[mindcrime]

People won’t take your half finished app seriously if you are outside of the early adopters market… which happens most of the time.

A point a lot of people seem to miss about MVPs and the whole Lean Startup approach (specifically the aspects taken from @sgblank's Customer Development Methodology) is that you start out focusing on early adopters. You aren't, with the initial cut, usually trying to sell to the mass market yet. You're trying to find out if there's any market for "the thing you're building".

This, to me, implies that if you're working with an MVP that is "half finished" or less than polished, you don't publicize it to the world and try to drive massive traffic to it right away (this is assuming some kind of webapp, SaaS thing). A closed, invite only, beta or trail program, just to get feedback, find out how customers interact with the thing, etc., should probably come first.

Of course, webapps are a slightly different model than what @sgblank wrote about in TFSTTE, and he revised some of his stuff in The Startup Owner's Manual to address that more specifically.