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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

#101

Post by garethrowlands »

cestith wrote: post #72

If it's not viable, it's not a minimum viable product because it's not viable. If it's not something you can sell or at least market to customers, it's not a minimum viable product because it's not a product. If it doesn't meet enough needs in a clear enough way, it's not a minimum viable product because you haven't met the minimum. MVP is not a longterm goal, but it can be an important stepping stone. All three of t…

Absolutely! The "minimum" in MVP is about minimising the time until a viable product's in the market. It's not that worse is better, it's that - other things being equal - quicker is better.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#102

Post by gilgad13 »

Contra to most of the comments here, I found a lot to agree with in this article:

> You have no soul as a company at that point, you’re just trying to make money with other people, rather than help people with a problem that you know. You may think you have an idea, but it’s not good enough yet.

I think this is the crux of the difference. If you want to have a successful startup, you have to believe that you deserve to exist and believe you have something unique to offer. You cannot just "show up and listen" and get paid the big bucks.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#103

Post by throwaway5752 »

rwmj wrote: post #65
borski wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to say this. The author of the article does not understand what an MVP is. An MVP is the eventual answer to a metric fuckton of customer development, not what you go into customer development with. If you think you already know what the customer wants, I wish you luck at your next startup after this one fails; you don’t know that, and neither does your customer, or they would have built / bought it alread…

With Ansible, Mike already had a successful prototype (func) which had been developed and used by the Fedora infrastructure team for a while. He then left Red Hat and worked on Ansible. So he did in fact already know what the customer wanted! However that's an unusual case for a start-up. https://opensource.com/article/21/2/ansible-origin-story

Based on my experience func and ansible aren't very comparable and it's hard to call func a prototype for ansible. My recollection is that it was much more of a disruption to puppet, chef, and saltstack that had all become much more complicated and heavyweight by that time.

What I took away from this article is that an expert in that space (DeHaan) knew there was a gap and opportunity in this area, and the point of this article is that because he was able to capitalize on that opportunity because of his existing expertise and familiarity.

It's an interesting view compared to some interpretations of lean startups.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#104

Post by nowherebeen »

I was recently watching a YT lecture from Geoffrey Moore, and one student raise their question about MVP. Their argument is that MVP doesn't work in B2C because no one wants to use your shitty product. Everyone expected everything to be complete. I think this makes sense from my experience. If you have web, people will ask if you have mobile. If you have iOS, they will ask if you have Android.

And given the YC have shifted their focus to mainly B2B Saas companies, I couldn't help be think the student was right in some way. B2C is so much harder to crack because expectations are high and attention spans are very low. If it doesn't click within 5 seconds, customers just move on. People's tolerance for trying new products compared to a decade again has decreased substantially.

This isn't the case for B2B. If there is a business need, people are much more willing to tolerate your shitty product as long as they receive a net gain. Of course, B2B comes with its challenges.

It was an interesting perspective.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#105

Post by xemdetia »

smilespray wrote: post #23
CipherThrowaway wrote: post #16

Bit of an arrogant and directionless rant with no concrete detail and many false dichotomies. "Just build the right product" is like saying "just don't write bugs" or "just have money." It feels like DeHaan is reacting to the idea of exploration because he thinks you should just know everything to begin with. Knowing everything upfront is definitely better than exploring your domain, product and market incrementally.…

This wasn't what I got out of the article. Too many people focus on the Minimum, and don't care about the Viable or the Product. There are table stakes. MVP doesn't mean half-assed and buggy. They misuse the concept and release any old crap. As a result, MVP has become too much of a buzzword and the intention behind it got lost.

I agree that this is what I drew out of it. You can't hand wave away some pieces of the product as 'minimal' if they are directly applicable to the basic use case. I've been the audience that has to say 'great but the fact that this doesn't allow more than 20 things is a complete non-starter' constantly. You then wait for the next iteration and these critical changes aren't even talked about, and so you just give up on them and start working with the next vendor. Another variant I see often too is something that 'creates a job title' at the customer where their product is so much of a ongoing headache that you end up needing a FTE or department just to manage the thing. It is often quite apparent from the visible product where you ask about things like 'how does the system alert if there is a problem' or 'how do we know your agents are connecting' is a TODO item that says 'we defer to YOUR infrastructure' instead of having a plan that works through the whole system well.

I don't mind that people try to setup a minimal product or have people to be self-inserted to do the work that is planned to be automated later on the service company's side, but if your answer to the question 'if we use this product we'll have 1000 artifacts to configure, how do we do this efficiently' is 'you have to go one by one and we'll implement it later' on a product/service that clearly is going to have 1000's of things is just junky and not minimal at all.

