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Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

michaeldehaan.substack.com

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Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#81

Post by dagw »

marcosdumay wrote: post #62
janxgeist wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These 9 bullet points are far from "not difficult to implement" though.

Well, 2 of them are hard, the others are the kind of thing you get if you let a developer take a week or two to solve them at the beginning, but almost impossible to create after the system is built. So, 3 months of up-front work. It very likely won't break any project/company, but it's enough of a drag that most people will say "fuck it" and not target large enterprises. And, well, there are plenty of other reasons…

Having worked at a large enterprise I agree that there are many good reasons not to target 'us'. However far too many companies are rocking up to sales meetings with large enterprises and have no idea about their actual needs and the scale and problems of selling to large enterprises.

Having also sold to large enterprises, you have to be willing to sometimes spend 3-6 month developing a really obscure feature that will only be used by that one customer to get the sale.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#84

Post by lmm »

jiggawatts wrote: post #13
lmm wrote: post #7

> An example of too much minimalism would be failing to implement UI pagination and your UI falling over with more than 20 objects, because you didn’t think about the use case. Maybe you haven’t thought about scale-out or upgrades or you can install on only one operating system. A serious buyer can sniff out this incompleteness and won’t take you seriously, and only serious domain experience can fill in these gaps. Y…

> IME this part is completely wrong, unless it's defining "serious buyer" in such a way that most of your market isn't one. I used to be such a "serious buyer". I represented a large government agency with over 2,000 sites and several hundred thousand employees. Vendors would turn up with "cute" web apps that used drop downs to select objects like security groups or user accounts. This works great when you're develop…

Sure, you can roll the dice on a handful of big organisational buyers, and you may find that good engineering is what they're after. But there's a whole lot of politics (organisational and other), relationships, and other stuff in play; having a heavily engineered product is not remotely a guarantee of winning that kind of contract.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#85

Post by rmbyrro »

TacoSteemers wrote: post #25
rmbyrro wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> merely clicking something like that will make both the server and client use gigabytes of memory until either one or both crash Curious as to how clicking on an UI object would consume gigabytes of memory, both in frontend and backend?

For large organisations the amount of entries in the dropdown is probably very large. To fill the dropdown would then require significant work on the server, and to build up and show the dropdown would require significant work on the client. Edit, of course a proper solution would be well-thought out and would not crash, but that solution would also not be using a single dropdown to show all possible values because t…

Modern backends and frontends can surely handle way more than 20 entries in a dropdown without sweating.

But in case you do have a LOT of entries that modern hardware cannot handle efficiently, just switch to a selector based on a search box (perhaps with autocomplete), instead of a dropdown.

Since it's an easy modification in the UI, perhaps these startups used a dropdown for simplicity, knowing they can change to a selector search box quickly, if it becomes an issue.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#86

Post by hackitup7 »

I upvoted this for discussion purposes (and because it's well written) but I really disagree here. User needs are hard to predict in all sorts of businesses. In b2c consumers often don't know what they want. In b2b, the market often doesn't know how it needs its solution solved. In both cases MVP + iteration on traction is the fastest path to happy users.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#87

Post by victor106 »

> The whole MVP process presumes you don’t know what you are making for a product, and that is death.

I am not sure that is how everyone understand what an MVP is.

I think of it as "I know what product I am developing, I just don't know what features within the product I should prioritize now vs later"

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#88

Post by titzer »

> The risk is you’re going to build something and nobody will come (or stay), and then you’ll run out of money.

I feel like the author missed the letter in the middle, V. V=viable. So you build an MVP missing the viable. Yep, that's a risk. How does that bust the concept of MVP?

The author goes on to reason in circles several times, occasionally repeating some permutation of "it has to be viable", and "why didn't you start with something viable". "You're doing it wrong, you don't have the viable."

This person isn't ranting about MVPs. This person is ranting about startups that obviously do not have MVPs and are stabbing blindly at one.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#89

Post by zerkten »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #68
onion2k wrote: post #8

Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build. This is exactly what killed my first startup. We believed we fully understood what the customer needs and that we should build the right product before we started selling. We were actually trying to build the minimum viable product, but we were hilariously (with hindsight) wrong about what the customers wanted. Almost all…

In your story you thought you knew what to build, but didn't. The "MVP" theory is that the MVP is part of validating that you really know what to build, as you say. OP author disagrees. (I'm not sure OP author says anything about when you "start selling" exactly). Clearly a lot more can be said about how you know what to build if not an "MVP" approach. OP suggests a few things: "cultivated instinct" (which as a phras…

>> "Domain expertise" might be the main thing he's talking about

This is clearly what he is talking about. When he is talking about his experience with the "Senior Design project course in Computer Science at my alma mater" he is really talking about how people can "MVP their way into getting domain expertise" at some level. This is a fundamental problem with the "startup industry".

Groups of people from a computing (I want to be broader than CS) that have reasonably strong technical skills and a lot of enthusiasm for applying those skills want to build successful startups. They generally lack domain expertise outside of technology-adjacent products for the most part. It's not completely absent because there is some success, but there isn't a balance for the most part.

Where does the domain expertise come from then? It could come from a slow development process involving the founders immersing themselves in the area. That's really only something that's going to be feasible before the founders create the company. Once the company has been founded, it becomes a scramble to interpret some ideas and build an MVP that can be sold to some of the advisors that the founders could get time with. It's only now that the foundational work is happening. If the right people see the MVP, or the founders make the right connections, it's possible to catapult forward from here, but it's a predictable failure point.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#90

Post by kuraudoOishii »

da_chicken wrote: post #53
movedx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't mean the MVP is a bad idea, then. That means it's being poorly implemented.

If an idea is routinely implemented badly, then it is a bad idea to implement it at all.

I don't think such an absolutism holds water: great ideas don't exist in vacuums. There is no magic bullet which makes startups successful: lots of things, big and small, need to come together to make it. I think the article touches on several failings which aren't actually the fault of mvps at all.
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