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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

#51

Post by jasode »

phphphphp wrote: post #43
onion2k wrote: post #8

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 think there's some degree of nuance that isn't captured with comments like yours. I agree with your comment in principle, but there are interpretations of this method that are too extreme and that's where most of the bad MVPisms come from (and what I assume this blog post is a response to). As with any process, what most people are doing is not what was intended, and so we have to discuss what people are doing more…

>My personal disdain for MVP-ing is [...], and it leaves little room for corrective action

The "corrective action" is actually embedded into the MVP / Lean Startup terminology popularized by Eric Reis: https://www.slideshare.net/startuplessonslearned/minimum-via...

It's just the that acronym wasn't longer such as MVPI (Minimum Viable Product Iteration) or MVPLL ((Minimum Viable Product Learning Loop).

>Customers lie, but so does data.

The "data" in the MVP iteration framework doesn't lie because the relevant data is "paying customers". Either the startup has growing revenue from its product or it doesn't.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#52

Post by izacus »

janxgeist wrote: post #39
jiggawatts wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IME this part is completely wrong, unless it's defining "serious buyer" in such a way that most of your market isn't one. 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 develop…

These 9 bullet points are far from "not difficult to implement" though.

Well, you ain't getting that 7+ figure contract for just building easy stuff either.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#53

Post by da_chicken »

movedx wrote: post #27
smilespray wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#54

Post by izacus »

drewcoo wrote: post #3

This seems to be arguing that the complete implementation is what matters most. That seems expensive and risky.

Yes, a complete, well-rounded implementation is what makes for a successful product (where well-rounded == supports use-cases for customers well).

It is expensive (which is why it costs a lot to create a startup) and it is very risky (which is why most startups fail because they mess this up).

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#56

Post by chris_nielsen »

Mindwipe wrote: post #41
chris_nielsen wrote: post #34

I think there’s two kinds of MVP in common use and they’re both valid tools in specific situations. In Lean Startup, Eric Ries argues that if your business has giant unknowns. Big leap of faith assumptions. Then you’re best off using the scientific process to validate those unknowns before you do anything else. Start with a theory, design experiments and analyse the results. Repeat. The MVP is the experiment. It’s a…

> 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…

Yeah I think we actually agree, that’s why I said it’s a valid approach “sometimes”.

Like any tool, Lean Startup MVPs aren’t the right tool for every situation. You need extreme uncertainty.

If you’re a FAANG and you’re releasing a new version of a well established type of product like an email client, what giant existential risks do you have? FAANG have existing customers, we all know people use email. There’s no questions to answer, no uncertainty, so MVPs are the wrong tool for the job.

Why bother running experiments if we have 20 years of data showing us that we have customers and they like using email…

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#57

Post by marcosdumay »

phphphphp wrote: post #43
onion2k wrote: post #8

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 think there's some degree of nuance that isn't captured with comments like yours. I agree with your comment in principle, but there are interpretations of this method that are too extreme and that's where most of the bad MVPisms come from (and what I assume this blog post is a response to). As with any process, what most people are doing is not what was intended, and so we have to discuss what people are doing more…

> it leaves little room for corrective action

The entire idea of MVPs is to leave as much room for corrective action as possible.

It doesn't happen often, but when it happens it really annoying that society is so reluctant to embrace an idea that people won't even acknowledge that the idea exists. If you name it, they will change the word meaning to the opposite of the thing you named. If you show it by example, they will completely ignore your idea on the example, and only ever accept irrelevant details.

We are seeing an example here, with MVPs. People really dislike anything lean and anything scientific. Merge the two ideas and you have a sure mind-repellent.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#58

Post by mizzao »

onion2k wrote: post #8

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 simplest possible solution that lets you iterate, but no simpler"

The most apt analogy for me has been multivariate optimization of a nonconvex function: the MVP is the initialization conditions. If you start near a local maximum then there is no way that hill-climbing (SGD, L-BFGS) will get you to a global maximum. So you need to make sure your starting point (MVP) lets you actually iterate to the global maximum through small local optimizations.

A product pivot is basically a random jump in the objective function hoping to get closer to a point where the function's gradient can lead you to a global maximum.

We did that with our product and thankfully the new initialization conditions are way better, and we are at a point where we can iterate to PMF. But there was no way we could have done that with our old product. (Here's the story of that pivot: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope)

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#59

Post by adrr »

Ability to pivot and agility is what separates the losers from the winners. In evolution, it is not the strongest that survives, it is the one that can adapt to changes. Building an MVP is being agile.

I was leading engineering at a finance company that offered ways to invest in an ESG fund that the company managed. The product had no traction. We had 6 months of runway left in the bank and no investor would even touch us with near 0 growth. This was when Wells Fargo scandal hit and people were angry at their banks. We pivoted to online banking and released a banking app in 4 months. 10x our customer base and raised $40m in under a year. If we kept just building out the investment product, we would have failed.

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