EDIT: also don't be that person who says 'well you can do that with the API!' when you in fact can't do it through the API and/or it is the exact same level of clunkiness as the UI.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#106

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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

No, the MVP process presumes that you are not omniscient.

Just because you think you know what a customer wants, doesn't mean that anything you make will satisfy the customer. They need to actually get their hands on it, so they can tell you if it works for them. 99% of the time they will be unhappy about something. And that is fine; nothing is ever perfect! But if there is a big expensive time-consuming problem, you won't know that until the customer gets their hands on it, so you don't want to wait long to find those problems.

You want to find those problems as early as possible, so you can fix things early, to reduce the time/cost/complexity of "fixing" things down the line, so your time and money is spent building things right the first time. This reduces cost, speeds up delivery, and improves quality. This concept is called Shift Left.

MVP is intended to get something in the hands of the earliest customers so they can give you feedback. Some people use this just to figure out if they have a market or a product to sell at all, but you don't have to use it that way. You can use as a "minimum customer-acceptable prototype with feedback".

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#107

Post by heuroci »

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 have an intuition that there are multiple classes of ideas: ideas that are linear interpolation of the present into the future: Those are intuitive, either for domain experts or the general public. A little voice that says "Next we do this..."

ideas that form a gravitational force: these are ideas that pull many, uncoordinated efforts. It is a bit hard to describe, but I think of this as ideas that are "necessary" in a grander emergence that needs the ideas to cement its existence.

Ideas that are not ready to be hatched: "the too early" class. Sometimes because a missing ingredient has not been identified or not sufficiently widely available. When those ideas fail, and a decade or so later new thinkers think them again and realise they failed, sometimes they go back and figure out the prerequisites weren't there and now they are or they build the prerequisites themselves.

Ideas that are non linear: those are the rarest to come by. I believe they require extreme tolerance for counter-factual thinking either naturally or otherwise-inhibition-reducing aids.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#108

Post by anaccountexists »

nowherebeen wrote: post #104

I was recently watching a YT lecture from Geoffrey Moore, and one student raise their question about MVP. Their argument is that MVP doesn't work in B2C because no one wants to use your shitty product. Everyone expected everything to be complete. I think this makes sense from my experience. If you have web, people will ask if you have mobile. If you have iOS, they will ask if you have Android. And given the YC have s…

I don’t think it’s necessarily true for B2C. It just depends on who your target audience is. It’s pretty normal for a game, shopping app, etc. to start on iOS and make its way over to Android months later.

The only place where you need more completeness is if you’re building a social app, in my experience. People want to be able to respond to messages everywhere.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#109

Post by heuroci »

smilespray wrote: post #23
CipherThrowaway wrote: post #16

Bit of an arrogant and directionless rant with no concrete detail and many false dichotomies. "Just build the right product" is like saying "just don't write bugs" or "just have money." It feels like DeHaan is reacting to the idea of exploration because he thinks you should just know everything to begin with. Knowing everything upfront is definitely better than exploring your domain, product and market incrementally.…

This wasn't what I got out of the article. Too many people focus on the Minimum, and don't care about the Viable or the Product. There are table stakes. MVP doesn't mean half-assed and buggy. They misuse the concept and release any old crap. As a result, MVP has become too much of a buzzword and the intention behind it got lost.

I also did not get this from the OP article. I would say he could have articulated things better.

It is imperative to note that what constitutes minimum and viable had generally changed since 2010.

We should also keep in mind that those terms are relative terms, depending on the domain.

For me, I think one should know a lot or experienced personally the problem(domain expertise) and be open to the form of the solution(the product). For practical reasons, if nothing else, learning any sufficiently complex domain while trying to build a business is expensive.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#110

Post by jldupinet »

nowherebeen wrote: post #104

I was recently watching a YT lecture from Geoffrey Moore, and one student raise their question about MVP. Their argument is that MVP doesn't work in B2C because no one wants to use your shitty product. Everyone expected everything to be complete. I think this makes sense from my experience. If you have web, people will ask if you have mobile. If you have iOS, they will ask if you have Android. And given the YC have s…

Interesting, I had the opposite idea. I come from doing B2C product and now work at a B2B SaaS company and my first thought was that B2B is so much harder to crack because existing solutions are really feature complete and clients are not going to tolerate for your service to have quirks or errors.

I guess B2B and B2C are not that much different regarding user tolerance and it just comes down to how much unique value is your solution giving to the customer.

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