Why Your MVP Should Feel Unfinished
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched to late
People often make jokes in response to this quote, like releasing a buggy heart defibrillator that doesn’t work. But there are two key problems with this comparison:
- That’s a catastrophic failure, not an embarrassment.
- It completely misses the point of the quote.
When you’re building an MVP, your goal is to strip away everything that isn’t absolutely necessary. This means leaving out many features you’d love to include.
More importantly, you’ll leave out features you never even thought of. And that’s where the embarrassment comes in. If you’re lucky, people are already using your product and giving feedback. While many suggestions won’t be a good fit for the MVP, every so often, someone will point out something so obvious that you can’t help but facepalm.
But that’s the point. The goal of the MVP isn’t to be perfect; it’s to get real-world feedback early, even if it’s a little uncomfortable. It’s better to feel that sting of embarrassment today than to launch too late, with a feature-laden product that nobody asked for. After all, the best products aren’t the ones that are perfect from the start—they’re the ones that evolve from real user input.