"It's always better" - words like this make me think "unchallenged accepted wisdom".
Accepted wisdom remains accepted until eventually people start to realize that it's not entirely correct.
Accepted wisdom remains accepted until eventually people start to realize that it's not entirely correct.
It's hard to be positive of causation, but correlation (long time to initial customer contact <=> software doesn't make customers happy) is pretty strong.
If you want to challenge it, you could try to deliver a successful large multi-year software projects with no prior customer engagement, and document the process. People can then make informed comparisons against the accepted wisdom.
Then wrong users can oversteer your product. For example, BigCo wants Feature X and will pay $100k/year for it, you add it but it complicates the experience for others and delays the rest of your roadmap.
Another is knowing when your users are wrong, they request Feature Y, but really what they want is Benefit Z.
Of course there's also nuance around how exactly you define minimum viable product (i.e., the part built before you start exposing it to users). I've seen experienced non-startup business people describe an entire app with every feature that they envision, then claim that's the MVP. It can be a hard model to adjust to.
Obviously in reality, things are a lot more nuanced than 'always', but when your goal is to help as many companies at once, where the degree of experience varies, it often help to simplify the problem. In one-on-one situations, the partners can give you more personalized insights and in general are quite insightful.