My playbook for building MVPs

MVPs come up a lot in my conversations. Here's my playbook for planning and building MVPs.

 - Launch (likely something bad) quickly

 - Get initial customers

 - Talk to customers and get feedback

 - Iterate (hold the problem and customer tightly, hold the solution loosely)

Lean MVP (for most cases):

 - Fast to build (days not months (e.g., landing page + bolt/lovable/replit + Supabase + Vercel)

 - Limited functionality (focused on small set of users and their higest order problems) - see SuperHuman blog on PMF (arguably the best article on PMF ever written) https://lnkd.in/gfcTiFHQ

- It is a base to iterate from

Examples:

- Airbnb: no payments, no map-view, part-time CTO

- Twitch (Justin.tv): 1 channel, low res video, no video games

- Stripe (/dev/payments): no banks deals (processed payments in a "startup way"), few features, founders would integrate it for you

Heavy MVP (for some cases):

- Significant regulation (insurance, banking)

- Hardtech, Moonshots, Biotech (e.g., rockets, drugs, Boring Co.)

- Still build some sort of landing page, it's useful for the people you talk to to refer to

- Launches - no one cares. More importantly, launch is getting ANY customers.

- Press launch is getting ANY press.

- Learning from customers is hard when they don't have a product to play with.

Hacks for building an MVP quickly:

- Time box your spec (e.g., 2 days)

- Write your spec (so you know what you commited to. Use Claude for 10x output)

- Cut your spec (if you won't make your deadline)

- HIT YOUR DEADLINE.

- Then don't fall in love with your MVP

- Never ask users for features. The users should give you problems, not solutions.

- If you're spinning your wheels (e.g., changing MVP), STOP. Your MVP is not special, just get something out.*

- A clear definition of your problem is more valuable than you think. Spend time defining the problem you are solving*.

- If you're asking, you don't have product-market-fit. When you have it, you'll stop everything except keeping your product online (almost NO ONE gets PMF)

- Address super users first. Then ask them for people with problems like them.