
It's called “Ship” not “Shit” - pantonepicker
http://blog.heyimcat.com/its-called-ship-not-shit/
======
derefr
The one thing people seem to forget: MVPs are supposed to be _experiments_.
You do an MVP to figure out whether it's worth your time to build a product
for a particular market (i.e. whether there is "product-market fit"), or
whether you should pivot to something else. You make them minimal so you can
afford to do more of them, because it's unlikely your first one will work. You
make them viable because, if they aren't, your experiment won't tell you
anything (people won't use it, even if they need what it does.)

If you already know your product is something people want (e.g. something a
bank would just give you a business loan for), you obviously don't need to do
an MVP, because there's already product-market fit. Starting a pizzeria?
Front-load your investment and make a really great pizzeria; buy huge ovens,
etc.

If there's literally nobody serving your market, such that it's unclear
whether it's even a "need" or not—please don't spend years building the
perfect solution to the "problem." Find out if it's a problem first. Build a
prototype. Show it to people. Get them to say they're willing to pay you for
it. That's what an MVP is.

(And, as soon as you've found your product-market fit, and decided which
product you're going to build? Stop thinking of that product as an MVP. It's a
real product now: make it good.)

------
mortenjorck
I remember reading once that part of Apple’s success was owed to their
shunning of lean principles, that they only ever ship complete, mature
products. I would say that couldn’t be further from the truth: the original
iPhone was about as minimum-viable as a category-defining hardware product
could be.

It did only a few things (web browsing, media playback, email) better than
anything else on the market, and left out nearly everything else that wasn’t
critical to that core functionality (Exchange support, software ecosystem,
_copy and paste_ ). If anything, the original iPhone was a demonstration of
lean principles applied extraordinarily well: A bare minimum of functionality
executed at eye-poppingly maximum quality.

~~~
tsieling
The difference with Apple is that even when they do minimum, they polish that
minimum offering very well. I know exactly the kind of stuff the article
author is talking about, and most of it undercuts whatever ideas are being
tried out.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Exactly. The iPhone might have been a minimum-feature product, but it surely
wasn't Minimum Viable Experience.

------
th3iedkid
This reminds me of my workplace.Unfortunately at my work-place people tend to
confuse MVP with agile and TDD and then let all the bugs fly around pre-
production and viola we go live with known bugs all around and hence
depreciating customer confidence.

Quality is often overlooked here, b/c someone else proved that it can be done
in 20 days and everyone wants it done in the same 20-days ,no-matter how bad
the product goes out of shape :)

With time, this pattern only seems to worsen as there is less money being made
day-by-day!

------
logicallee
An MVP is an ugly lean-to (not even shack -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean-to](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean-to)),
it is 100% functional. Building it means getting airdropped into a completely
unknown forest with an axe and nothing else (in this analogy the unknown is
your market, and only an axe because you have no programmer resources except
what you can wield by hand for a few hours), a few pieces of tarp, and 8 hours
until freezing night temperatures set in. And maybe wolves.

It's not a minimum viable house, minimum lovable house, or whatever else. It
literally is the absolute smallest thing that can POSSIBLY meet purely
physical requirements such as protection from wind or holding some warmth so
that you can, ahem, not die, and which you have any hope of building with no
resources, and from nothing, using nothing. This is why it is absolutely
crucial to know how long it takes to build, and why people focus on it.

In the market, it is the absolute smallest thing that anybody can use to
achieve anything.

It doesn't matter what this designer thinks of MVP's, because when a designer
starts getting involved, you are way outside of MVP territory. This author is
an interior decorator criticizing a survival guide.

To the author: I don't know if you program, but if you want to experience the
meaning of MVP, try coding something up enough for anyone to achieve anything
using it. I guarantee you will not miss the time you spent not getting the
design (aesthetics, love, etc) right.

On the other hand, you will die in the cold if you have nothing but a
beautiful photoshop mockup to look at. That is the meaning of MVP.

------
RKoutnik
This reminds me of the Humbug in The Phantom Tollbooth, who is described as
"[someone] who always managed to be the first with the wrong answer" and later
tries to argue that it was the question itself, not the answer, that was
wrong.

It's a shockingly good lesson that I seem to re-learn every six months or so.
Being first is never a virtue in and of itself. MVPs that sacrifice quality
for speed (instead of sacrificing scope) always end up as painstaking rewrites
at best, and slow slogs to failure at worst.

Something I think most miss is that taking on this technical debt is ok when
you don't know which direction to go [0]. Get something to market to _learn_ ,
not to be "first" or "right".

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqeJFYwnkjE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqeJFYwnkjE)

~~~
bitwalker
As an aside, this reference makes me happy. The Phantom Tollbooth was one of
my favorite books when I was younger, just brilliantly written. So many good
lessons about life (the Humbug being a great example). Another great one that
is somewhat applicable here is Canby, the regular visitor to the Island of
Conclusions, who attempts to be as much as he can be of all things (hence his
name), which leaves him not very much like any of them, instead of picking one
thing and mastering it.

