Ask HN: How to show a not “so perfect” MVP to potential customers?

First, determine exactly what the goal of your demo is. There are lots of reasons to show someone an MVP - maybe your product has a fair deal of complexity, so you believe that a demo of functionality will help people understand. In turn, that understanding will allow them to better answer business questions ("Does this seem like it would solve x need for you?"). Maybe you have some basic UX mechanisms planned, and you want to test whether they're intuitive.

Once you know what you're looking to get out of it, focus the entire experience on answering the important questions. If there are parts of the product that are important to see for background but aren't critical to actually have the user try out in order to answer your questions, you might be able to film videos of those parts instead of building the functionality.

In your case, if you need people with good diction/utterance, just try to recruit those people. If you're trying to answer the question of whether your software solves a problem under ideal conditions, create those conditions. If it turns out the answer is yes, then you can work on solving for non-ideal conditions later and run user testing with people who have heavy accents later.

Key is to position the product evolution from this point as a journey, with discrete steps/periods on a quasi-roadmap, and make it clear to them that they as users/clients will help shape that journey.

So picture a slide with 4 steps/phases enumerated, and a talk track like: "Today, we're at Phase 1 which provides the most important feature XYZ but has some constraints around diction; next, in Phase 2, the algorithms will allow for even mediocre diction and feature ABC will also come online deliver 123 value; in Phase 3, we'll have enough data that diction is a non-issue, and features DEF and FGI are planned".

So the core question is - does Phase 1 have enough value? Is that journey/roadmap worth it for the customer putting up with limited value today?

You might be surprised either way. If even the limited experience is still super valuable, great! Or you may find that you DON'T have an MVP yet since it's not usable in its current form regardless of the journey from here.

People want a product that works for MVP in most cases. If you are a brand new tech that no one has ever done, okay. But if there is even 1 competitor that kinda works, a mock-up is worth 0. So I think depends on the market for the product.

This is great example of setting expectations. Plus I think getting the answer to "does Phase 1 have enough value?" is super important early on, even if the answer is no.

> in order to have accuracy and a fully satisfactory experience, it requires some conditions, because it deals with random variables that I still don't have full control over

> I'm really afraid we can't solve a "mediocre diction" problem.

So you're not asking "How can I present my work-in-progress to potential customers so that they focus on the potential & not the missing features?".

Instead your asking "How can I present a product that has (and always will have) limitations?" and so will never have a "fully satisfactory experience". Is that right?

I think this is an important distinction (that I didn't get from reading your original post).