Building the Product

How long should building an MVP take?

A starting point

Weeks, not months. If your MVP will take more than 4-8 weeks, your scope is wrong, not your timeline. Airbnb, Stripe, and Twitch all launched narrow and ugly, then let real usage tell them what to build next.

Go deeper

Watch

▶️ Video
Free Beginner

How to Plan an MVP

On Y Combinator (YouTube) by Michael Seibel (YC) ~13 min

How to Plan an MVP
Why we picked it

The single most-cited practical talk on scoping a first product, from the person who ran YC's accelerator. It cuts through the theory and shows what an MVP actually looks like using Airbnb, Twitch, and Stripe.

  • Talk to users before you build anything.
  • Launch something lean in weeks, not months, the goal is to start the feedback loop.
  • Don't try to solve every problem for every user; ship narrow and ugly.
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →
▶️ Video
Free Beginner

How to Plan an MVP

On Y Combinator Startup Library by Michael Seibel ~15 min

Why we picked it

Michael Seibel's crisp framing of holding the problem and customer tightly while holding the solution loosely, the mindset that keeps competitor and problem research honest. Free and canonical.

  • Hold the problem and customer tightly, the solution loosely
  • Talk to a few users before building, a little research beats none
  • 'No competitors' often signals a weak problem, not a blue ocean
  • Iterating changes the solution; pivoting changes the problem
Open ycombinator.com →

Read

✍️ Essay
Free Beginner

Do Things That Don't Scale

From paulgraham.com by Paul Graham ~15 min read

Why we picked it

The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few customers. The cheapest, most honest way to validate demand is to go get it one person at a time.

  • Recruit your first users manually, don't wait for them to come.
  • A tiny group of users who love you beats a big group who like you.
  • Manual, unscalable effort early is a feature, not a failure.
Open paulgraham.com →

People also ask

What actually counts as an MVP, and what's the smallest one I can get away with? An MVP is the least you can build (or fake) to test your single riskiest assumption, not a shrunken version of your dream product. Ask 'what's the ... Beginner 3 resources → How do I decide which features to cut from v1? Cut everything that doesn't help you learn whether people want the core thing. Pick the one workflow your earliest, most desperate customers need a... Beginner 3 resources → Should I build an MVP at all, or can I validate without one? If you haven't talked to ~20-30 potential customers yet, don't build anything, you're not validating, you're procrastinating in code. A concierge M... Beginner 3 resources → How do I get my first users for the MVP? Recruit them by hand, one conversation at a time, this is the whole point of an early startup. Go to where your users already are, DM them, email t... Beginner 2 resources → What's the difference between an MVP and just a cheap, half-finished product? An MVP is a learning tool with a clear hypothesis attached; a cheap product is just a bad product. The point isn't to spend less money, it's to buy... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I validate an idea without building anything? Replace the product with a conversation, a manual service, or a landing page. Interview people about the problem, hand-deliver the outcome yourself... Beginner 3 resources →