Comment by dia80 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dia80 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, this doesn't add up. Lean doesn't mean your product breaks or is pushed out functionally incomplete. If no one wants it it's not viable.

The article says give your customers what they want. Unfortunately they thought the customers wanted a mobile app... but they didn't! Wait, what startup methodology could have prevented this...

The article is honest about their mistakes and that must have been hard to do and props for trying but don't try and pass the failure buck to a methodology you didn't even do right.

Agreed (edit: though I thing the title of the post indicates awareness of not doing it right). Jumping from:

  > Our inaugural customer couldn’t access the software

to claim:

  > the minimum viable product [...] has limited practical 
  > use. Customers aren’t interested in funding your “learning.”

and blaming the MVP concept instead of the broken software?

Exactly, viable = vendible. If there are no customers, than you didn't make your homework right and built something that nobody wants. I'm affraid that this misassumtion about mobile app can be caused by the feedback from customer interviews. You shouldn't rely too much on what people say, ask them to pay for your product instead.

"The purpose of your first release (and every other release) is to give your customer immediate value."

Exactly. That's a MVP, not a crappy product which doesn't even work.

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