Hacker News Reader

Comment by anthonyb | Hacker News Reader

The point of an MVP though, is to start small and build your VP incrementally.

If you can't do that it's not an MVP - it's a prototype.

As the legend goes, an MVP is not even a prototype, but an ad or a landing page that describes an idea to see if people respond and/or comment on it in a usable way. The prototype form of an MVP can certainly be thrown out in favor of a new codebase, and at any rate prototypes as a generic industrial concept are routinely built by independents, contractors and small firms before the manufacturing decisions have been made, before going to a larger concern to build the product as refined from the prototype. That is, prototypes are commonly used to generate funding for the actual product. Therefore I don't think being an MVP coder who can't or won't move on to the final building stage is anything to be ashamed of, and not anything to blame like this consultant does. Not only that, but a lot of product-stage coders are terrible at greenfielding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_project

How is an ad a minimum viable product? That's insane. You can't sell it - it's a marketing exercise, not a product. As a mechanism to get pre-orders, or gauge demand, maybe, but it's still not a product.

The point is that for something to be a fully-fledged product, it has to have certain features. They're expensive, so an MVP skips a lot of them in favor of getting a product up quickly. But you still have to add those features in later. They're usually not optional.

Hence, an MVP that you can't add those features to to is not an MVP - it's a prototype. You will get beaten in the market when someone else adds whatever your product is missing.

- if it will (or should) be thrown away at the end of development, it's a prototype. MVPs are not thrown away. Though from looking at wikipedia, even they confuse the two.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com