Founders usually arrive with a feature list. The first useful thing we do together is make it shorter. An MVP is not a small version of the whole product; it is the smallest thing that lets a real customer complete one valuable job from start to finish.
Start from one workflow
Pick the single workflow that your earliest customers are already trying to solve with spreadsheets, email or a competitor they dislike. Write it as a sequence of steps. Everything that is not on that path is a candidate for later.
Be cheap in the right places
- Spend on the data model, authentication, tenancy and billing. These are expensive to change later.
- Save on admin screens, settings and edge cases. A database query and a support email are fine for the first fifty customers.
- Buy rather than build anything that is not your product: payments, email, search, file storage.
Decide what 'launch' means before you start
Agree on a date and a definition of done at the beginning, then cut scope rather than move the date. A product in front of customers in ten weeks teaches you more than a better product in ten months.
The goal is a first version that is narrow but solid: a foundation you can keep building on, not a prototype you have to apologise for.