IMHO its better to start with a UI prototype. It's much faster and cheaper while still being effective.
Right - I am assuming you are comparing to vs. starting with a backend heavy prototype where it could get very expensive before exposing to customers?
> It's much faster and cheaper while still being effective
Effective as in effective in getting customer feedback as to whether the product makes sense to them?
but what if there were faster, cheaper and effective ways to get customer feedback than a UI prototype for a fresh startup just a few days old?
When I see scope reduced from a functional minimal-product to a non-functional one. I usually see accompanied with that more time spent on producing a higher-fidelity UI-'prototype' which is clearly not a better use of time/resources.
> while maintaining a semblance of what it is used for.
and how do you know how it will be used for and by who without actually talking to users and understanding if, why and how they will actually use it?
said differently, would you agree that market risk (there's no one who cares about the product at all) is higher than the product risk (we can't build the product)?
The main goal is to find Product-Market fit as a first priority. This is done through prototyping, mockups, user-testing, etc, etc. Often this will be considered/called 'making an MVP'. This is an ongoing iterative process and the phase ends when you know what the core function or value proposition of the product is and who it is for.
At that point you move to the phase of building a higher quality (hopefully still very feature limited) v1.0 product.
Agreed.
I want to see whether you realize that in the "Product-Market fit", the only thing you control is Product - you can manage/change/affect it as a builder.
However, you do not control the Market.
So, would it stand to logic that reducing the thing that you do not control - Market Risk (there's no one who cares about the product, we are going to build, at all) should be much higher priority than the Product Risk (we can't build the product)?
Not entirely true. Part of finding Product-Market fit isn't only to shape your product, it's also to possibly redefine your target user as well. Often you will discover a use-case that is stronger than the one you set out with at the start with only minor changes to the original product idea.
Don't you think that iterating on a software MVP is more wasteful than iterating on a prototype? By the time you finish to setup the dev environment for your MVP you could've finished the prototype. And you don't have to carry any technical debt going forward.
> but what if there were faster, cheaper and effective ways to get customer feedback than a UI prototype for a fresh startup just a few days old?
Like what?