How much MVP is enough?
Before creating 3 successful startups with over $1M in ARR, I often ran into this problem. As a perfectionist, it's hard to stop adding features and thinking about the long term vision, and that is recipe for delaying the launch.
Is this a problem that you guys had? Finding exactly how much MVP would be enough to validate an idea is a tough question. I have tried to address some of it in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdThXpDRKvA
Let me know if anyone else can relate to it, especially developers who are creating a startup :)
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It's hard to validate a business idea when the MVP is too different from the long term vision... I never understand why tech entrepreneurs feel the need to launch as quickly as possible.
In science, researchers spend a lifetime researching and they don't think they wasted their life if they did not get a Nobel prize. The journey must be enjoyable; that's how many great tech projects started anyway, with someone having fun...
In the tech sector, one has to build something truly great within 6 months and be successful within 2 years... Is it realistic, when there are so many brains building similar products, to produce something special within a few months? Babies don't come with a MVP, yet we wait patiently for 9 months for the baby to be ready... Would a 3-month foetus help us know what the baby is gonna be like? The MVP must be close enough to the vision , so we can validate the vision...
I'd imagine developers would hold a slightly different opinion on this topic than biz devs and sales/marketing types.
For a dev, the sunk costs in development time can be put down to education, enjoyment of coding, portfolio piece etc.
For non-dev founders, you're talking cash, and the stress that comes with finding and spending it.
I fall on the dev side, no doubt, I'll happily create things that go nowhere and chalk it up as a learning experience, but it would be a different story if I was burning cash in the attempt just to get an MVP.
Rate of learning - is a really good reason to move fast. Here's a great post about it.
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2861-how-nature-and-naivet-helped-paul-maccready-build-a-human-powered-airplane-in-only-six-months
Hey, if that works for you, great!
But a lot of us need to make money $$$ from a business :) A startup is a business, and if a business doesn't have the potential to make money, it's a wasted effort IMHO. What an MVP does (or should do) is simply validate the potential of the idea to make sure it is something that people want.
Once that part is done, you can spend all the time you have on the idea to nurture it. I agree that growing a business is a much longer effort.
Although I don't buy the baby MVP analogy, but even then parents go to the doctor every now and then to see if everything is going OK with the baby. That's validation :)
Validation is when people use or buy the product, not when they say it looks nice.
If the financial constrainsts require a smaller product then one should have a final goal that reflects those constraints. There is no point in validating an electric truck concept by building an electric bike... Better to leave the truck project to those who can afford the investment and the losses...
Engineering can be very expensive, there is no doubt about that.
Of course, agreed. That's exactly the point I'm making in the video. MVPs for different companies will be different based on a number of different factors.
I like the term MAP (Minimum Awesome Product )
The smallest surface area product you can get away with that is really great for your customers!
ie Not just functional.
Being someone who held that idea for a long time, I am now in the opposite camp.
For starters, those researchers spend a ton of time finding grants. It looks rosy from the outside but they face hell.
To your point of babies, yes the MVP is totally different - it's sex, or rather sperm and egg.
Nature already has a thing for it called metamorphosis. The start (caterpillar) is totally different from the vision (butterfly). The egg is equally different from the chicken.
What about artists and novelists who spend years working on their product?
If writers had that mindset litterature would be very poor, with only short stories written to make a quick buck; nobody would spend years writing a book for fear of not being able to sell it.
What about all the wonderful open source software that we rely on which do not have a launch date? They are built to work, not to make money...
Imagine setting out to build a plane and delivering a hot air balloon instead; we would never have planes with this mindset: I found a niche for this smaller design so you won't get a plane after all... It does fly though.
It seems to me that you have made up your mind to believe in this path and everything around you seems to align with your thinking process. Let me add some insights.
Many authors, including very well known ones, suffer from blocks in attempting large works. So they practice by writing everyday, does not matter what. Here, you can see an app to encourage that from an Indie Hacker - https://200wordsaday.com
Open Source work usually starts off with an engineer trying to fix something. There is rarely any vision drama. My product itself is a really complicated one, but it started off with simple questions to the status quo. I am an engineer who has been writing code for 20 years or more. But solving a small challenge where the output is visible is always the easiest way to buy motivation. And my product is commercial open source.
Yes the airline industry started exactly with air balloons. You are seeing an entire industry here, with thousands of bright minds, and multiple short experiments. It is an industry that spaces 2 centuries or more if you count Vincent van Gogh's attempts.
The vision building is ego-talk. Solving immediate issues is what we need, that gives us motivation. And if we do that for 40 years, we surely would have created and chased vision. Execution is really tough and the brain wants to imagine large things, when it fails on execution on a near-daily basis. There is a word for this - procrastination.
I love this: It's hard to validate a business idea when the MVP is too different from the long term vision...
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
Agreed.
I agree. This is exactly why I love the message.
