for survival.

simonswords82 5y ago

Could not disagree more with the article. Sounds like Michael just isn't very good at building customer engagement and then using empathy driven engagement to understand pain points and ideate solutions. For exmaple, he says: > What is there to be careful of MVP as a strategy? Well, to start, I don’t think MVP works. The risk is you’re going to build something and nobody will come (or stay), and then you’ll run out of money. This has nothing to do with a MVP approach and everything to do with ensuring you are building the MVP with and for a specific customer or customers who have pain points you understand, and then iterating on their feedback as you go. You could make the mistake of not having customers ready to share their feedback with you with and without an MVP. He also says: > But no - who would give you money if you didn’t know what product you were making? The product should be in your DNA Utter tosh - I've had success building software that started as MVPs in two completely different industries that prior to building the software I had zero experience in. I could go on...but I've made my point. Don't listen to anybody who says MVPs are old and busted - especially but not limited to this guy.

zomglings 5y ago

Every time I read something like this, I am reminded of the story of the blind men and the elephant [0]. It sounds like the author had some success and, now that they had that success, they are going around imposing their world view on others whose paths to success may necessarily require different strategies and patterns of thoughts. Because they are different fucking people from the author, under different conditions, and with different interests and passions. This articles is meant to advertise the author's endeavors as a speaker and perhaps as a coach. Nothing more. If you are struggling with your business, please disregard this article as drivel. You have many paths to success or failure. None of them are universal. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant