Over the past decade of designing and building applications for hire, I’ve found myself guilty of defining MVP as a lightweight, shallow-featured version of the end-to-end solution on more than one occasion. Part of that was leadership demanding the good old-fashioned triple constraint: good, fast, and cheap - and part of it was my own ego.
The result was all the width and none of the depth that users could really call valuable. That approach isn’t just ill-conceived - it forces the entire team to make poor decisions that then get exposed to real users in real time. Lather, rinse, repeat. V0 to V1 to V2 can easily mean going back to V(-1) sooner than anyone expected and rebuilding the whole thing, because MVP meant fast, not right.
In hindsight, that was the trap. Front-loaded risk, no product-market fit signal, and sometimes the clock ran out before anyone noticed opportunity had slipped away.
The reframe that changed things: stop asking “What is the smallest complete solution?” and start asking “What is the smallest piece of value that proves the vision?”
When we cut our current MVP down to the smallest useful thing a single ICP would find valuable enough to pay for, everything opened up. Customer conversations became specific. Sprints became about shipping working chunks of production code to actual users. Demos loaded real data for real problems.
The proof came from market research and a design partner working in the trenches with us. A professional who depends on a $5,000 per process spend they’ve been paying someone else to run for years. After one pivotal session with our product, they told us that their old way was over. They’d just use our software. You can’t manufacture that signal with marketing. You earn it by going deep on one job instead of wide (and shallow) on ten.
If you’re a founder right now and the speed of motion isn’t making you queasy, you’re probably building too wide. MVP doesn’t mean shallow. It means ruthlessly focused.
We still have a ways to go. But we’re close, and sleeping at night has gotten a lot easier knowing the customer is bought in before our first release.