Prototypes vs. MVPs | Hacker News Reader

Prototypes vs. MVPs

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59 pointsnancyhua12 comments

> Some people walk into Jesse Schell’s Game Design class expecting an easy time, and are shocked to find themselves pulling multiple all-nighters for a class where getting a 100% on everything is only enough for a B. But those that persevere find themselves with new worldviews on everything from sleep to applied probability theory, and learn why there’s no such thing as a prototype app.

Well, if they are sleep deprived, at least he's preparing them for the real world.

But I can't help thinking that maybe if the class allows people to only get a B for getting 100% on everything then it is very poorly structured, or catering to the wrong people.

Also, maybe we shouldn't be teaching people that it's okay to expect unreasonable things just because it's what the industry norm is. Maybe if enough people think it's ridiculous to work all night for arbitrary deadlines, things might actually change.

"Also, maybe we shouldn't be teaching people that it's okay to expect unreasonable things just because it's what the industry norm is. Maybe if enough people think it's ridiculous to work all night for arbitrary deadlines, things might actually change."

agreed.

happily, i do notice a recent increase in how much my peers value a sane 40 hour workweek, and a stable fulfilling job (fulfilling in the sense that you believe in what the organization does beyond just the paycheck they cut you). and there seems to be a bit less of the tendency to prize being at a work-intensive startup for its own sake (probably because of a more grounded view towards whether it'll actually be a worthwhile experience, or an experience that will pay off monetarily).

of course, this is just anecdotal evidence from my immediate friend and coworker groups. friends in their 30s, coworkers ranging from 20s to 50s. lots of the friends are starting to have kids, but this change in attitude definitely isn't restricted to those who've got kids.

I have some insights on this. I took Building Virtual World from CMU that is taught by Jesse and other faculties but the structure is the same.

They don't give credit on how many all-nighters you took to build something or how hard you tried. Instead they value how "complete" your product is. Students (myself included) tend to build something pretty ambitious in relatively small amount of time and ended up making a prototype that kind of works/don't. They want you to learn that you need to estimate better and deliver something simple/complete and not something that is ambitious/complex that is not quite working.

You can imagine I got a B in that class :P

In other words, a "microgame" (in the WarioWare sense) that you've polished the hell out of would get a better grade?

A prototype is not a product.

A prototype is an idealised example that demonstrates a concept or a set of concepts.

A product is a real instance of these concepts packaged up as something that a customer will use and pay for.

It is perfectly fine to provide prototypes as part of the development process as proof of concept. You can show them to your customers or test audience as demonstrations of what you expect your final product to look like and that you've correctly understood their needs.

A prototype is also suitable as a totem for team discussions to help develop understanding of an as-yet poorly understood problem domain.

Product is the embodiment of these prototypes, and all the other material such as documentation, packaging, independent certification, quality control, licensing ...

All Minimal Viable Product is is the embodiment of "just enough" of the prototype stuff to be useful to your customer, but all the other stuff is still required.

Prototype is Inspiration (1%), if you like, and Product is Perspiration (99%)*

The paradox of MVP is that you're really just saving on that 1% but the other 99% still has to be done with very little variation in the effort required. What's more if you're building for a single customer MVP is just their requirements and nothing more, if you're building for a set of customers, then MVP as opposed to P is just a case of deciding which customers you don't care about.

(* Maybe it's more like 30/70 or 50/50 but I was echoing the popular trope)

I was following the logic of this post up until this part:

> In 2008, Dropbox hit a key milestone on the path to their MVP when they released a video demonstrating their product. Tens of thousands joined the waiting list. So actually, the minimum viable product was the video itself

I'm not sure if I agree with this, because its suggesting that all you really need to prove your idea is smoke and mirrors. If Dropbox didn't have anything behind its video, we'd see a huge backlash from angry viewers wondering why they made the video before the product. I was under the assumption that an MVP allows you to get your product out quickly and change it with feedback. Not just for proving that your idea is widely desired.

Arguing over nomenclature probably doesn't really matter. There's no one-way™. The video validates that there's need, drew already had a prototype that worked. I think a lot of time just build it all at the same time.

Nobody's ever going to fully externally validate an idea for you ahead of time. Just keep building until it seems like it's boring / you're poor / it has no potential. Don't go off and do it by yourself (without growth / people using it) if you want to build a real startup and not an art project.

I think a lot of times people are looking for an excuse to not build the thing they really want to build. Just build something cool, don't worry if it's an MVP or prototype or whatever. You don't normally have to talk to other people about MVP or prototype because talking about it is usually fake work.

It took DropBox about a year after publishing the video before they had a launched product that the general public could use.

I used to be similarly uncomfortable about the "publish a fake product before you've actually built it" tactic. But I've since signed up for 3 products that didn't actually exist at the time - DropBox, RescueTime, and some analytics SaaS done by ex-Googlers - and each time my emotion was more mild annoyance rather than harsh anger. Heck, there's a whole industry (crowdfunding) now based around the idea of selling a product that doesn't exist yet and then using the money to fund development & manufacturing.

This is also not a new tactic - in the 80s, it was common for enterprise software companies to find an initial company, sell them the product, and then use the money to build the product. Microsoft did this with DOS - they sold IBM an operating system that didn't exist and then used the money to find someone who had written an OS for the 8088 and buy it from them.

Crowdfunding works because you already know you are helping bring on a cool product that would not exist otherwise (and are aware of the risk that it might not pan out anyways).

Being asked politely and in an upfront way makes all the difference.

Terminology-wise, a video is definitely not an MVP, unless you are a company that sells videos.

Well, if I'm remembering properly, MVP was originally designating the minimal thing that people were willing to pay money for. Add in kickstarter, and tada. You've essentially got people giving you money for the video (and a future promise)

In my opinion a prototype is used to prove there is a market for your product and attract seed investment.

An MVP is then created with the help of that seed investment and launched to help greater substantiate your product and attract further funding.

The Dropbox video is a good idea. It may not be a prototype but it created enough hype for them to show investors that there was a market and demand for what they were building. My only concern is that if you are creating a product in a new market you are potentially giving away a lot of your first mover advantage with that tactic.

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