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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

#91

Post by TacoSteemers »

rmbyrro wrote: post #85
TacoSteemers wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For large organisations the amount of entries in the dropdown is probably very large. To fill the dropdown would then require significant work on the server, and to build up and show the dropdown would require significant work on the client. Edit, of course a proper solution would be well-thought out and would not crash, but that solution would also not be using a single dropdown to show all possible values because t…

Modern backends and frontends can surely handle way more than 20 entries in a dropdown without sweating. But in case you do have a LOT of entries that modern hardware cannot handle efficiently, just switch to a selector based on a search box (perhaps with autocomplete), instead of a dropdown. Since it's an easy modification in the UI, perhaps these startups used a dropdown for simplicity, knowing they can change to a…

> Modern backends and frontends can surely handle way more than 20 entries in a dropdown without sweating.

I agree. I meant that I as a user will not find it usable enough if I often have to search the correct value in lists of 20 or more.

The discussion of the load on the frontend and backend was about amounts large enough to create problems if the developer wrote naive code, but we did not get in to a specific amount.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#92

Post by marcosdumay »

mizzao wrote: post #58
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 s…

The MVP strategy is entirely about validating your product. Unless you decide it has a good market fit, there is nothing in it telling you how to look for alternatives. There's nothing telling you to go by hill-climbing, or even by any gradient based search at all.

What it says is that once you find product-market fit, you don't destroy it by jumping around at random. But at this point, it's about disruption and the Innovator's Dilemma, where you are the incumbent. It's not about starting-up anymore.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#93

Post by madeofpalk »

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…

> 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.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#94

Post by throwaway5752 »

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

People can argue about different beliefs about what MVP means, but regardless of semantics that line really resonated.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#95

Post by rmah »

The author writes "who would give you money if you didn’t know what product you were making". Which is a very good point. And is the point of an creating an MVP first. You create an MVP before you seek outside financing, not after. You know, so that you know what product you're making when you ask for money.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#96

Post by karaterobot »

I'm ready to just say MVPs as a concept shouldn't be taught. In theory they should work fine, but I've never worked at a startup where they helped us. It's one of those things that's so easy to get wrong that it's dangerous and should be probably be avoided.

He nails it when he says people focus on the "minimum" part too much. The last startup I worked at insisted on making the minimum version of every piece of a huge system. This resulted in a shallow, unpolished platform that did everything, but didn't do anything well.

At every step, we'd say "this feature set sucks, and the UI is embarrassing. We need to flesh this out," and the response from PMs would be "this is the minimum viable product that might work". Well, it didn't. In the end, we made something nobody inside or outside the company wanted. We made the minimum, but it wasn't viable, and it wasn't a product.

You might say "well, the fact that people don't employ it correctly is not a strike against the concept of MVP" but I've seen this happen over and over. I've only ever seen MVP go wrong, and I've only heard anecdotes about it working. Using it doesn't seem to change your odds of success as a startup. I think it may be one of those theoretically good ideas most people aren't ready for.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#97

Post by throwaway5752 »

borski wrote: post #36
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 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…

"The author of the article does not understand what an MVP is" - it feels like that's not the case, based on their background? Reading the comments here, I see a lot of people with their own (and conflicting) ideas of what MVP is in the context of a startup. I also didn't get the idea from reading the article you are disagreeing with their point, and that they weren't opposing iterative learning.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#99

Post by jollybean »

I think what people miss with MVP is how it fits into the product lifecycle.

There's inherently a not of 'gray' in the situation, so don't take more steps than you need to.

Do the 'first thing' and then adjust before the 'second thing' and just don't get too far ahead of yourselves.

Even if people loathe the MVP you'll find out why.

Going from 'Slides' to 'Something Material' is a big deal, so to it in steps.

It's almost another way of saying 'build your product incrementally' - and I you do that, the 'first increment' is an MVP.

That's it.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#100

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

This article is entirely about startups, which means the title is too click-baity. The idea of MVP makes a lot more sense in its more common setting: mundane corporate backoffice applications. In such a setting your audience is not millions of people; sometimes it can be one person.

When you have a small audience you aren't afforded the freedom to decide what the product should be. Of course you control the eventual product, but the stakeholder has a huge say in what must be done, and they often have a fairly clear idea of what they want. That's where MVP comes in. You and the "customer" (stakeholder) come to an agreement on the eventual product, and you deliver an MVP to them as a milestone. The point of this MVP is to give the customer something that delivers a bit of value early on, and gives them a way to try out their initial idea to see if it really holds water. Through their time using the MVP they are able to sooner refine and readjust their wish list. Maybe the end product they initially asked for wasn't quite right after all.

In the case of startups, I sort of agree with the author, but he's still missing something: the first customer is you. Yes you should have a crystalline idea of your eventual product (similar to corporate stakeholders) because that is what separates you from your competition. But you should still use MVP! MVP doesn't mean delivering unfinished garbage. MVP just means there's more to come later. "Viable" is completely subjective, and in the case of a startup with a grand vision it should absolutely be a much higher bar than usual. You the customer/entrepreneur need the MVP because you need to see how your product performs when you present it to millions of people.

The whole point is just to avoid the morass of never-ending vaporware with years of missed deadlines, only to finally deliver something nobody wants. If "MVP" is too much of a trigger word you're welcome to call it whatever you want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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