1) MVP != half assed, cheap, shitty product. It is exactly what it says: a minimum viable product, key word being viable. An MVP for a mission critical application or a cutting edge piece of research isn't going to be cheap or easy, because it needs to be viable.
2) The cycle of expectations that your product needs to be as feature rich as your competition on day one leads to what Eric Ries calls the large batch death spiral where it always seems like a good idea to add that one last feature (I've been there, it's painful, and really difficult to pull out of).
3) RE: fear of ruining your reputation if your MVP isn't shiny enough-- good news: no one knows who you are when you launch, so you have nothing to lose. Don't launch your MVP in the press, court early adopters, listen to your customers, and focus on building value until your product kicks the competition's ass. If you hide from customers out of fear you take the biggest risk of all: building something no one wants. Even if you have the best product idea in the world, the only way to know if the features you add are having a positive impact is to measure the behavior of real, live, human users.
Unfortunately I think what we're seeing is the lean startup backlash where people use the terms but don't really take the time to understand what they mean. The Lean startup movement is a powerful set of lessons that can empower entrepreneurs and save us from wasting our time and effort building the wrong things and chasing the wrong metrics, but maybe some of the lessons just have to be learned painfully through experience.
Very helpful - Like that first article as well, thank you. I wasn't attempting to bash the lean movement, though I have found it more difficult to implement with my own startup than I'd thought (emotions / fears find their way into the equation, spurring the batch death spiral). I just wanted to point out that there were other factors that will drive success now that the "secret" is out. Thanks again, and hopefully I can minimize the lessons I learn painfully.
Brian, I can't quite seem to grasp what you're really trying to say here. It sounds (to me) as if you're trying to justify the ubiquitous position of entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs that 'I need to spend a lot of time planning and building before I launch'. I get it...it's scary as hell to launch something that is half-baked and may not feel like your proudest moment.
Some constructive criticism - I, nor you, can comment on your user experience, because you and I are NOT the user. I'd love to hear more about "Sheri Foxton, who can't get enough of the app" (made-up name and story). Comments like "Our beta product looks and acts amazing" and "two of the most talented UX/Marketing guys in the city" make lean advocates like myself cringe. Lean is about getting close to your customer, and at no point do you ever talk about how you're actually hitting the streets. Your Appstori video is cool, and is exactly what "lean" is about - asking potential customers if this is something they want/need. However, there are two things that I just couldn't get past: (1) Your video talked about YOU (Find Your Lobster company) way more than it did ME (the person who wants to find a date). (2) I'm not sure if your UX buddies explained the psychology of user experience (the UI looks great btw!) but basically UX solves one problem - user frustration. If you have no frustration to begin with, than UX means nothing. MVP's are all about creating an app (which will inevitably include some frustration) and then adding features and interfaces which reduce that frustration.
Thanks! Very helpful. I've kept the user experience descriptions a bit vague as all of our user feedback has been from "lean" products - basically me emailing people with match suggestions with screen shots of shared mutual friends, then asking if they'd be interested in these people. We've had favorable response to that, but until the app is in our users hands I don't want to jump the gun. It's not yet - the stuff we can play around with works "amazing," but a full experience is not yet built so our users don't have it yet. I definitely could've been more specific, though.
On the video - great point. Wish we'd thought of that a bit earlier... The hope was to prove that we were legitimate. Gaining users for a dating site is not an easy proposition, and we should've focused more on what we can do for users than why we are viable.
I find parallels with the irreducible complexity intelligent design argument. Lean startups are oriented toward the evolutionary approach, where as fat startups are attempts at intelligent design.
On one hand, evolution demonstrates that small changes can have beneficial effects and building on top of them can lead to whole new paradigm shifts. On the other hand, intelligent design should be able to trump evolution. Humans can design a car or business from whole cloth, one that is not composed of lesser incremental changes but requires each part to make the other parts useful.
My only gripe with lean methodologies is just that, that it seems like a soul-less reactionary process at times. At its extreme anyway, I know that't not the way it always works.
The point TFA makes is a non-lean (fat) company may be viable whereas the lean version of the same concept might not be. If nothing else it's thought-provoking. In my head I'm trying to decide if what he's doing is still lean -- one might argue that "fun marketing" is actually part of the MVP of his vision. I think an argument could be made that MVP can be different based on the team...
1) MVP != half assed, cheap, shitty product. It is exactly what it says: a minimum viable product, key word being viable. An MVP for a mission critical application or a cutting edge piece of research isn't going to be cheap or easy, because it needs to be viable.
2) The cycle of expectations that your product needs to be as feature rich as your competition on day one leads to what Eric Ries calls the large batch death spiral where it always seems like a good idea to add that one last feature (I've been there, it's painful, and really difficult to pull out of).
3) RE: fear of ruining your reputation if your MVP isn't shiny enough-- good news: no one knows who you are when you launch, so you have nothing to lose. Don't launch your MVP in the press, court early adopters, listen to your customers, and focus on building value until your product kicks the competition's ass. If you hide from customers out of fear you take the biggest risk of all: building something no one wants. Even if you have the best product idea in the world, the only way to know if the features you add are having a positive impact is to measure the behavior of real, live, human users.
Unfortunately I think what we're seeing is the lean startup backlash where people use the terms but don't really take the time to understand what they mean. The Lean startup movement is a powerful set of lessons that can empower entrepreneurs and save us from wasting our time and effort building the wrong things and chasing the wrong metrics, but maybe some of the lessons just have to be learned painfully through experience.