During the past 14 years I've been helping companies of all sizes and kinds to adopt a user-centric approach and UX methodologies to their processes.
For early-stage startups and indie hackers that have very limited resources, team and time, it is very hard to design and develop an MVP while having the potential users involved in the process to craft a better UX.
But it's not impossible!
Here is a short post where you can see how I managed in a couple of months to design and develop an MVP for my web3 side-project, just on my own, while having a user-centered approach from start to end.
https://www.nicolascunningham.com/cases/proud
Hope it helps for your next project, and please, let me know what would you have done different in the process so I can improve it the next time.