Narrowing down the MVP

From our founding duo, I am the coding founder. After a couple of months of working additional 4-6h daily (on top of the 8h contract work) I started to feel exhausted. I felt the motivation and the initial energy fading away. The amount of work yet to be done was not shrinking proportionally to the time spent because of a poor discovery phase.

We underestimated the work and complexity hidden behind nicely-sounding features, and we overestimated our capacity as far as time is concerned.

We sat down and redefined our MVP. Instead of a full-fledged complex application we decided to focus on a single module of it – automated, configurable quoting algorithm. In this narrowed MVP the manufacturer has to upload the client's files manually, get the quote and send it to the client.

That being said, we didn't abandon the initial concept. The goal of the redefined MVP was to go live ASAP with one specific piece of working viable product and continue the development with the feedback of early adopters. Or fail fast, in the worst case.