Successful founders, how long did it take to build your MVP?

I had a couple of versions of an Alitu MVP - they took the form of back-end and front-end validation.

1. The back-end MVP took around 2 months - we built a range of processors which did all the audio processing we needed to. And we had a very basic front-end which allowed you to select individual processes, apply the variables and that would string all of the processes together. It allowed non-coders to use it and test out what the back-end could do with our audio.

2. The front-end MVP took waaaaay longer. That was from May to Jan - so around 9 months. A lot of that was UX and UI design, because Alitu's audio editing interface is pretty complex. But... if we hadn't had that feature, we probably could have cut it in half.

I'll consider successful as "making revenues", but of course, it can greatly varies from one another.

For PDFShift, it took me 3 months to build the MVP. It was quite long because I had to figure out a scalable way to setup and manage servers dedicated for conversions (a simple docker on Amazon wasn't enough) and I had to implement a solid codebase to handle PDF conversions efficiency.

But in general, you need to take into consideration the type of project you are working on. A directory website will be faster than an app for managing kids in a school for instance.

It took me four months full-time to develop a MPV in 2011. It was fully functional, but a stand-alone app. The app was definitely minimal but also 'viable' so I got lots of feedback from people about what they wished the app would do. I used that info to lay out a feature roadmap.

There was negligible revenue for the first two years as I tried to find a sustainable business model. I picked up contract jobs in the interim and worked my ass off. In 2013, I switched to working for myself full time, but money was tight. That was nerve wracking but the right thing to do.

Right now, I'm up to $7,457.32 MRR... so not newsworthy, but enough to allow me to keep working on it.

About 6 months to ship what I consider a true MVP. It’s a fully functional Android app that is usable, it’s unique selling proposition being obvious but not implemented to full potential yet.

Also it’s a very polished app (that’s where the most of those 6 months went), with animations and great care for performance. I think that showing a quality-made product and not just a hacked-together prototype really helped a lot to persuade early adopters to buy it already.

In the first two weeks upon the "soft launch" it got me >6000 installs, >110 purchases, and $1.5k of revenue, but has stalled since — now I’m busy with development and don’t market it much. Working on those paid features right now, will promote the app after I ship those.

That was my case. As always, YMMV.

I build the initial version, the version I shared with the world, of Startup Costs within 8 hours. It lacked many, many features both on the product side as tech side (tests, validations, etc).
That version got me about in 150 users in a few weeks. Now slowly converting the, now close to 350 users, to paying customers. :)

Biggest "secret" is a best-practices Ruby on Rails template, I recently released a product too (which also was built in mere hours—though the actual template was years in the making). This side project is now gearing towards $1k.

My MVP was a service, so it was easier to launch, as I didn't have to sit down and code anything.

Coming up with the idea for the service and deciding what it would entail probably took me about 6 weeks.

That said, the MVP really evolved quickly over the next months as I got feedback and understand people's needs better.

I've spent everything from 1 week to 9 months creating MVPs over the years.

FWIW, the successful ones always involved either existing customers or potential customers and the MVP was kind of more a "work for free" to validate the idea style arrangement. What I mean by that is that we would have a bunch of people from the niche we were targeting and we'd co-develop the product.

Looking back it seems obvious, but the reason this was so useful, I believe, was that the product we ended up making was usually
quite different to the idea + features we initially envisaged.

Some of those customers went on to purchase and some didn't.

We also used this same approach when developing and releasing new features or versions. Although in that case it's much easier to find the customers to contribute ideas... the problem then is actually making sure you choose the right ideas to add to the existing product... but that's a nice problem to have :)

I think @robwalling has a great approach in this area... he's posted a bunch of interesting stuff here recently worth checking out.

FYI.. the MVPs that took the longest without close customer involvement were the ones that didn't work out... learnt that the hard way and have "re-learnt" it again recently.

For @wavve - My technical co-founder spent about 12 hours getting our first MVP up. It was just an open source project that we modified a bit and hosted on an EC2 instance. No database, accounts, or logins.

We would have customers hit our landing page, pay through a WP widget, then we would send them the IP Address to the EC2 so they could use the product. Luckily, there was nothing account specific needed for people to get value out of the MVP.

For @zubtitle - We didn't "build" an MVP. We did the concierge product route: We had users upload videos through a landing page and we would outsource video captioning and invoice the user directly. To the user, they didn't know whether or not software was doing it or not.

Neither were glamorous, I know... but they helped us (a) validate people would pay and (b) get a head start on what features people wanted and would pay for.

What's needed varies so much by product category, customer base, etc that I don't know that you'll get any actionable advice from this to be honest. Whats needed these days really depends entirely on what your potential clients expect.

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