Are You Embarrassed by Your MVP?

“If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

– Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn

A number of people replace the “first version of your product”

in the quote above with the word “MVP” which I think is a mistake.

This quote was applicable at a time when

we primarily employed a build-first strategy to launches.

We didn’t get outside the building.

We didn’t run customer interviews.

We didn’t know what customers “really” wanted.

We have gotten a lot better at all these things.

An MVP is not simply the “first version of your product”,

but the smallest solution you build that delivers and captures customer value.

Getting to the right MVP takes hundreds of hours of

customer testing.

But you end up with a problem worth solving,

paying early adopters versus feedback giving free loaders,

a first release that solves an immediate must-have problem,

which is the beginning of your journey towards product/market fit.

What’s to be embarrassed about that?