Eight weeks is enough time to build something people can pay for. It is not enough time to build the product you have in your head. The gap between those two is where most MVP budgets die.
What goes in
- Authentication with email and one social provider
- The single core workflow, done properly, end to end
- Billing with one or two plans and a trial
- A minimal admin view so you can support users manually
- Analytics on the five events that tell you if it is working
What waits
- Team accounts and granular permissions
- A public API and webhooks
- Custom branding or white-labelling
- In-app onboarding tours
- Anything described as 'AI-powered' that is not the core workflow
The three premature additions
First, multi-tenancy with organisations before you have a single paying user. Model the schema so it is possible later; do not build the UI now.
Second, an integrations marketplace. You need one integration, the one your first ten customers name unprompted.
Third, a mobile app. If the web product is not retaining, a mobile version of it will not retain either.
The test
If you removed a feature from the scope and your first paying customer would still pay, it is not MVP scope. We apply that sentence to every line item in the proposal, and it usually removes about a third of them.
Want this applied to your product?
We do this work for clients every week. Bring us the specifics and we will tell you what we would change first.
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