4 Notes About MVPs

MVPs are like magic shows. If your first performance rubs the wrong way, you may well not have a return audience.

Story time.

Meet Jerry. He loves attending magic gigs.

The nearby amusement park opens up a fresh lineup of magic acts. He decides to check it out.

Show 1: Rabbit Hill

A magician pulls out dull variants of the standard rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick. Jerry leaves unimpressed.

Show 2: Borina's Bottle Tricks

A lady makes strange things magically appear in a bottle. Although she looked promising at first, she botches her second act & accidentally reveals her illusion. Jerry leaves flustered.

Show 3: Discarded

A slick magician sticks to card tricks but uses giant-sized decks & pop culture humor. It proves to be a home run. Jerry gets his money's worth.

Next week, Jerry takes his friend Rob out to the same park.

Even though Rabbit Hill & Borina's have flashy discounts & new cast members now, Jerry waves them off & makes a beeline to Discarded.

—

You've probably heard Reid Hoffman's famous mantra: "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."

This is largely misunderstood to mean "launch anything & see what sticks". In fact, he clarified this in a follow-up article.

His real intention was to encourage teams to stop engaging in analysis paralysis on hypothesis you simply can't simulate in abstraction.

Some notes about MVPs:

1- "Launching early" is not just an engineering velocity problem

It's equally (sometimes more of) a scoping issue that the PM is responsible for. The "must-have" lines get incredibly blurry.

2- "Don't launch recklessly"

Moving fast at the expense of quality will go against you, especially in red-ocean markets. If your product simply doesn't hold up on it's own promise (like Borina's), that lost trust will be tough to win back.

3- "Launch to test a theory"

There's a reason you're launching a product. You believe you can solve an existing problem better than others. Well, that hypothesis needs to be put to test in your MVP in some capacity.

If you launch a functional me-too (Rabbit Hill), you're no longer product-centric. Then, you have to protect a shallow moat based on price wars, support tiers etc.

4- "Launch while standing out."

Audiences don't line up because you use AI or blockchain. You also need to pump the branding (& dare I say "hype") to build a fanbase, sometimes even before Version 1. SadaPay is a great example of this.

Imagine if Notion launched without it's flexible multi-views or sharing capabilities. It would have hardly made a blip on Evernote's radar.

Similarly, if Notion lost a few of your crucial notes because it was "breaking things while moving fast", it would have been sent to oblivion by the troll army.

MVPs aim at solving a small set of problems better than others leaving the cheering audience clamoring for more.