This doesn't make a lot of sense. What does "MVP" mean to you?
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Minimum viable product, but to me an MVP must be a product that solve a problem well enough to validate a first hypothesis.
But not all problems are made equal, let's take Uber: what was their MVP like then?
Now, create a competitor of Uber now: What needs to be done to be called a MVP?
Efforts aren't the same than before, this is my point and something that I'm feeling when building my SaaS, users are expecting a lot even in the early days.
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Right, like when OpenAI first released the playground? UX/UI is important for mass adoption, but if the functionality you're offering is powerful enough, it doesn't matter initially. Certainly not for early adopters.
MVPs are to prove you have a market for your startup hypothesis and to learn/pivot until you find PMF. Flashy UI/UX can come after you actually have something to build around, not before.
That's a very good exemple and thanks for pointing out OpenAI's exemple.
Let's say you would like now to create something like openAI (which is a massive undertaking of course).
The level in this field of UX and user expectation is so high, that people would dismiss your offering until your reach a given level.
This is kind of my point, if you're trying to do a SaaS, there is an expectation from the users, even if not told directly.
You can stand a crappy UI if your need is big enough.
MVP are often associated with something that just work "enough" to validate your idea, the thing is, most people in their subconscious are used to a given polished experience and you can quickly lose a lot of people if done wrong
It like a wrong note in a song, you can feel it
It’s a ‘cool startup bubble’ you’re living in. Most of the professionals really doesn’t care about crappy UI in the beginning if: you solve their problem & there’s no substitute for your solution. It all depends on the maturity of the market and eventually - as more competition arises- you need to focus more on things that are not necessary, like providing better usability. See Kano model.
Guarantee you would use an app if it solved your problem and nothing better existed
True, what about starting a product in a niche with existing players? How would an MVP makes sense while others offer most likely way more features?
The only way is to have something better, this comes from a really well though UX / features
An MVP isn’t necessarily something you sell, an MVP can be your teams internal product just to know that it works.
Literally every project goes through the MVP step, you just don’t see it.
Even so, you don’t NEED something better. You could focus on a subset of features, or be cheaper, or more polished, more localized, etc, etc.
This explains the aesthetics of enterprise SaaS.
MVPs are not that you provide crappy UI/UX. It is about filtering all unnecessary features and giving only the core one. So you are focusing specifically on the 1-2 features your service can't live without and make it work well.
Totally agree! MVP should be about one thing, but one feature can be a massive undertaking itself.
MVP is a moving target. What was an acceptable MVP in the past may not be anymore, especially if you are trying to compete with an existing product. People often focus on the Minimum part, and forget the Viable bit.
The "one thing" can be a $5M thing (to build) for some products/industries, and a $1000 thing for others. Numbers are totally arbitrary here - the point is that the MVP does just the essential for that pain point.
How much did the Chat GPT MVP cost?
How much did the Gumroad MVP cost?
Etc...
yea to add to these, i've had a multiple profitable online businesses.
MVPs are very much alive and kickin.
more popular than ever.
but you probably can't tell the difference between MVP and launched product.
Everything has gotten so accessible people will build full fledged brands and launch them, just no infrastructure or minimal infrastructure on the backend.
for something as simple as a teeth whiteneing product like trysnow.com or a business service like explodingideas.co there's tons of examples of companies that started with mvp.
for saas too.
i mean look at theranos, elizabeth didn't even have an MVP and did a deal with walgreens.
that gives you everything you need to know tbh.
Very well said! No MVP will have a bad UI/UX/Branding if the company can afford it.
I think you’re describing an mlp
But good looking UI is not an essential feature. It just makes things easier on the eyes.
That notwithstanding, it seems that no one will give a chance to an MVP that excludes this non-essential feature of good looking UI.
So this applies to UI. UX is only slightly different. A user can still test and benefit from your product even if it is a little unintuitive or unfriendly, but that is unnecessary friction.
So in the end, my recent experience tells me to keep UX simple and easy to use and the UI beautiful before pitching an MVP to anyone.
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I see what you are saying, but it is possible to knock out a slick looking UI in a few day with tools like Flutter. Yes, it won't be more than basic in functionality, no SEO, but it will look great.
It should LOOK but also FEEL great, there is nothing worst than a broken experience :)
The onboarding must be nailed straight of the bat
You must not have a lot of experience in the real world. Go look at servicenow, a well established, decades old billion dollar saas and tell me that is a great ui/ux experience. It solves a problem so it negates the two things you think are absolutely required.
In reading this post, I'm getting the idea that just maybe you have no clue what you are talking about.
For most of the use cases, future is API economy with AI. So if we push B2C solutions to where customers are already like X, Insta, FB, WA. We should service customers where it adds more value. My 2 cents, maybe it doesn’t apply to all. It has to be way apple changed how we used Telephone in 1942.
Having said, what it WA, X goes bankrupt in 5-10 years like Nokia, as blockchain, VR world is next Gen future.
Honestly, if you use Tailwind or Chakra UI it can't be too bad and that's what most SaaS use these days.
I could possibly don't see how it solves my needs if it does it in a crappy way too.
I think initially people just build things to validate it or even validate it before. If it solves a problem and people start paying for it, then is the time to optimize the user flows and polish the UI I would say. Do not invest too much time into something that might never work.
100% agreed, from my saas https://breeew.com I coded everything using NextJS/Tailwind and based on shadcn.
I was able to go super super fast with a really good UX / UI
Somewhere MVPs became: a static landing page with a newsletter signup form and a "coming soon" lie.
I hope this kind of MVP dies.
But i don't believe an actual MVP should look like it was built by a high-schooler. It's about delivering just enough functionally to add value. You can write decent CSS for it in a day or two, especially with tools like Tailwind and Bootstrap (or even rolling your own, really).
