How long is "too long" to build an MVP?

How much does the red car cost?

If you could launch it significantly faster, and you're not, then that's too long.

For custom software development, you'd better ship the MVP in 3 months.

For everything else like landing page, no code, etc. - ship it in 2 weeks.

Surely, depends on the industry, product, and complexity.

I'd judge it based on what's holding me from releasing it. Am I trying to make it absolutely perfect?  Even if it is a "beta" version of the product, I believe it must be released at some time in order to obtain genuine consumer feedback. Otherwise, it is a guessing game that wastes a lot of time and resources.

I'd think that a MVP should be built between 1 day to 1 month for most ideas — YC said in SUS this past summer that it should take days to 3 weeks maximum if it's a more technically complex domain. From what I recall, DoorDash was launched in 1 afternoon by some guys who just put up a phone number on a blank website.

Personally, I spent 2.5 weeks to build our MVP for Infisical: https://infisical.com. Once we launched and started getting some early traction, we watched for how people checked out + used our platform and iterated accordingly.

I think your goal should be to produce and launch as fast as you can, so you can validate your idea, start learning from potential customers (ideally you would've talked to them beforehand to make sure your idea is logical to test out), and build towards something you know people want. Too often, people spend many months and even years (I talked to someone who spent 3 years recently) to build an MVP only to launch and find out that half of the features go unused and more-so that no one needs the thing they're building — I learned this the hard way with my previous startup (https://www.auledge.com) that launched, got 500+ users, but half of the features were not used and the app never got real traction.

Not saying that you can't take long to build a successful startup (clearly Figma did it with a very slow 3 years to their first paying customer) but this is just from typical advice given by YC and other startup founders.