Bloated MVP — Table of Contents
Published in
4 min readJun 8, 2020
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Concepts
- Your MVP is Bloated
When you finally “launch” your MVP, you’ll probably get zero users and you’ll feel stupid for making a bloated MVP. - What’s Your Value Prop Story?
The Value Prop Story Test is a quick and easy sanity check for a startup. It should be really easy for startups to pass the test. Yet 80% of startups fail it. - The Lean MVP Flowchart: How to Follow the Value
The core of a startup isn’t building a product; it’s giving a person value. Here’s what that means for your MVP and for your subsequent growth. - The Great Filter of Startups
The evolutionary leap that only a small fraction of startups manage to make - Manhandle Your Early Users
The approach that successful founders use to break through the traction barrier - The Bloated MVP Test
A simple 10-question test that tells you if you’ve just wasted your life on a bloated MVP - The Power to Judge Startup Ideas
The fundamental reason why so many founders fail the Value Prop Story test is that humans suck at giving specific examples of abstract concepts. - When Not To Be A Lean Startup
If your startup is one of the rare ones whose primary risk is technological rather than market, you can be excused for having a less lean MVP.
MVP Reviews
- AlphaSheets MVP Review
It just kept getting more bloated - Arbital MVP Review
It should have been all about the content - Axiom.org MVP Review
Blockchain? More like Bloatchain - Beaker Browser MVP Review
0 use cases + 4 years of engineering = 0 users - Dropbox Paper is a Bloated MVP
It’s unclear why to not just use Google Docs - General Magic MVP Review
Surfing a wave, or boiling the ocean? - Golden.com MVP Review
It’s got everything except a value prop story - Hey.com MVP Review
They really know what they’re doing MVP-wise - Listle (YC S19) MVP Review
A “place to listen”, but for who? - Openland (YC W18) MVP Review
Chasing the siren song of product and engineering craftsmanship - Reddit MVP Review
Started from the value prop story now we’re here - Roam Research MVP Review
Pages + Bullets = Cool New Product Category
My Crypto/Blockchain/Web3 Posts
- a16z Is Gaslighting Us — May 2022
Their “State of Crypto Report” is so logically flimsy it’s weird - Debating with Balaji Srinivasan about Blockchain Use Cases — Jan 2022
Struggling to understand how Balaji thinks blockchain technology adds value to internet-enabled use cases - Web3 is Vision-LARPing — Nov 2021
Role-playing as a visionary when you don’t have a coherent vision - Cryptocurrencies Make Sense As Uncensorable Mediums Of Exchange — Nov 2021
Cryptocurrencies are useful because millions of people want to make transactions that their governments want to prevent - Why Web3’s Shared Data Across Applications Doesn’t Matter — Nov 2021
The ability for applications to read and write their data to the blockchain will be inconsequential - Chris Dixon’s Crypto Claims Are Logically Flimsy — Sep 2021
Crypto discourse has turned into the ultimate Bloated MVP - Naval Ravikant and Chris Dixon Didn’t Explain Any Web3 Use Cases — Oct 2021
Their web3-themed episode of Tim Ferriss’s Podcast didn’t provide the one thing I was hoping for - The Billion Dollar Homepage — Sep 2021
NFTs meet old-web nostalgia - Digital World of Crypto/Blockchain/Web3 — Dec 2021
Credit to the incomparably hilarious Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared
Other Stuff I’ve Written
- The 4 Angel Investing Strategies — Jan 2022
Exclusive access to hot deals, discovering founders, picking winners, and indexing the category - VC Larping - Jun 2021
VCs’ job is to value companies. They should stop LARPing about “value add”, “deal flow”, and “access”. - Where’s the Twitter of Podcasting? - Jul 2019
Someone will figure out how to make podcasts bite-sized, socially interactive, and serendipitous - Data Denormalization Is Broken - Sep 2016
The software industry is losing $trillions/year due to the lack of a declarative denormalization paradigm - I’m just an average guy who does Electrical Muscle Stimulation instead of going to the gym - Sep 2021
My review of the Katalyst fitness system after using it for three months - Sample Questions for the Y Combinator Interview - Sep 2018
This is my most popular post thanks to SEO luck - Half-Baked Products and Idea Kernels - Mar 2020
To get a quick feedback loop going, keep your ideas half-baked - I Hate Phone Calls - Jan 2019
You don’t need to be calling me for any business reason - Send A Complete Message, Not A Stream-Of-Consciousness Dribble - Oct 2020
The Slack DM etiquette your busy coworkers wish you’d follow - The Truth About Being A “Detail-Oriented” Employee - May 2019
How to focus your efforts on being detail-oriented where it matters - Startup Idea: ImproveMyLifeRightNow - Oct 2018
Proactively stalk people and pitch them ways to improve their lives - A Simple Project Management Process - Sep 2020
How to keep track of people doing stuff you asked for
