Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
<i>Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build.</i><p>This is exactly what killed my first startup. We believed we fully understood what the customer needs and that we should build the right product before we started selling. We were actually trying to build the minimum viable product, but we were hilariously (with hindsight) wrong about what the customers wanted. Almost all our ideas were <i>just</i> wrong enough to make the product fail to solve the customers pains. They solved the pains we&#x27;d had in the past brilliantly, but sadly that wasn&#x27;t relevant. We weren&#x27;t buying our product.<p>Starting out with the notion that you already know everything you need to know <i>will</i> kill your startup. Running a startup is as much about spotting and understanding the signals that you discover along the way as it is about building what you think you customers need.<p>A minimum viable product is not &quot;selling the least effort product you can get away with&quot;, it&#x27;s spending the least amount of time you can to build something that you can use to gather more data than you can use to focus your product on what the customer wants <i>rather than what you think they want.</i> Building what you think the customer wants will very likely be wrong - customers lie, they&#x27;re deluded, they don&#x27;t understand their own problems, and they can&#x27;t see value in solutions. But they do start to understand the problem when they see a solution to it, even if it&#x27;s the minimum viable solution. And then they start having ideas about what else they can pay for to make it better...