Is Your “Minimum Viable Product” Really An MVP?
The most significant risk for early-stage startups is that you spend a lot of time, energy, and money building something that no one gives a shit about
Note: This article is for aspiring high growth startup founders. Additionally, this advice is mostly intended for consumer startups and is probably less applicable to larger B2B or hardware startups.
Nearly every time I’m meeting with founders, the conversation goes something like this:
“I have this idea for (or have already built) product X — how do I raise money or build my app or patent my idea? And do you like my idea?”
My answer is almost always some variation of:
“I wouldn’t worry about raising money, hiring a dev shop or other things. I would recommend thinking about your idea as a hypothesis and build something as quickly and cheaply to test that hypothesis.”
We’ll often discuss ways to create experiments that hardly resemble their grandiose product vision. But the experiments help test key assumptions to move their idea or company forward.
Many of these founders, myself included at one point, have what I call the “I-Need-To-Build-It Disease”. They are so focused on building a fully-fledged product that they ignore key assumptions and waste lots of time and money in the process.
