Pro/con of the best early stage strategy - MVP launch & learn OR Do it right
Fritz Brumder
4 replies
I have always been in the MVP/ship it and learn camp. I hate getting bogged down in longer roadmaps and it feels like I am doing too much guesswork. Getting a product to market, gathering user feedback, and building to meet their needs is the classic product launch playbook.
However.... users have a short attention span and if your product doesn't do enough you can lose them for good. As a consumer, I hate a partially solved problem and love a complete one.
What do you think? Let's have a Lean startup vs. full-featured release battle.
Replies
Jimmy Douglas@jimmydouglas
Vault
Personally, I'm on team MVP. It doesn't have to mean "do it fast instead of right." Ideally it means do "something narrow" extremely well.
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Zipcan
@jimmydouglas Agree the ideal MVP makes people say wow this is working well for X but it would be even better if it also did Y and Z.
Launching soon!
How about we start a new term, the Ripped Startup or MVP. Bigger than lean but all muscle, no fat :).
I struggle with this as well, we are building a tool with a lot of competition in the space (some give it away for free) but I strongly believe that what I have in mind is still needed in the marketplace and not really solved by our competitors. Problem is, if we go too lean then we can't compete and we will lose users quick. But then again I don't want to build for a year to find out that I am completely wrong.
So we went somewhere in the middle. I categorized our feature set into 9 large buckets (or if you want call them sub products) and decided to do 3 of them right from the start with the other 6 saying coming soon.
So my hope is with the 3 we have we start solving problems our competitors aren't doing the same way, learn, gather feedback iterate and then start introducing the other 6 sub-products.
Zipcan
@husseinyahfoufi Nice. I like the new term 💪 . It also sounds like you are applying the right filter to your roadmap. In a space with competition there is this desire to have feature parity - your product has to do everything the competition does before the customer will use it regardless of value; then + more for the differentiation. That is a hard place to be when you are on the MVP team.