20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilience and sunk cost fallacy
Before I riff on him a little, I&#x27;m very thankful the author shared his experience, that takes a lot of bravery.  He&#x27;s also not the only person to make this mistake, so many have. I learned a lot of these lessons from making a bunch of expensive bone headed decisions myself. I also am not implying that just because he fundamentally doesn&#x27;t understand an MVP or how to build a lean startup that he isn&#x27;t an awesome dev, I honestly bet he is a great dev who just learned a valuable lesson(3 times :| ) about what an MVP truly means. ( I haven&#x27;t shared them because I&#x27;m awful writer, but I hope to one day )<p>But wow does this guy not understand an MVP or what matters for a startup.<p>&gt; I became more and more “aggressive” about reducing the scope and focusing on the essentials<p>You should do this day one before you write a line of code.  There should be nothing you can cut from your MVP.  For the first two months of my last MVP to edit data you sent an e-mail to a dev who wrote a sql script that edited it for you.  We still added 3k MRR each month.  For every feature you should ask &quot;What would happen if I cut this out?&quot;  if the answer is anything but &quot;It literally wouldn&#x27;t work for any individual who could conceivably use this product (with a broad definition of conceivable) then the answer is cut it.  Is it a differentiator? cut it.  Does your product suck without it? cut it.<p>You can always trade time for features, but you can never trade features for time.<p>&gt; Maybe I obsess too much about code quality<p>The answer is YES YOU DO!  Code quality doesn&#x27;t matter. It really doesn&#x27;t matter.  What killed your first three startups?  Was it code quality?  Or was it was not getting out a product fast enough, not iterating quickly enough, and not finding product market fit fast enough.  This experience is typical.<p>If the code quality on your MVP doesn&#x27;t physically disgust you, you&#x27;re probably focusing on code quality too much.