The Big Idea
Your first product version needs to be smaller than you think. Much smaller. Probably embarrassingly small.
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Strip it bare
Earlier this week, I was invited to share my experience building companies with a class of promising entrepreneurship students, enrolled in the Lean Startup course at Davidson University's Hurt Hub, taught by Rebecca Weeks Watson.
Many of them were working through planning out their first business, using a tool called the Lean Canvas.
They'd interviewed potential customers and were defining their MVP. Their task: strip the idea to its core to test the riskiest assumption and find what customers would actually pay for.
When you have a big idea, it's tempting to spiral into features and complexity. But you don't need a fully-realized product to test if your idea has legs.
Why we overreach
Most founders, especially first-timers, mis-scope their MVPs. About half the time, they add way too much to their MVP for it to be built quickly. This is the trap of it's not ready yet, or "if we build it, they will come". I have made this mistake - and I've seen it happen to others.
There's also at tendency to build an MVP that will lead to a yes no matter what. This usually means an MVP that's designed to reinforce the founder's belief in their idea, rather than challenge it. After all, founders who have made it this far into the journey of building something are convinced they're onto something meaningful.
Whether they admit it ot not, this sector of founders is often more focused on protecting their ego than validating their idea. Red flag. 🚩
So what's an MVP for?
There are plenty of ways to look at the outcome of an MVP, but I like to think of it as 2 simple yes/no questions:
Is there a small, focused group of people who are feeling this pain? Would they pay for a product that helps them solve this problem?
If you don't get a confident "yes" to both of these questions, then you need to rethink your plan. You can always build more, but you can't recover wasted time building features nobody wants.
This can be accomplished with less than you think. A landing page with a video demo, a sign-up form for a waitlist, or a non-functional prototype.
MVP for a coworking SaaS
My last startup, smpl, was a SaaS for managing coworking spaces. Our MVP was boiled down to the basics: we took the pain of collecting monthly membership dues out of our customers' hands. Version 0 was nothing more than a few manually configured Stripe subscriptions.
What did we learn? Coworking operators are great communicators, and rarely great at balancing a budget. Collecting all member payments on the same day of the month made it far easier for them to budget, track growth, and plan for the future. We spent the next year building a product that made it easy for them to onboard new members immediately, and to start their recurring payments on the first of the month.
(Side note: this is a trivial problem in 2025, but in 2017 it was on us to figure it out. Timing really helped us!)
MVP for a service business
Craftwork's MVP boiled down to a simple question: will people hire a painting service online? We tested this with a landing page and a typeform -- and spent a month painting houses at-cost for friends and family.
The amount we learned from that experience was worth the cost of the paint, and helped guide the way we hire paint crews (which has since changed several times), and how we price our services (which has also changed several times).
We focused exclusively on residential repaints for homeowners (not renters, not businesses, not commercial buildings). In doing so, we became very familiar with what our competition was lacking - a focus on considered homeowner experience, pricing transparency, and a commitment to quality.
The value of embarrassment
In both of these cases, we were able to steer product development based on what we learned.
For smpl, an initial focus on member onboarding and billing brought much more value than building out a tiny social network for community members of a given coworking space.
For Craftwork, we learned that price transparency alone wasn't enough to win over skeptical homeowners -- trust is earned through thoughtful communication, and a self-serve price quote wasn't enough to get people to slap the Buy button. We pivoted to a more consultative approach, and focused on building trust through a more personalized service. This also meant dropping our self-serve estimate form in favor of a literal contact form... can you imagine the time we'd have saved with a smaller MVP?
Your challenge
If you're designing an MVP, take a step back.
What's the absolute minimum you could build to test your idea?
Is it actually testing your idea? If there's no outcome from your MVP that will cause you to change course, you're doing it wrong.
Is your MVP actually as minimal as it can be? If you're not sure, ask yourself:
- Is there a way to test this without spending money?
- Is there a way to test this while spending less time?
- Is there a way to test this while using fewer resources?
If you can't answer yes to all of these questions, you're probably over-engineering your MVP.
Launch something so minimal it makes you uncomfortable. You can always build more, but you can't recover wasted time building features nobody wants.
Do more with less - you'll be glad you did.
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Some resources to help you build less
- The Mom Test - From author Rob Fitzpatrick, on how to listen to potential customers without misleading yourself.
- The Lean Startup - A legendary tome from Eric Ries, on how to build more with less. It's a book so good there are literal college courses built around it.
- This video from Y Combinator on How to Build an MVP is a great primer on the topic, with some really useful examples of MVPs from cpmpanies you know.
What are you building right now that could launch with half the features? Hit reply and tell me what you'd cut first.
