Former YC CEO Michael Seibel’s two pieces advice for building your MVP

In most cases, most people should be building a very lean mvp. So by that we mean you should be able to build it fast, in weeks, not months. This can either involve software or honestly, we see startups just start with a landing page and a spreadsheet, but most startups can start very, very fast. Second, extremely limited functionality. You need to condense down what your user needs, what your initial user needs, to a very simple set of things. A lot of times founders want to address all of their users problems and all of their potential users. When in reality, they should just focus on a small set of initial users and their highest order problems and then ignore the rest until later. You should have a vision of everyone. You should have an mvp. Very small. All this is is a base to iterate from. That's it. It's just a starting point. It's not special in any way. You just have to start. And so please make sure you don't feel like your MVP is too special. Okay, here is a classic example. This is one of Airbnb's first landing pages. In 2008, I believe, there were no payments. When you found a place to stay on Airbnb, you had to exchange money with the host in person. Needless to say, that was a pretty big problem. But they started without payments. No map view. You know how when you search Airbnb, you can see where the house is in the city? You don't have that. Sorry. And the person writing all the code, Nate, was working part time. Okay, so everyone tells these kind of magical stories about how everything was perfect from the beginning. Airbnb, not perfect from the beginning. The next one, Twitch. This was what Twitch looked like. Day one, not very familiar. Twitch launched as Justin tv, which was a online reality TV show. There was only one channel. Justin, you had to follow his life. If you didn't like his life, you had to leave the website. That's all there was. The video was extremely low resolution. And most importantly, there were no video games. No video games. Except if we decided to play video games in our apartment. Like, that was the only time video games ever appeared. Last Stripe, which wasn't stripe. It was called DevPayments because why not? Like, let's make a name that's really easy to remember. This was Stripe day one. No bank deals. I won't tell you exactly how they process payments, but it was in a very startupy way. Almost no features. And even cooler, if you wanted to use Stripe, the stripe founders would come to your office and integrate it for you. Half because they were just desperate to get anyone to use it, and half because it was a great way to find bugs before the users found bugs. Integrate yourself. So These are just three examples of extremely simple, extremely fast to build MVPs. All of these are billion dollar companies, and they all started with something that most people would say is pretty shitty.