whoisvince

Thanks everyone for your replies!

@justjimmy, as for my understanding of what MVP is — there actually needs to be an actual functioning product... although, Eric himself does mention in his 'Lean Startup book' to products that qualify under the MVP title with just a video (Dropbox) and a Concierge service (don't remember the product)... I do find it weird that he mentions those as qualifying, since they really just validate the business model.

One of his (Eric) simplest definitions for a MVP was a product that could easily go through a full cycle in the lean.feedback loop: https://skitch.com/vince.baskerville/gixq3/mvp-feedback-loop which should/hopefully help distill what customers want & thus actually pay for.

I was never one to argue that apps don't sell on the Android Market; however, I do believe that it's a tough business decision for a startup to invest time and resources to a platform that has a sell-rate worse than a fixed las vegas digital slot machine.

Great comment @ctdonath.. and exactly. Even if it's unintended too this 'issue' still happens, and slowly creeps up on companies. Palm mentioned at how they wanted to build the pre and then slowly kept adding wow-features and tricks to the list, until they realized that's what was wrong with their products already. Granted, I'm not a huge fan of the Palm Pre, I believe they did an excellent job in comparison to their past product releases where they solely focused on tech. specs & things the average consumer really didn't care about.

It's not guaranteed success either way, but making a product that "just works" in the your users eyes will give an advantage.