How Long Did You Build Your MVP?

I spent 3 months building MVP.
I've worked 6/8 hours a week but the service is very simple.

MVP for Zlappo took a month.

Scheduled Twitter threads. Auto-retweeted your content. That's all it did at first.

My first product I spent several (I think 4) months building the “MVP” (it definitely was more than an MVP. That was after years of thinking about it and months building a rigid prototype that wouldn’t work. All this time I didn’t get the feedback or validation I should have. This was all a mistake and it’s still at $0/MRR over a year later. (There are other reasons I haven’t put more effort into it.)

2nd product I built the MVP in a couple of months after having gained some validation from the landing page and outreach. Still put more time into it than I should have for an MVP, but it did just the one core thing. Most of that time was on UI/UX. Still working on this and already have users. I enjoyed it more and got feedback sooner.

3rd product I just finished an MVP over the weekend. Not sure yet how it will go, but it’s probably the first true MVP I’ve built. It’s rough, barely does the one thing, and doesn’t look super great. But I put a weekend into it so if it fails I’m ok with that.

Each one gets a little better.

For the products I ended up launching, it didn't take more than 2 months. When it took more than that, I abandoned the project before showing it to the public.
I think getting some feedback at the early days is beneficial not just because you'll build what people really want but it can help you stay motivated. If you keep building alone in the "dark" you have to stay motivated by yourself. And that's really hard.

We built https://scrapingfish.com in 2-3 months: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/scraping-fish
Two co-founders who code.
This includes some hardware setup (mobile proxy pool) required under the hood.
And by MVP I mean a product for which someone was willing to pay.

Ideally you can test this with even smaller mvp

4 years of solo development. You learn a lot by doing it for that long and the skills you gain are beyond anything you could have expected.

Highly recommended to try and put everything you got into your project. You’ll be surprised by what you can accomplish if you just stick to it for long enough.

We built ScrapingFox in about 2 months. We focused heavily on rapid iteration and agile development.

The number one mistake is, that it takes too long. ;)

I'd say:
Marketing-MVP (validating idea): max 2 weeks, including concept and research
HiFi-MVP (validate solution): 2-4 weeks max

Anything over that just costs your time and money.

First of all, let me share how I understand an MVP. You know you have an MVP when the target market recognises your product as a solution to a certain kind of problem. It’s one step further than problem/solution fit.

That means that developing an MVP is more about understanding your customer needs than most people think.