I've seen products release to early, and it can sometimes be painful. But releasing too late can be an existential threat to your company.
What you need to build is the minimum product that can steal sustainable amounts of market share from competitors, but that product itself won't be an MVP.
Also the risks aren't symmetrical. If you take an MVP approach and find out an MVP doesn't work you can always build a bigger badder product, you're out a little bit of time(relatively). If however you build out a big bad product and find out you don't have product market fit. You're much more screwed.
Another reason this advice is useful, is because new founders who are more likely to rely on advice and rules of thumb over their own experience are far less capable of solving an un-mvp-able ideas simply because they'll have far less access to the capital required to build a big bad product.
I use air quotes for easy and hard since obviously they are not the words I'm looking for, but I can't find better ones. All(?) problems are difficult to solve in some way.
Anyways, this is almost off-topic, not really fitted for a pragmatic thread such as this one :)
If you have a known market like nuclear fusion and your biggest challenge is going to be how do I scale nuclear fusion, and how do I raise money from the DoD than mvp/lean startup and 99% of the advice on this site aren't applicable.
Tesla, Google, and just so many huge companies absolutely aren’t good fits for it. It’s a limiting framework at this point as people seem to have oversubscribed to the philosophy and turned it into religion.
The minimally viable solution will differ depending on the product and market.
If you're entering an entirely green market that is just dying for a solution, a ramshackle MVP held together by cardboard and string might be appropriate.
If you're entering a crowded market, you'll be competing on product or price and what's minimally viable will be somewhat different.
We only tend to hear about the former as that's generally where the biggest opportunities exist, so it's more exciting and makes better reading material. However, if you've 'outsourced' your product market fit to the competition and your aim isn't to be first, but the best, your MVP will necessarily be of higher quality.
Building a really refined product that outclasses on features or experience just isn’t the common usage of MVP. It requires dramatically different framing, strategy. Sloppy code and quick iteration don’t make sense.
In reality “viable” does all the work, it’s definition literally means whatever works best, so it’s almost just a poor term to use in the first place as it basically can stretch to mean anything.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/11/06/932199300/dropbox-drew-housto...
MVPs are good if you're solving a niche problem in a niche industry. But if your competitors are Slack and Zoom, you're going to have a hard time launching with a barebones approach.