Speed over perfection when building your MVP

When does it makes sense to forgo obsessing over every detail and push scrappy product to users

If you’ve ever tried to build a product with the intent of consumer distribution, you must have found yourself at crossroads on whether to be patient and build out every feature to perfection or to build a scrappy version of your idea and just ship it out there to test the waters.

Both approaches present significant upsides. Both has its downsides too. It’s important to categorize your idea as you build and adapt a strategy that is more relevant to the market you serve.

I am huge fan of speed and the benefits are numerous. High speed execution gives you an opportunity to listen widely to your end user and quickly incorporate feedback. As a builder, you might have a unique perspective on why certain features might be the answer to the problem you’re looking to solve but there is only one way to make sure — measure how well it is received.

Obsessing over perfection on the other hand allows you to build an experience that is hard to hate. This makes more and more sense when it is important for you to deliver a user experience that is too hard to ignore.

But how relevant is speed in 2019 where every MVP on Angel-list looks perfect? And what to choose when?

I think a critical question you need to ask yourselves is whether the product is just an improved version of an existing service or is it a whole new concept.

If you’re building an improved version of a widely used existing service you will find that user tolerance to faults is significantly lower. As an example, consider attempts made to rewire the email application. Enough debate has been done over this subject that the experience of email is still stuck in the past decade. Several startups like Superhuman, Hiver, Front App are trying to reinvent the end-to-end experience redefining staple features and functionality. In applications such as these that disrupt a widely successful existing service, the bar of acceptance is very high. You absolutely have to nail the user experience to get users to use your product free of obligation and pass on any feedback that will materially further the cause.

On the other hand, if you are building something extremely novel, then user threshold of judgement is fairly low and speed if your friend. Instead of obsessing over every little detail you might be better served by pushing critical features as is out to users and then course correct based on what you hear.

Having said that, it is critical to acknowledge several underlying trends in shifting user behavior and attitude. For example, over the past decade it has been several order of magnitudes easy to build and launch a web service or a mobile app and hence collectively, user expectations have scaled to keep up with the flow. We’ve trained ourselves to shut off from the constant marketing we’re served and our senses are titillated only when some extraordinary is presented. App fatigue is real and it is very easy to have your product lost on the app store among a deluge of other similar services.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you have launched too late — Reid Hoffman

Speed then becomes your most effective weapon in a tight group of users. Your first 10 or 100 or 1000 users have to be sold on trying your idea the old school way — face to face, solving a problem and real. This cohort can be acquired in a non scalabable, cost in-effective fashion but the advise you get from them will form the core of your specialized insight into the space.

If you’re launching an entirely new service, speed when coupled with a tightly monitored group of users can be extremely powerful weapon. If you’re reinventing an existing experience — go with perfection.