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I think you are just using the wrong analogy, because the vision is not usually to build something but to achieve something. So the analogy should be something like:

If you have a vision for getting people to move from one place to another in a better way, you should build whatever achieve moving people from one place to another in that better way. Getting rid of everything that is not necessary for you to test if you are really getting people from one place to another in a better way.

update: typo

>> They had tried to build similar systems in the past and failed miserably, mainly because of Big Bang thinking. They told me that one of their previous attempts took 7 years from inception to first release. SEVEN YEARS! By then of course everything had changed and the project was a total failure. So this time they wanted to do it differently.

Or well... Maybe it's just that they have failed to build a system because the IT industry had been changing incredibly fast at the time. So they built their skateboard, but the government closed the skateboard parks, and everyone jumped ship to rollerblades. And that's how they've spent the full 7 years.

At least agile, whatever it may be to people, has worked well in government/public sector IT projects. If ever a project was going to require many changes in its development lifecycle it's government. No more 7 year projects with no working product at the end. It was common practice to underbid the price to win the contract and rinse it on the change requests.

It makes perfect sense Agile works a lot better for Government projects. Also probably for agencies too.

I'm not 100% on SaaS. Need something more fine-tuned. Call it SaaSGile.

In practical startup terms, if your idea is to deliver either a better car or a better skateboard, you've already failed. Both these industries have a century of optimization behind them; even if you did manage to catch up, any useful innovations would be copied by incumbents. Successful startups usually come out of new markets: areas where the environment has changed such that existing product categories or delivery channels no longer match what consumers want to do. You can't really define these as "better" except in the sense of users adopting them rather than existing alternatives: if you could, the existing companies would've done it.

Rather than designing a great skateboard or a better car, your goal might be to design the Schweeb, or OneWheel, or Segway, or HyperLoop, or rideshare or scooter rental company. There're still plenty of ways to fail with these, but at least you have a chance of success.

The real question is "what, exactly is an MVP?"

Some people interpret an MVP almost literally as almost nothing - just a web page that describes the idea and asks for email addresses.

Others interpret the MVP as almost nothing, but a "workable" almost nothing - i.e. some code that users can find. After users have found it, the code will be iterated upon until the original vision is realised.

The skateboard people interpret an MVP as making a series of easier-to-build similar, broadly analagous products on a path to eventually building the full product that you envision.

I interpret the MVP as being the minimum system that completely realises the vision. That might takes months to build. but the point is that when any user sees it, they should understand completely what this thing is meant to be. It doesn't mean the software is complete in every possible way, but it does mean that everything needed to make original vision working and obvious.

Speaking to the original post, this takes time and it might take alot of time.

The vision is irrelevant to the customer.

There's an easy way to tell in hindsight whether something was an MVP. Did it get beaten to market by someone who came out with something worse? Then it's not Minimal. Does nobody use it? Then it's not Viable. Do they get bored and move on? Then it's not a Product.

Doing this with foresight, so you're the one who actually puts out the MVP for the market and captures it, is significantly harder. Whoever manages to do that ends up rich, so if it were easy, we'd all be rich. But a general rule of thumb is that if the world is moving on and other people are getting rich while you sit there refining your idea, your idea of "Minimal" isn't actually minimal, while if you're continually pumping out ideas that nobody likes, your idea of "Viable" isn't actually viable.

>> The vision is irrelevant to the customer.

Having vision for a product means correctly identifying customer's problem and proposing a solution for it. Dropbox vision is: "Make user files accessible anywhere, by storing it in the cloud synching them across devices". Google's vision is: "Make all information in the world easy to find and access, by having search engine know you better than you know yourself" :)

Customers either buy into your vision, or ignore it, and the latter means that the problem that you stated does not exist or is not important enough to your users.

For you, having clear vision helps you create MVP, because you can easily identify which features are crucial, and which are nice to have.

This sounds an awful lot like the famous HN criticism of Dropbox; don't make a better version of something which already exists. Is there any existing data about this (whether new markets or established ones are more fertile ground for startups)?

It seems to me that GoPro did a pretty great job innovating in a highly established market, for example. PayPal is another good case study here.

