The Lies you were told about building a Startup's MVP

Warning: This article is totally opinionated and it goes against the principles of lean startup in terms of duration of product delivery. I just decided to face reality instead of sticking to the principle written in a book with rare application.

I am always amazed when startup founders come on twitter to talk about how they built and shipped their product in 3 weeks. Sometimes while working as a full time employee in another company. Other times, while working full time on their startups.

The usual belief is that building an Minimum Viable Product(MVP) should not take more than a month, as it saves money and time and of course helps the startup founder to validate the product quickly.

MVP became the holy grail for validating a startup idea. But then, how long does it really take to build an MVP?

MVP is defined as a version of a new product that allows you and your team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about your customers with the minimum amount of effort. – Altar

For a product that will allow you to gain maximum feedback, it sure has to take a long while, not one year but definitely not 3 - 4 weeks. Believe twitter influencer founders at your own peril!

A screenshot of the tweet above shows a tweet talking about 3 lessons learnt from Startup twitter. The number 3 is of great interest.

MY OPINION ON THE DURATION OF MVP

The duration of a minimum viable product should be dependent on the nature of the product in question.

Hardware Products

Hardware products literally take more time to develop compared to software products.

Since MVP is seen as the holy grail for validating a product, how then do startup founders focusing on hardwares validate their ideas? Market Research! Either a primary or secondary market research.

Majority of the time, hardware startups focus more on “proof of concept” than on MVP. This is because the proof of concept validates the fact that the proposed solution can be built using the existing technology and of course with resources that are within affordable reach of the organization or individual involved. 

Hardware startups can take up to 6 months to 1 years to get out a Minimum Viable Hardware(MVH).

A complex hardware could take up to 2 years to develop. It took Space-X between 2005 - 2009 to launch a successful falcon-1. That’s literally an insane 4 years of grinding!

Software Products:

Twitter: We built the MVP in 3 weeks.

Reality: A good MVP takes an average of 3 to 4 months to build. For a software product, the best way to validate your product and perhaps gain insights into the mind of a user is by going out to interact with your users.

Experience has shown that if you projected that your product will take you 3 weeks to build, ensure to multiply it by 5, that’s the actual number of weeks that it will take you to develop the product.

While this post is against the usual 3 to 4 weeks proposed for developing an MVP by a startup which usually has 2 to 4 persons, it does not invalidate the usefulness of an MVP in a startup’s ride to success.

If you insist that 3-4 weeks is the ideal time to build your startup MVP, you fit hold body with the tweet below: