Your customers hate MVPs. Make a SLC instead (2017)

Other folks have already made the correct point that the author has just come up with a new initialism for what MVP actually means, but I'd like to add that describing your product as "lovable" is gross manipulative arrogant marketing speak. With _very_ rare (and probably unhealthy) exceptions (Apple springs to mind), customers don't love products - they just use them, or at best appreciate them.

The classic “big reveal” style of communication - hiding the important thing until half way through. Don’t bury the lede! It confuses and distracts the reader who is looking for how to frame and read everything else.

“SLC = simple, lovable, complete. Let me tell you why this is better than MVP.”

It ain’t hard, folks.

I'm actually going to disagree with this post because it's a tangential problem to what MVPs are supposed to be for. If you're operating on a shoestring budget in a competitive environment (i.e. most pre-money startups), you don't know if your idea is worth making "slick", so you build the minimum usable feature set that will get you feedback from actual customers. I've seen far too many developers (and hardware engineers) go down a path similar to what the author is proposing, only to find out that they spent a bunch of time making a simple, complete thing that no one actually wanted.

Start with MVP, see if it resonates, then you can spend the time to go for SLC.

Introduction should cover what an SLC is, I had to force myself to read through an article I might not even have been interested in

If you try to build "Simple, Lovable, Complete" then you're likely taking too long to ship.

Success with MVP looks like this: "Frank in accounting says he hates it, and thinks it's ugly, but says he'll use it because it saves him ten minutes every day. And he wants to talk with you today about why it sucks so much right now."

It's pretty obvious that if you don't consider what the customer wants your product will miss the mark.

The argument an MVP excludes actually meeting customer's requirements is pretty misguided.

This completely fails to address the significance of the word "viable" in MVP - it's only meaningful if we define what it's viable _for_.

In a startup it may be "viable to test a hypothesis", in a running business it may be "viable to implement a new workflow". In either case the logic of the MVP approach holds - do the least you need to do to learn what to do next.

One could argue that "simple" in their SLC is analogous to "minimal", and "lovable" to "viable".

A 2017 is missing in the title (guess it matters as this was a total different point in the agile hype cycle) Wonder why this recently pops up recently[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37371502

Its a completly different factory to build a skateboard vs a bike vs a car.

Scale, tooling, materials, what happens when things go wrong, etc are all different. Product people never seem to appreciate that bit.

SLC: Simple, Lovable, Complete

1. Define a popular term or process in a very restrictive way.

2. Explain why it doesn't work.

3. Coin your own acronym to describe how most people actually understand the original term.

I call this the R3 pattern, for Restrict, Reject, Rename. :)

For successful companies the rules are different. They can’t afford to push out crap to see what sticks because their customers will get pissed. If you have no customers, you need to iterate much more quickly until you find something that can viably get you some customers. Or you can do an SLC as a startup if you are VERY confident you are doing something people will love. That confidence can pay off, but playing the odds it usually doesn’t.

If I was going to re-brand a great idea with a legitimate tweak in emphasis it would be “dogfooding”: the denotational semantics are almost right, but the term combines the wrong emphasis (force yourself to use something intended for others, almost never a recipe for great work) with a mental picture that is less than appetizing.

pg has written about this so extensively and effectively that it would be a waste of any readers time for me to footnote: go read all his essays with an emphasis on the earliest ones if you haven’t: they’re great.

I’m not the writer someone like pg is by a long way and so I’m both making the argument less well and don’t have a great alternative proposal, but I bet someone on HN has a good name for this.

Instead I’ll share a memorable quote from a world-famous chef that stayed with me: Thomas Keller has two restaurants in Northern California: The French Laundry and Bouchon. He’s quoted as saying that “The French Laundry is where I create meals I like to make, Bouchon is where I make meals I like to eat.”

What’s an alternative to “dogfooding” that describes the process of building some simple, lovable, and complete by building something that you yourself prefer to any existing substitute or alternative?

The article seems to be attacking MVPs which are not "viable". In the included graph of the development of a car I have seen version which show exactly the preferred path of development skateboard --> scooter --> bike ... as an example of an MVP! Here the author uses a new initialism "SLC" to describe this preferred path of development and the only reason seems to be some experience dealing with non-viable MVPs.

I’m working on doing a total replacement of an existing system that’s been in use for a decade.

Right now I’m focusing on the logic and internals and have no UI work done.

I’ll release a MVP without the UI because the users are very adapt at backend query and would much rather get off the current system than delay waiting for me to do a total front end.

That’s our MVP and I’ve total buyin from the business

Nothing wrong with MVP when everyone is aware of what that means.

Did not know MVP meant a "broken" product.

If your customers hate it, how can it be viable?

minimum viable product, it’s right there in the name. If you customers hate it, then it’s not really viable, is it? And if they do, but they use it anyway, then mission accomplished… I’m really not down with this article.

lol just reinventing the wheel imo — MVP really just means “minimum product people are willing to pay for (and sometimes just use)”

It’s correct to say 98% of your target market won’t want to use that product. That said, the 2% that do will help iterate and refine for the remaining folks.

To get the initial folks identify the problem and folks willing to work with you. Sure, that’s about it.

“Simple, lovable, complete” sounds nice, but that sounds like features. Good luck building a car, word doc, space ship, new drug, etc with that lol those are products, not independent micro-services