In the eyes of its users DropBox is a fundamentally different product from the filesharing sites like YouSendIt that already existed, or the techie utilities like rsync that HN commenters compared it to. There's an easy way to see this: people talk about dropping a file in their DropBox, they don't talk about this new filesharing program they're using called DropBox.

Similarly, people talk about buying a GoPro and putting footage of it up on YouTube. They don't talk about buying a digital camera from GoPro and putting their videos up on this video-sharing site called YouTube.

Similarly, people Google questions and Xerox pages, they don't search the web with Google and copy documents with a Xerox copier.

Conversely, people stop at the gas station (which might happen to be a Mobil or Exxon or 76 or Valero) in their car (which might happen to be a Honda or Subaru or Ford) on the way to the supermarket (which out here is probably a Safeway, but that varies depending on location). Or they might stop on their way to Whole Foods, which actually did succeed in differentiating, while driving a Tesla.

The customer's mental model is the only thing that matters here. If you're building a car or a skateboard, you're seeking to fit into an existing category in their head. Even if you win (which is unlikely, because incumbents optimize very heavily with lots of resources), you lose, because you're a commodity in a market with lots of substitutes. If you want to actually win - in the sense of create a monopoly product that defines its own market - you, as an entrepreneur, need to be thinking in terms of the overall problem that the user wants solved (transportation, or information access, or answers) so that you can define the terms of the market in a way that you're the only reasonable solution.

Your explanation is very clear and really makes a lot of sense.

> The customer's mental model is the only thing that matters here.

Totally right

> If you're building a car or a skateboard, you're seeking to fit into an existing category in their head. Even if you win (which is unlikely, because incumbents optimize very heavily with lots of resources), you lose, because you're a commodity in a market with lots of substitutes.

> If you want to actually win - in the sense of create a monopoly product that defines its own market - you, as an entrepreneur, need to be thinking in terms of the overall problem that the user wants solved (transportation, or information access, or answers) so that you can define the terms of the market in a way that you're the only reasonable solution.

At what point should you start doing that?

Using one of your examples: I don't think the Google founders had a vision of defining a new category of service. And they didn't even have a business model for several years. So what actually made them "win"?

I think the Google founders had a vision of solving a problem. They wanted to make search work right.

(Well, technically, they wanted to get their Ph.Ds - the actual history of Google was that Larry had the idea to download the web and throw away everything except the links, so he did that. Then he had the idea to visualize it as a big eigenvalue calculation on the probability of a random surfer ending up at a given page, and that's where he got the idea for PageRank. Then someone - might have been him, Sergey, or Scott Hassan - got the idea to sort webpages by PageRank, and the results were better than existing search engines, and so they launched BackRub as a search engine. Then Andy Bechtolsteim thought it could be a really big company and gave them $100K to make it one, and the rest is history.)

If you steer towards problems, and do so without fear of the unknown, you'll naturally move towards ideas where you get to define the category. They wouldn't be problems if someone had already solved them! The rest - building a business, making money, marketing it, defining it in customers' heads, etc. - can all follow later.

> even if you did manage to catch up, any useful innovations would be copied by incumbents.

If your optimization is sufficiently novel, can't you use intellectual property to protect yourself?

If that isn't an option, how do you provide yourself enough runway to scale fast enough to escape the incumbents?

Only if you can a.) detect that the incumbents are copying you (in ways that can be legally protected - in general you can't protect what a product does, only how it does it) and b.) have the money for a legal battle against a well-funded incumbent and c.) know that you aren't infringing on any of their patents or IPs. Most startups don't fit all 3 of these categories.

The way most startups manage to get big is to fight on ground that big incumbents are unwilling to occupy, while their attention is occupied elsewhere. IBM thought that software was a loss-leader and the money was all in hardware: they came out swinging hard with the IBM PC and eventually dominated the market, but didn't realize that leaving the IP for MS-DOS in Microsoft's hands would be a crucial error when the PC BIOS was cloned. Microsoft knew how to fight on platforms and ended up crushing Netscape, but they had no idea that Google (ostensibly "just a search company") would end up occupying the crucial real estate on the web.