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> The risk is you’re going to build something and nobody will come (or stay), and then you’ll run out of money.

Maybe author is conflating MVP with "build and they'll come". They're quite different ideas, although are frequently seen together in the same minds.

"Build and they'll come" is silly. 95% of businesses will need effort to bring products to consumers. Some form of marketing and/or sales.

One great risk is whether you can market and or sell the product. That's where MVPs help. Simulating marketing/sales without any product usually is not a good predictor of reality.




"Build it and they'll come" is pure survivor's bias. It's true that there are some products (Wordle, Minecraft, Undertale, lots of other indie games, ...) that were built by single developers or small teams with little to no marketing and became wildly successful anyway. But nobody is remembering the thousands of products that tried to follow this strategy and failed (or still exist in complete obscurity).


> Maybe author is conflating MVP with "build and they'll come". They're quite different ideas, although are frequently seen together in the same minds.

I think the author is pointing out that other people are conflating the ideas. I don't think the author advocates building a fully-fledged 1.0 product before getting real-world feedback.

I've worked for startups that kept shouting "MVP, MVP" for each new feature (and customer) we built. What we got in return for that was a heap of half-finished features, lots of technical debt — and not a single happy customer.


Then you weren’t building MVPs, because V stands for “viable”.

Devs I’ve worked with will sometimes hear “MVP” and think “prototype”. Not really sure why. An MVP needs polish, it’s just a way of keeping a narrow focus and avoiding bike shedding.


Absolutely agree. I was about to make an edit to my post pointing out that we missed the "viable" part.

I work in UX, so I kept shouting to deaf ears. Unfortunately, it was seldom my decision to make.




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