------
eksith
Is this really a problem in the design/startup community or does it just
appear to be so as judged by the loudest bunch? I'm not _in_ the community so
maybe I'm just not exposed to it directly, but these criticisms are awfully
similar to what was happening before the first DotCom bust.

~~~
zenogais
There is really and truly a problem. I've worked full-time for several start-
ups (I'm working full-time for one now) as well as consulted for several more.
I've also networked with a lot of startup founders and know many other people
in the industry. From my limited experience it seems endemic - the kinds of
people who flock to this apparently easy money are the kinds of people solely
focused on winning the startup lotto quick. Not the kind of people focused on
building good businesses. This means you get all sorts of short-sighted
approaches to things. When those are inevitably frustrated by complicated
realities (eg. when business isn't as easy as people were led to believe by
movies and books) you then see founders/managers scramble to justify these bad
practices. I've watched companies loop like this until all their funding went
down the drain and then the founders go and do it again somewhere else. It's
one of the big myths that needs to get busted - Adam and Jamie we need you!
I'm trying to do my small part on the daily.

~~~
mrweasel
It sounds like people are trying to built something that just good enough to
be bought by Facebook, Google, Microsoft or Yahoo so they can bailout, perhaps
give a few talks and may rake in a few thousand Twitter followers.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's _exactly_ what they're doing. It's called "an exit strategy", and
apparently any self-respecting startup ought to have one.

A lot of things about the products we see become clear when one realizes that
the primary focus and goal of a exit-seeking, toilet-paper[0] startup is to
get bought for a lot of money, period. The product itself is a lie, it doesn't
matter what happens with it - its only task is to attract new users fast -
i.e. be growing, which is a proxy for "we could be profitable in the future".
If the startup maintains this growth long enough, there's an increasing chance
that someone will come and buy the company. The product gets killed, founders
write some audacious blog posts in which they thank their (former) users for
giving them the opportunity to have those coctails at the acquihire party ("it
was our journey, we couldn't make it without you..."). Everyone is happy,
except the users, who get screwed. Again. Live. Die. Repeat.

Of course most of the toilet-paper startups won't sustain growth long enough
and will just disappear somewhere along the way.

I sometimes wonder why we (as users) keep tolerating this. People lying in our
faces that they care about us and our problems, that the product is really
meant to help _us_. Fool me once, fool me twice... but we've been fooled since
the dot-com and we still haven't learned.

[0] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8319102](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8319102)

------
lpgauth
MVP is about cutting out non critical features, not quality. Without the
quality you just end up being slower at iterating and the whole process falls
apart.

~~~
TeMPOraL
But it ends up cutting out on quality, because people are used to put up with
quite a big amount of crap. If it weren't the case, a whole great deal of
_business models_ wouldn't ever panned out.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Has anyone _ever_ produced a maximum viable product?

Or even tried to produce one?

------
peterwwillis
All you really need is a long view. You can ship something with, say, two
features now, but done in a way that _anticipates_ the other 10 features
you'll implement later. Planning should take a while. And when it's done you
can ship bit by bit without screwing up your timetable or the product's
integrity.

------
startupfounder
MVP, MLP, MUP or whatever you want to call it needs to create value for at
least one person.

Value + People

The product needs to increase the number of people extracting value from it,
increase the value your product creates or both.

Facebook creates some value for a billion people, thats why it is valuable to
the tune of $203.58B.

The question is what is the smallest amount of value you can create with the
smallest input for one person to test your idea that you know can scale to as
many people as possible or continually increase the value for that one person.

And your product doesn't need to be code initially.

------
tsunamifury
I firmly believe that MVP culture the writer is referring to comes from
Venture Capital, as a way for VC's to ping the market state faster at the cost
of individual startups.

In aggregate they get more data and more likelihood to get find a single
success faster, but you as an individual startup are far less likely to find
success.

------
jcavin
catchy title and this was a great reminder of finding the balance between
speed and quality. Many answers that I was looking for have been presented
through user growth and interaction. Without getting my app up there, it would
be very difficult to come to that conclusion. I have also found that building
a solid foundation can save time in the future even though it may cost more
time currently.

A super simple example would be writing lines of code. Making sure all the
tags line up properly and everything is commented out will allow the app to
flow more efficiently in the future. Go-fast/efficiently