I consider MVP to be minimum viable product, where viable means:
Three different stories from my life:
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When building my previous product, I totally failed at MVP - We had a decent IT product for the tourism industry, and we decided to turn it into SaaS to make it available to a much bigger market. Along the way, we decided to cover also other industries (that we knew nothing about). We spent 2 years with the development, most of the time on features that nobody had ever used.
On the other hand, there are still customers from the tourism industry paying for the product (but just a little money)! If I was smarter, I would release it only for the tourism industry and pushed it forward this way.
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I started Floating Apps (https://floatingapps.net) as a hobby project to solve my own pain. Soon, I realized that it could help other people, so I released very the first version publicly. There was no overnight success, but it was just a hobby project, so I didn't care.
However, it was the first app of its kind on Google Play, and people started noticing it, contacting me, requesting features, and I pumped some money in, and the app started to grow. Eventually, it was my full-time job for almost two years, and it has recently reached over 8 million downloads with tens of thousand paid versions sold.
And I'm still a happy user of my own app.
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With my current product Localazy (https://localazy.com), I'm solving my real pain (I hated translating Floating Apps described above to more languages and other solutions are simply not developer-friendly) and so I'm the happy user now.
I pushed on the development long enough for the product to make sense to me. It was ready at the moment I was willing to use it for my own apps. It wasn't perfect, and there was (and still is) a long way to go, but it was good enough to be used in production for me. And I was the first user.
Then we've launched it! And we keep working hard to make it better and better. The feedback is fantastic, users love it, and a lot of decisions about the product are based on real users now.
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For me, the lesson is simple, but it cost me a lot of money and time to learn it: You should understand your target audience and the pain you try to solve. Better, you should feel the pain too. Then, it's much easier to recognize the moment when the pain is solved good enough that missing features are no longer to be roadblocks for potential early adopters.
Wonderful stories! I learnt my lessons after a bunch of failures as well, so much time wasted. That's exactly why I'm now trying to spread awareness on this topic so new founders can avoid the same mistakes.
I can relate. I created a game on iOS called Barista Coffee House which was a ricochet physics game. I spent several months on it. It didn't make any money and I thought I should add a level editor function. Note that I had no data to support the fact that users downloading the app want a level editor. I spent close to a year reworking the internals of the game to make it easy for me to create and edit levels.
Turns out nobody used it. Games are sort of a different type of business and the MVP looks a lot different, but I'm definitely a believer in creating and MVP and then iterating the product around the community you're building.
That is such an interesting case study, and it makes me think how the MVP principles apply to the gaming industry. But yes, I have had this problem for many years until I changed my mindset to user-first and validate. Next few years, 3 successful startups in a row (2 SaaS and 1 mobile app).
That's awesome, congrats on your success! How did you go about finding and engaging with customers? I've just started engaging on twitter, facebook and instagram but still no luck for me.
Honest answer? I didn't :) As most developers, I don't like interacting with people a lot so what I did instead was created free tools that would attract users. Once thousands of them started using the free tools, I started added premium hooks.
Ah, I see - thanks for the honesty :) That's a smart idea. It follows the same idea of offering something of value to build. How did you attract the users to free tools? Was it open source or something?
We used ProductHunt for the most part. For example, here's a free tool we built to get users and it was #1 product of the day. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/templates-by-email-monster
I believe that the MVP should cover the main functionality of the app and that does not have to be complex.
After that it’s up to the team what to build next or improve the current features to get them to a more stable state.
Great question, with Portabella I've gone way beyond an MVP.
After some consolidation work over the last few weeks I need to stop pumping out features and get users. Which begs the other difficult question, how does one get users?
I read a quote somewhere, maybe even here.
"MVPs die from obesity, not from starvation".
That quote has really stuck to me while working on http://relaax.io. I constantly find myself asking "Is this really needed?", and more often than not I find out that the answer is no.
Awesome! Looks like a great product :)
My rule of thumb: it's done when it has the bare minimum features required for it to function and do what is is meant to do.
We're trying to create startup products every month. So the MVP phase must be fast.
We build the idea on paper and latter with squares and not pretty stuff.
For the development part, we code in a scalable way to help us build faster in the future.
As we find all the edge cases testing the MVP and clear them out, the MVP is ready for beauty and serious dev.
We're posting on monthlystart.com the process and building a community of starters (Just starting and this, we're newbies 😳)
I have this problem consistently.
I think before developing much you are supposed to use the following to define what MVP is:
After defining what the MVP is write it down so while you are building you don't get lost (what I call it) adding one more thing to your MVP. If you are adding something you need to have evidence that it is worth it.
I know this is good advice, but I don't even follow it well myself - I think this was more of a reminder to me than anyone.
Keep adding features is not a big fault, but it will affect the Launch date.
My advice is release a first version and keep updating the new features. But Dont touch the Business Flow till you are confident with Data.
I agree. The goal should be to launch the first version as early as possible.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
Very well put! Finding that "just right" takes some experience for sure.
This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
Agreed. I personally never write tests for the first few versions. I start doing that once the project starts making $ and reliability becomes important.