When I say there's little room for corrective action, I am specifically speaking about the choice to pursue the MVP strategy. A person who starts a company and decides to embrace the MVP strategy is stuck on a hamster wheel: if they've spent a year and not validated anything positively, they cannot "just" change strategy because the organisation has been built atop of the idea of small ideas, not big ideas.

My experience is that most businesses that pursue the MVP strategy never leave the MVP stage, regardless of the viability of the thing that originally inspired them, because they believe to MVP properly is to surrender all creativity, vision and intuition to numbers, which is in turn to surrender what's important when building anything.

No matter what strategy you choose, there has to be a meaningful amount of intuition and understanding to be able to make decisions: a purely data driven approach (with arbitrary goals like "someone paid us") is predicated on product development being entirely quantitative. Customers lie not just in what they say but also in what they do: getting a customer to pay is very easy compared to, say, building a sustainable business. People would have paid for faster horses!

People who espouse the success of the MVP strategy in their own businesses are often people with a level of creativity/intuition/understanding that most people do not have. MVP is a powerful tool in the right hands, absolutely, and I don't doubt that you're one such person, but MVP as a strategy for "normal" people has so many foot guns that I would never recommend it over a grand vision strategy. How many people are capable of picking the right customers to talk to? How many people are capable of understanding customer behaviour? How many people are capable of balancing outlier vs. representative behaviour?

I believe that normal people will have a higher chance of success by pursuing a vision than they would by following customer behaviour from the start.