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

Is you goal to get VC funding, or is your goal to sell to a client?

To get VC funding, if the market is frothy enough, you don't even need a MVP, just a power point and a fancy resume.

To sell to a client is what I was more along the lines of.

General rant incoming:

Feedback, in the UI sense: one of the biggest annoyances for me is using Google Auto. I issue a voice command and it says "Sorry, I don't understand 'navigate home'". Clearly, the audio process was fine, clearly the voice-to-text interpretation was fine, 'navigate home' is a command it recognises, so I deduce there was some back-end error but it's not specified in the applications feedback. It seems it would be super easy to check if the phrase they're telling the user that they don't understand was in a list of common phrases that the application handles. "Our app works best in a brightly lit environment, with microphone noise filtering turned on, and a clutter-free high-contrast background".

Like, I wish computer games came with (free before you buy!) simple benchmarks; "if you score above 100 on $benchmark you should be able to run at 60fps on default settings; above 200 75fps on max". Then it's really easy to know things are working or if you need to monkey around with drivers and settings and such.

IMO if you're struggling to get good input then you should score the input against the characteristics you want to improve, like "30% for audio quality, 80% for recognised commands, 50% for gesture quality;" change the score on the fly so users can easily tell if they're doing it right?

/ranty-mc-rantface

Prepare for the worst; hope for the best.

What will you do if it doesn't work on the first try? Second try? What's the backup plan? Hopefully you won't need it, but it will make you feel more confident.

Walk through a scenario where everything that could fail, fails. When do you stop trying? What do you switch to? How do you segway? Do you warn at the start of the demo, or just as you are about to do the thing you are worried about, or both? Is the audience technical, should you talk about the randomness or just say "it's somewhat random?" What are the important things to get across, even as things fail. If your brain starts going into panic mode; what are your top priorities?

The second way is to think about the positives of failing. During the on-stage Windows 98 launch party, the demo computer BSODed. Bill Gates quickly interjected with "I guess this is why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet", and everyone got a very memorable moment out of it. What are your one-liners to ease the mood and at the same time shift focus from the failure to the process of development?

Personally, I tend to say "let me try this..." right before I do something I'm not sure will work. If it doesn't do what I want, I (mostly calmly) acknowledge that it needs more work and describe what should happen in the finished product. Getting the word "finished" in there is my "not shipping yet." Then I move on to paint a picture of how the feature will be useful, and why it's worth continuing getting there.

I once saw a demo of a smoke detector. The demonstrator started talking about how much time they spent on making sure it gave no false positives. Then he took a can of fake smoke (used for testing smoke detectors, mind you) and nothing happened. He kept trying for at least a minute, but nothing. Was this a failed demo? Or did he demonstrate that there are no false positives? It's all in the framing of the recovery. I don't believe he had a recovery line, sadly, so I'm sure the part of the audience that didn't remember/listen to his initial speech had a very different take-away than did those who remembered.

I wish you the best.

> Then, at the end of the demo, you could actually see him, closing the Director show. The rest of the demos did not have the eye candy.

Showing a video of a demo is in itself not a bad thing - that's often done when you want to show early builds or even a patchwork of work across multiple builds.

Depending on when you saw the Longhorn demo, it might be inaccurate to say that Longhorn became Vista. I worked at Microsoft (not on Windows) back then and saw some flashy demos of eye-candy UI in the 2003 timeframe that never launched, except as a beta build that was given out to external developers late 2003 at the PDC (conference). The original Longhorn, demo-ed at PDC 2003, was abandoned in mid-2004 and was pivoted to the Windows 2003 codebase. A lot of the features originally planned / demo-ed for Longhorn (new filesystem, XAML-based UI etc) never shipped.

This!! I worked for a startup and we were always chasing the "I would buy if you had this feature..." feature for every company who didn't yet buy the product. It was a total mess. And worst of all most companies didn't buy the product once we implemented the exact feature they wanted.