Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

MVPs don't exist in a vacuum, they are part of a larger effort to figure out your business model (what is the actual problem? Who are your customers? How will you make money?) in the most efficient way possible. For a MVP to make sense, you have to do user research and truly understand the problem domain.

> Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build.

This is wishful thinking. Tons of products and companies fail simply because founders think they "know" what their business model is when in fact it's just a bunch of unverified assumptions about the market.

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 developing in a toy environment in your dev lab.

In the real world, merely clicking something like that will make both the server and client use gigabytes of memory until either one or both crash.

Here's the thing though: if you can put just a modicum of engineering effort into making your software suitable for non-toy scenarios, then winning even just one enterprise customer like this could make your rich. Win two or three similar orgs in other states or countries and you can start subscribing to Superyacht Owners' Quarterly.

But there will be no yacht because you used a drop-down. A simple control that can be implemented in minutes instead of a search box that takes a few extra lines of code.

Sorry...

PS: On a more serious note, I had a checklist that wasn't long or all that difficult to implement, and 90% of vendors would fail outright on most/all points.

    1. Search-for-select
    2. A provisioning API of some sort (REST, PowerShell, whatever)
    3. Hierarchical permissions & delegation
    4. Hierarchical policy & preferences
    5. Single-sign-on support
    6. Central audit & error logging
    7. Clone-to-deploy and/or highly automated setup.
    8. Don't demand Domain Admin rights for setup.
    9. No quadratic (or worse) scaling issues. (USE INDEXES in the DB!!)

Maybe author is conflating MVP with "build and they'll come". They're quite different ideas, although are frequently seen together in the same minds.

"Build and they'll come" is silly. 95% of businesses will need effort to bring products to consumers. Some form of marketing and/or sales.

One great risk is whether you can market and or sell the product. That's where MVPs help. Simulating marketing/sales without any product usually is not a good predictor of reality.

Curious as to how clicking on an UI object would consume gigabytes of memory, both in frontend and backend?

So… a minimum viable product?