But an MVP doesn't need to be a flashy, polished product; nor does it need to scale or perform well or automate everything for the user or do any of the things

But an MVP doesn't need to be a flashy, polished product; nor does it need to scale or perform well or automate everything for the user or do any of the things we would expect out of an alpha- or beta-quality product. It just needs to solve a problem that people have and work. You don't need to be a seasoned hacker to throw together some desktop/mobile frontends in a free trial of Dreamweaver, put that on EC2, design a barely functional data model in phpMyAdmin, and glue the whole thing together with hacked up PHP. Hell, you could even get most of the way there without touching code at all before hiring a freelancer to take you the last mile (if you can't make a Dreamweaver mockup and a relational data model – even if they both suck – then you have no business being in charge of any product, much less an entire company). After you've earned some traction from people who are willing to use your product, in spite of its inefficiencies, because it succeeds at solving a legitimate problem for them – that's when you'll have a shot at convincing me to quit my day job in exchange for 30% of the company. MVPs can be rewritten from scratch after it's been demonstrated that the product is worth creating in the first place.