The problem I see is that investing is happening before even basic demonstrations. Billions of dollars are being given to people who haven't even put together a slide deck.
Worse! We're throwing money at people who haven't done the basics AND experts are highly confident will fail. All while ignoring those with viable prototypes who need money to scale...
But what really gets me is that it's become commonplace to just fake tech demos. Demo is short for "demonstration" not "illustration"! You can do a "this is our vision" and that's fine, but you can't fucking call that a demo. Calling it a demo is a lie. Calling it a vision is not. It really isn't that hard to stay within the ethical lines here
It is a nice aphorism by an economy shouldn't be based on duping people. It's literally why we have regulations. Why you can't make Ponzi schemes. You literally are not allowed to lie to investors though we love to ignore the spirit in favor of the letter of the law.
There's a better term for what a MVP should be. MVP implies a minimum set of features you _have_ to develop otherwise users won't touch. The problem is agreeing what this minimum is... in startups that's easier because you have to launch, in big companies the MVP what 13 stakeholders want it to be.
I like Minimum Learning Product, or MLP - what's the minimum you need to launch to start learning? To do user surveys, analytics, get feedback on? You might not even have enough users to really run an A/B test yet, but it captures better the idea of launching small and iterating, anchoring it in listening to your users.
> Now think about a bad software product that you might encounter briefly or you are forced to use: a poorly designed electronic kiosk with 1000ms lag on every interaction, or a hospital electronic system. I think there's a high chance that the people building them rarely use them, or not at all.
looks at Adobe Illustrator
picks up the manual for Creature House Expression, a 2003 natural media vector editor just oozing with better and more thoughtful implementations of things Illustrator still barely does, bought by Microsoft and killed
I once used the phrase 'Enterprise Software' in front of a friend. To explain what I meant I asked "What software do you use at work in the hospital?". They rolled their eyes. Exactly.
> Now think about a bad software product that you might encounter briefly or you are forced to use: a poorly designed electronic kiosk with 1000ms lag on every interaction, or a hospital electronic system. I think there's a high chance that the people building them rarely use them, or not at all.
To be fair, it would be hard for me to build hospital EHR software if I were also checking myself into the hospital every day.
At my former company we built software for enrolling seniors into Medicare. It was as polished as we could possibly make it, but none of the engineers were 65+ and so pretty hard to dogfood.
I'm one of those people who take the bright, shiny trinket that engineers love to show off and, after a few moments, make it start oozing a brown, smelly fluid as I find the flaws.
Another area where people don't dog food anywhere near enough is handicapped accessibility. It's a catch-22 situation where people like me can't write code because their hands or eyes don't work correctly, and those who have the physical ability to write code don't use accessibility tools.
The best mental model of MVP I have found is that it is in some sense a science experiment and you’re trying to test a specific hypothesis as efficiently as possible with the resources you have, because you ultimately don’t know what’s going to work.
> An early, basic version of a product (such as a piece of technology, a computer program, etc.) which meets the minimum necessary requirements for use by its creators and customers
The keyword here is customers
If you are building something for others, which you expect to make money from, then you should probably be thinking about a Minimum Sellable Product - what is the most basic product that a very specific target user or group of target users, will pay for. Or at the very least the target users must be willing (and ideally eager) to use the product “for real” (eg. for work or daily personal use)
This means your MVP or MSP, could very well be just a spreadsheet, or a basic document, as long as it’s clearly targeting specific people who want/need to use it
There’s also the concept of Minimum Lovable Product.
The first iphone for example, was very barebones: slow EDGE internet, only a few apps, very low powered device. But people loved it because the things it did well it did very well- for instance it was a beautiful touchscreen that always remained silky smooth. The feeling of sliding something and having it stay under your finger really tricks your brain in a way nothing did before, and is so good you forget the weaknesses and missing features.
A minimum viable product that is very large and takes years to get out is just scope creep disguised as minimum viable product.
Minimum viable product used to mean, "What do we build that hooks a customer immediately?". It is about getting them engaged and learning from their engagement to then build features onto the MVP.
I agree 100% that a product is way better off when used actively by the creators and/or those with extremely low-effort access to the creators. It's a bit weird to call it an "improved definition" though. It's more like how to set your MVP up for successful iteration and growth.
Some products (like most of my own side projects) are ONLY ever used by their creator :P.
Dogfooding is good but I abide by a different definition of MVP. Minimal describes the feature set (go to market with your differentiators). Viability is determined by the value added by the product relative to the competition. The greater the competition and the less differentiated the product, the more compelling and polished it needs to be viable.
My perspective is more as a small business founder creating an app to solve real world problems in a small market, rather than a VC/Silicon Valley. (So I don’t know for sure how my views stack with “conventional” business wisdom. Maybe smarter people disagree.)
I observe or believe that an MVP (product and strategy) exists in the context of the current time and marketplace, with a view to figuring out how the customer responds to it, so has evolved over time as the customer expectations have matured.
The problem I see is that investing is happening before even basic demonstrations. Billions of dollars are being given to people who haven't even put together a slide deck.
Worse! We're throwing money at people who haven't done the basics AND experts are highly confident will fail. All while ignoring those with viable prototypes who need money to scale...
