Former YC CEO Michael Seibel’s 4 hacks for building an minimum viable product (MVP)

Finally, some hacks for building an MVP extremely quickly. First, timebox your spec. So your spec is the list of stuff you need to build before you launch. Timebox it say, okay, what happens if I want to launch in three weeks? Okay, well the only things that could be on my spec are things I can build in three weeks. That makes your life a lot simpler. It allows you to remove all the features you can't build in three weeks. Second, write your spec. It's really easy to change what you're working on before you ever launch it because you never write it down. You start working on something, you talk to a user, they say, oh, I would never use that. Or God forbid you talk to an investor and they say, oh, that could never be a company because investors know everything. And so you decide to change what you're working on. And because you never wrote it down, you don't even really realize you're changing it. And so your three week plan turns into a three month plan. If you write shit down, at least you can be honest with yourself that you're changing your spec all the time. The next one is cut your spec a week into your kind of three week sprint. You probably realize that you added too many things to your spec and you're not going to make your deadline. That's okay, just cut the stuff that clearly isn't important. And if there's no non important things, start cutting important things. Most of the goal here is just to get anything out in the world. Once you get anything out in the world, the momentum to keep anything going is extremely strong. If you don't have anything out in the world, it's very easy to just delay, delay, delay, delay. And then last, don't fall in love with your mvp. So many people fall in love with the vision in their head. And none of the products I showed you before was the initial vision what it ended up being. So please don't fall in love with your mvp. It's just step one in a journey. You wouldn't fall in love with a paper you wrote in the first grade. That's like the level of impact often your MVP has.