[danieltillett]

This is a great post, but I think what the op is asking is how many business fail because what they thought was a mvp was not actually a mvp.

I should add you can still fail even if you have customers. In someways having customers can be worse than having none. If you have no customers you know what they problem is, but if you have customers and no growth then it can be hard to work out what to do.

[NetStrikeForce]

I think the parent's point is:

Yes, you can be short of desirable features for your customers and fail; but the real failure is that you didn't talk to your (potential) customers to identify this gap. In other words, you shouldn't be adding more features if you think your MVP is too minimum - you should be talking to customers to really find out.

[danieltillett]

Talking to customers is critical, but you need to do it in an intelligent way. Just asking customers what features to add will have you end up with a monstrosity with each customer asking for something different.

[felisml]

"What features should I add" is another trap question. Avoid this.

You want to study the people & problems you're targeting to the point that you become the expert they're trusting for advice about the problem. This is hard, but not that hard - minimum viable expertise is a thing as well.

For example, not everyone who uses email as part of their hiring process has spent an enormous amount of time studying how to improve contact-to-interview conversion rates. Specializing on this & studying across N people who are a close match for your target customer can quickly give you working expertise on the problem, because everyone else is worrying about 10 other things at the same time when working with it, while you can go deep on that one thing.

Then based on your understanding of their workflow & what ought to generate value (as obtained by talking to those people in a learner mode vs. a sales mode), you generate a hypothesis and test it. If it actually helps deliver value, and the problem actually matters, and you actually understand these people well enough to get them to trust you...congratulations, you might have yourself a viable product.

For the above example, you need exactly zero unique software to pull this off. You can start as a completely manual service with direct sales only against the people who you think will be most likely to buy. Give yourself the easiest win conditions you possibly can, requiring the least time and investment. Then, build on that, add automation as appropriate and test that the value is still delivered, try to scale, etc. - but start with the scaleless version, it ships easily and then you have actual customers who are paying you.

[danieltillett]

I agree that knowing what to build is a real skill and one that is not easy to get right. Sometime you have to make a judgement call on what the market really wants and build it.

Unfortunately not all problems are amenable to “stubbing out” with human labor. With my product every new feature has to be built first and then introduced to the market - sometime they stick and other times they fail to get used despite being really great (customers aren’t always rational).