But what really gets me is that it's become commonplace to just fake tech demos. Demo is short for "demonstration" not "illustration"! You can do a "this is our vision" and that's fine, but you can't fucking call that a demo. Calling it a demo is a lie. Calling it a vision is not. It really isn't that hard to stay within the ethical lines here
Sir, this is Hacker News.
A fool and his money are soon parted.
It is a nice aphorism by an economy shouldn't be based on duping people. It's literally why we have regulations. Why you can't make Ponzi schemes. You literally are not allowed to lie to investors though we love to ignore the spirit in favor of the letter of the law.
I'm happy when any (rich) investor gets scammed. Money ought to be distributed downwards.
Unfortunately over millennia of this happening, nothing has changed. Which is rather obvious since scamming is unethical.
You just replace one unethical person with another.
The result is you feel good but nothing meaningful changes. Maybe all those aphorisms about revenge are onto something...
There's a better term for what a MVP should be. MVP implies a minimum set of features you _have_ to develop otherwise users won't touch. The problem is agreeing what this minimum is... in startups that's easier because you have to launch, in big companies the MVP what 13 stakeholders want it to be.
I like Minimum Learning Product, or MLP - what's the minimum you need to launch to start learning? To do user surveys, analytics, get feedback on? You might not even have enough users to really run an A/B test yet, but it captures better the idea of launching small and iterating, anchoring it in listening to your users.
> Now think about a bad software product that you might encounter briefly or you are forced to use: a poorly designed electronic kiosk with 1000ms lag on every interaction, or a hospital electronic system. I think there's a high chance that the people building them rarely use them, or not at all.
looks at Adobe Illustrator
picks up the manual for Creature House Expression, a 2003 natural media vector editor just oozing with better and more thoughtful implementations of things Illustrator still barely does, bought by Microsoft and killed
sighs
I once used the phrase 'Enterprise Software' in front of a friend. To explain what I meant I asked "What software do you use at work in the hospital?". They rolled their eyes. Exactly.
This really just shows you need people with domain knowledge of whatever you are writing to be on the team whenever you are developing software.
> Now think about a bad software product that you might encounter briefly or you are forced to use: a poorly designed electronic kiosk with 1000ms lag on every interaction, or a hospital electronic system. I think there's a high chance that the people building them rarely use them, or not at all.
To be fair, it would be hard for me to build hospital EHR software if I were also checking myself into the hospital every day.
At my former company we built software for enrolling seniors into Medicare. It was as polished as we could possibly make it, but none of the engineers were 65+ and so pretty hard to dogfood.
I'm one of those people who take the bright, shiny trinket that engineers love to show off and, after a few moments, make it start oozing a brown, smelly fluid as I find the flaws.
Another area where people don't dog food anywhere near enough is handicapped accessibility. It's a catch-22 situation where people like me can't write code because their hands or eyes don't work correctly, and those who have the physical ability to write code don't use accessibility tools.
The best mental model of MVP I have found is that it is in some sense a science experiment and you’re trying to test a specific hypothesis as efficiently as possible with the resources you have, because you ultimately don’t know what’s going to work.
> An early, basic version of a product (such as a piece of technology, a computer program, etc.) which meets the minimum necessary requirements for use by its creators and customers
The keyword here is customers
If you are building something for others, which you expect to make money from, then you should probably be thinking about a Minimum Sellable Product - what is the most basic product that a very specific target user or group of target users, will pay for. Or at the very least the target users must be willing (and ideally eager) to use the product “for real” (eg. for work or daily personal use)
This means your MVP or MSP, could very well be just a spreadsheet, or a basic document, as long as it’s clearly targeting specific people who want/need to use it
There’s also the concept of Minimum Lovable Product.
The first iphone for example, was very barebones: slow EDGE internet, only a few apps, very low powered device. But people loved it because the things it did well it did very well- for instance it was a beautiful touchscreen that always remained silky smooth. The feeling of sliding something and having it stay under your finger really tricks your brain in a way nothing did before, and is so good you forget the weaknesses and missing features.
A minimum viable product that is very large and takes years to get out is just scope creep disguised as minimum viable product.
Minimum viable product used to mean, "What do we build that hooks a customer immediately?". It is about getting them engaged and learning from their engagement to then build features onto the MVP.
I agree 100% that a product is way better off when used actively by the creators and/or those with extremely low-effort access to the creators. It's a bit weird to call it an "improved definition" though. It's more like how to set your MVP up for successful iteration and growth.
Some products (like most of my own side projects) are ONLY ever used by their creator :P.
Dogfooding is good but I abide by a different definition of MVP. Minimal describes the feature set (go to market with your differentiators). Viability is determined by the value added by the product relative to the competition. The greater the competition and the less differentiated the product, the more compelling and polished it needs to be viable.
viability relative to others is a better lens
My perspective is more as a small business founder creating an app to solve real world problems in a small market, rather than a VC/Silicon Valley. (So I don’t know for sure how my views stack with “conventional” business wisdom. Maybe smarter people disagree.)
I observe or believe that an MVP (product and strategy) exists in the context of the current time and marketplace, with a view to figuring out how the customer responds to it, so has evolved over time as the customer expectations have matured.
Huh?
I have seen the worst imaginable software UX used and cherished by people when it was doing the job.
I have seen great UI/UX go away as people did not handle it.
100%. I have also seen software used and hated (sap? salesforce? even jira?) because they were first in their niche or because who knows why.