[goldenbeet]

mine came from a hackathon. (for reference it was an online tournament platform) So it was two people and 48hrs building mocks, getting basic stuff rendered and implementing live reloading in browser (one of the main points for our idea). We ended up winning the hackathon (over 100 teams) so we considered that "validated" and decided we could try building the rest of it.

Spent another weekend building out basic functionality (login/register for tournament/report scores/"staff" ability to resolve disputes) Then we reached out to a gaming league who held tournaments three times a week. They used it had some issues, we fixed them. Opened it up to two more leagues and they all loved it and wanted to start putting money into it. This was the point when we felt "validated" again and considered this our MVP.

At that point it was about 6 days of coding and about a month of testing with these three "clients". We then ran with that MVP for another month, opening up to more people, and collected feedback before doing another round of coding.