I feel this story demonstrates one of the "emotional vulnerabilities" of Lean Startup/MVP movement. You're going to crank a product out and then you expose it -- whether it's deliberately marketing it, pitching it to investors, showing it to friends, etc. You expect to hear something back like, "great concept, bad implementation," and so you just gradually improve the implementation until people stop thinking it's bad.

But sometimes you'll hear, "terrible concept, so I don't even care about the implementation," and that can be very demoralizing. Really, it should be taken as, "your implementation is so bad that I don't get the concept," which requires the same iterations of "improve the implementation." But it's too easy to basically just hear, "you guys don't know what the hell you're talking about so why don't you stop wasting everyone's time, including your own."

As we so often quote to ourselves: "your startup idea idea is worthless by itself." But that's not entirely true. Startup ideas indeed have no value to anyone by themselves. But they must have worth to the startup founder, because without that burning desire to solve that particular problem, how can a startup founder have the mental fortitude to persevere when their first iterations get very negative feedback?