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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

So you're saying that MVPs should be of mediocre quality?

MVPs should be the absolute bare minimum.

If you're starting a grass cutting business, don't go buy a pickup truck, a trailer, and 3 of those orange ride/stand-on mowers.

Get a spreadsheet out and start signing up your customers.

Is that mediocre quality? No. It's not prematurely optimizing for something that may never happen.

If you are in a crowded space, UX differentiation is a feature. In the case of close.io, they are competing against well entrenched market leaders. Making a high quality, easy to use sales communication tool is their MVP.

I think an MVP has got to be as few "features" as you can get away with -- but each feature has got to be as HIGH QUALITY as you can make it, to stand out from the crowd. It's not year 2000, or even year 2010 anymore -- you probably have competitors, you need to differentiate somehow.

Don't buy a pickup truck, a trailer, and 3 of those orange ride/stand-on mowers -- but the ONE mower you buy, make it the BEST DAMN MOWER you can afford, well-thought out best for precisely the kind of mowing jobs you plan to focus on. (And this is only a great analogy to software if your customer is going to be actually USING your mower themselves!)

If your value proposition is "I've got a better mower", sure. If not, work on your value proposition, the rest is fluff. Unless close.io's business model is "allowing you to enter information easily" (it might be, I don't know what they do), they shouldn't bother with it for the MVP.

Yes. They should be of minimally-viable quality. It needs to be stable enough and featureful enough to be useful. That's all.

Exactly. The clue is in the name :)

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