Essay · ~12 min read

Your customers hate MVPs. Make a SLC instead.

Jason Cohen · A Smart Bear (Jason Cohen) Free Intermediate

Cohen argues the MVP framing pushes founders to ship something too broken to love, and offers an alternative: make it Simple, Lovable, and Complete instead. It sharpens the cut so you remove scope without removing quality on the one thing you decide to keep. A useful corrective to "just ship anything."

  • Cut breadth, not quality, so the one workflow you keep is genuinely good.
  • Simple and complete beats broad and half-working.
  • A narrow product people love earns more than a wide one people merely tolerate.
Open on longform.asmartbear.com ↗

It answers 2 questions

  1. How do I decide which features to cut from v1?
  2. Should we ship an ugly, half-working version now or wait until it feels good enough to be proud of?

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