111–120 of 132 posts
I don't agree at all with this statement. It's not that you don't know, you know, but you are realistic with the pretentions: you will not go for huge product to hit the market, you want to focus on your best strenght and then grow faster until you complete your idea.
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.
Completeness can also mean content. If your shopping app doesn't have vendors, no one is going to use it. Try getting vendors to join your no-name shopping app and I bet you will be 100% ignored other than desperate mom and pop shops.
And for games, it requires a huge investment of talent to develop, and very few games succeed. So completeness here would be getting game designers, graphic designer, software engineers to work together for low pay and high possibility of failure. The only games that don't require huge investments are puzzle games like tetris and 2048.
Completeness is the bar where the end users feel there is sufficient value to use. If Uber Eats only had 10 restaurants, very few people would ever use it. So the bar is very high to get people to start using it consistently.
> The emphasis should be on viable and product, and getting there ASAP. So… a minimum viable product?
For most companies a MVP is planting a fast growing seed of technical debt. It's rushed, not polished, full of bugs and used to see if you have any traction because your Product Owners and Sales teams usually have a significant disconnect and development is thought of as an after thought. If you can do a MVP in 1 month, but a minimal polished product in 2, I think that extra month will pay for itself if the product is worth anything.
The worse thing a company can do is have your customers fund your products with a JIT development process.
Sure some companies can get it right doing a true MVP, but most cant and it shows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And again… it’s a perfectly valid approach. It's a valid approach in certain markets. But if you're FAANG and launch that sort of MVP going against mature products from your competitors, often replacing a more feature complete product with an existing user base that you try to port over... well, you're going to get destroyed. As keeps happening to Google because they don't seem to realise that the market has moved…
> But if you're FAANG and launch that sort of MVP going against mature products from your competitors Then you haven't launched a viable product. You haven't made an MVP.
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…
It seems like a lot of YC companies are just drinking the MVP kool-aid. And there are 400 companies per batch now because they can just play the numbers game: throw them all at the wall and see who sticks. It's a very interesting and nuanced distinction between: "just build something and launch it as soon as possible" ...vs... "think really hard about how to solve a particular problem in a novel way, then build the s…
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…
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…
Also, while customer development might work well for web apps and such, there are classes of software where customers have no desire to interact with you until the product is almost fully baked. Trying to do customer development in these markets is often an exercise in futility. It is a different kind of process to arrive at an MVP, and in these cases it requires that the founders have strong domain and market expertise.
I disagree with “know what problem you’re solving exactly before you start a company”. The entire point of an early startup is working out exactly what problem to solve. A pivot is realising your hypothesis is flawed and redefining the problem based on some new information.
Great execution at the early stage is table stakes for survival.
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…
Customers want a complete solution for their use case, but not all customers are the same, and not all use cases are the same.
Say you want to create a sports tracking app. You can focus on all sports, or just a few, you can focus on all forms of one sport, or just one particular.
For exmaple, he says:
> What is there to be careful of MVP as a strategy? Well, to start, I don’t think MVP works. The risk is you’re going to build something and nobody will come (or stay), and then you’ll run out of money.
This has nothing to do with a MVP approach and everything to do with ensuring you are building the MVP with and for a specific customer or customers who have pain points you understand, and then iterating on their feedback as you go. You could make the mistake of not having customers ready to share their feedback with you with and without an MVP.
He also says:
> But no - who would give you money if you didn’t know what product you were making? The product should be in your DNA
Utter tosh - I've had success building software that started as MVPs in two completely different industries that prior to building the software I had zero experience in.
I could go on...but I've made my point. Don't listen to anybody who says MVPs are old and busted - especially but not limited to this guy.