We decided to build an MVP based on our best estimates and test the market that way. The goal was to launch something in 6 months and test if the demand was there; and if it wasn’t, we’d only wasted 6 months. We chose to optimize for getting to market quickly rather than worrying about how much it would cost.
Contrast it to what the Lean Startup principles say:
The Lean Startup methodology has as a premise that every startup is a grand experiment that attempts to answer a question. The question is not "Can this product be built?" Instead, the questions are "Should this product be built?" and "Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?"
So instead of doing what a lean startup would do, they did the opposite. Let's see what they could have done instead...
"How many customers will actually use it?"
- Lean startup: create a signup page with a mock up or landing page and a few buttons that work and every potential behind a "coming soon" screen - Their approach: actually build the whole product and then launch it and see who's interested
"What is it all going to cost?" - Lean startup: As little as possible to discover the insights we need to iterate and evolve the product - Their approach: well we already paid the salary for our engineers and we've given them six months, so what's half the salary+benefits of X number of engineers?
"What should we charge for it? Is it going to cover the infrastructure costs?" - Lean startup: experiment on costing and pricing as you go along - Their approach: give away the product for a 30-day trial at a high cost to ourselves! Unbelievably expensive customer acquisition costs.
Reference: http://theleanstartup.com/principles
And now I guess I've truly learned why product managers exist. Someone let this crazy experiment run for six months. You're saying in six months you couldn't spend one month finding the simplest/cheapest ways to test these various hypothesis?
$100k customer acquisition spend is insane.
The whole post is just a lesson in contradicting what an MVP minimal viable product is.
Even when we were building v1, the team knew it wasn’t the ideal architecture. Before v1 even launched, there were plenty of conversations in our Slack about whether we should port Octopus to Linux and run it on Kubernetes, or see if we could run it on Windows within Kubernetes or use Nomad by Hashicorp?
Lol, engineers always want something fun to work on and sometimes it turns out to be a great idea. But they porting software for an MVP? Why not evolve the new product so that it generates more revenue or reduce the costs in some other way instead of talking about porting and rewriting?
If you're at an established company that has money to burn, go ahead, read the whole blog series. If you're trying to create a new startup, whether it's a product or service, avoid this article or read it as a warning. When you've spent as much as a decent engineer costs in one month...something's gone off the rails.