When you're new to the market either its experience (ui/x) or the product's problem-solving capability are the main factors that are going to define the future. Even if your product looks bad, if it solves the problem, people might stick for a few days or even months. But after a certain time, you have to fix the experience issues to keep them happy. Otherwise, when you try to scale, this will be the main roadblock. It doesn't have to be something extraordinary. It should feel fresh and simple. This is what I learned from my experience at a start-up.
This is exactly how I see creating new product, you said it perfectly!
Building solid base and system that allows to ship simple features with a future proof UX
I think you have wrong idea about MVP. Let's say we are making coffee shop as a business. To build MVP you still need great location, awesome interior, few amazing coffee options, smiling and welcoming staff and great prices. In MVP you can leave out "wouldn't that be awesome if we had" things, like free wifi, comfy puffs, all kind of coffees, pastries and ice creams. You can't build MVP in crappy place, location and serve bad coffee.
MVP is functional, easy to use main product, without extras, to ship it faster and validate market. You add fancy features later.
100% agree with that, but the common thing to see online is: just ship it fast, do not wait on small details like design / ux / branding which is in my opinion wrong.
Selling a product is like everything: storytelling, centered on the user. Except this user maybe lived this story X times, making them more difficult to convince.
Love your analogy with the coffee shop, I agree with you, my point really is: the bar is so much higher than before now for "MVPs"
True, i totally agree with you, but the bar ia higher in everything. Even in offline businesses, back in the days you could open any business in your garage, now you need a whole legal team to handle and get all licenses, permits and other stuff before you can even start something.
No.
Why not just start with the landing page and nail the value prop (MVP). Build a beta and get feedback. Then build and launch a V1.
MVP should stand for minimally valuable product, not viable.
Folks misunderstand this every single day.
Looking crappy is subjective. Look at the Hacker News forum. Its UI is barebones; yet it is fantastic at what it does.
A while back I wrote this MVPs Types list. Probably it might help others https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/C4TEaS4eXT
I believe you are looking for Minimum Lovable Product (MLP). Unless you are serving a very niche market where existing options are total crap, nowadays users can find direct/indirect alternatives easily, making the "viable" threshold so much higher.
Also, UXUI could play a larger part of the "viability" if you your target audience are more towards designers isn't it?
The best problems to solve are those where people will battle through thick and thing to make a solution work for them. That includes a poor UX. If it’s purely your UX putting the user off then perhaps you should find a different problem to solve for, or new features. UX becomes an optimisation problem and is usually not core to the proposition.
No.
For MVPs I use a component and/or css library that makes UX easier. I like Bulma. At a certain point, we migrate the front end to tailwind, for the control our designers want.
This depends a lot on your target audience and your product. A technical audience may see behind UI and understand the technical innovation you have made. For a non-technical audience, you can develop the most complex system and they don't care about it at all if it's not pretty. If you only have a command-line interface, for them it's like you haven't done any work at all.
Also, for many products the UX is the innovation. Because they do things that you could also do with other tools, like Excel, but with your product it's easier to do. In those cases, the UI is very important.
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At Amazon we were always building “Minimum Lovable Products” to remind us that people needed to have a positive emotional response to the first evolution.
MVPs are just at a higher standard than 10 years ago where I can spin up a pretty good looking website in a matter of minutes but MVPs don't even have to be a web app - they can literally be you manually doing it and emailing them the results
Reading some of your comments, I think this may get to it...
The Viable part is key here. What makes a product Viable will be category dependent.
Every category has its Kano curve. If you're creating a new category, or entering one early on, the must-haves will hopefully be a small set. In this case, your MVP can be fairly simple.
If you're entering a more mature category, your competitors will have likely established a baseline of must-haves that you will need, plus whatever differentiating features you are bringing. In this case, your MVP will be more complex.
In both cases, you would be building an MVP, but viability will be very different.
UI/UX rapidly becomes a must-have as categories evolve, but, as others have said (with the very apt OpenAI example), if you're early enough and are bringing something suitably exciting, UI/UX can wait a bit.
It depends a lot on the situation.
The standard advice is that product market fit is like selling water in a desert. That your incomplete functionality or poor UI/UX would be a deterrent for people who aren't dying of thirst, but for those who are, they're going to buy your product no matter what because its just that vital for them.
> I would certainly not use a product that looks and feels crappy even if it solves my needs.
Do you use Amazon? :)
For my personal use I feel the opposite. (Although I’m definitely not the demographic you should target)
I prefer simple and sometimes less intuitive UIs since they usually indicate the product is either function-oriented or from a small team. When things are too polished it feels off putting and sterile. I’d use Windows Vista over MacOS any day.
But to answer your question, no I don’t think MVPs are dead. Instead of doing 100% of your product’s features at 50% quality, you should focus on doing 50% of your final product at 100% quality.
The idea is still to make something that’s just good enough to bear its own weight and demonstrate the concept to potential investors. The only thing that’s changed is what people are expecting
MVP to me seems more like the mentality of okham's razoring any ancillary features that are not core to your product's viability. If a good UX/UI are critical to your product's viability, then it is part of the MVP.
My friend Chris calls these "birthing rights."
For some products and MVP could be very crappy and you would still use it because it's novel and solves a problem in an unexpected way, or does something new where trying the product is worth the experience.
For the rest of the products you have expectations of what they look like and how they work, and if those features are missing, then indeed you will not even consider trying.
I think this has been the case for a very long time, but now that coding is becoming somewhat obsolete, simple MVPs are dying indeed. No one needs another X for Y. Your product has to be wildly different to still be accepted as an MVP.
I think nowadays it's mandatory for an MVP to have good UI/UX. Thankfully with all the UI libraries and nocode tools out there, it's become quite simple to do it in little time.
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