In my experience from building the 191st uptime monitor (+ site speed & puppeteer checks), MVPs don't work for established product ideas.

Customers expect polish, and they expect a lot more functionality than the bare minimum.

For context, I kept a twitter thread detailing what I worked on, and when the customers started coming: https://twitter.com/RozenMD/status/1364881512500404224?s=20

> Customers expect polish, and they expect a lot more functionality than the bare minimum.

That's why it's the minimum viable product, and not the bare minimum product. Determining what's needed for viability is an important part of the MVP design process.

You're right, but there's a point at which "minimum" is no longer appropriate.

I'd expect an "MVP" for an electric car company like Tesla Motors to be a microcar, but instead it was a luxury sports car.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcar
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster

Or that MVP isn't just about your product in isolation but also about the marketplace you're going into.

If there's no-one selling drinks in the park on a hot day, a homemade lemonade stand might do good business. If there's a café and a food market in the park & 5 ice-cream shops nearby it would be harder to get the same outcome for the original product

Couldn't it just be that resources are more abundant and know-how is more spread?

You have way more designers, software devs, libraries, etc, now in comparison to 2013. The trend will be for these things to be almost "commodities"... even for solo founders, you don't need to know design to copy/inspire yourself from a plethora of examples out there.

With no code tools you can quickly slap things together to validate stuff, before outsourcing the development to somewhere else if you need to get things going, or hire a dev.

Things are just easier and more abundant, so to make the classical "MVP" or a more polished "MVP" probably doesn't require that much extra effort/resources.

Also you need to realize that standards have changed, some small things that were valuable are now taken for granted.

Yeah, still feel like MVP is a great way to start. If people want your product without it being polished, then you know you really solved a problem. And not just any problem, but an overlooked one (because nothing solving this is polished yet).

I think Ravi (the author) is spot. The difficulty is the table stakes features for SaaS products have increased so much as the industry has grown and so have expectations.

That being said I think people have erred way too much away from the MVP concept and aren't fundamentally testing the biggest unknown with their MVPs. Of course you're going to need SSO at some point but you don't need it for a MVP.

Interesting, why do you think would that be? Difficult to reuse code/infra from the mvp for the final product? Or is it that the mvp is hard to define and ends up being the product? None of the above? Interested to hear the thoughts behind the comment

MVPs used to look like the rest of the web. Now people expect a “design” in a product. The web looks much different than it did even 10 years ago, but browser defaults haven’t changed much in 30 years.

I don't think people expect it so much as that the designs that put form over function are pushed so hard that it seems as though people expect it because there aren't any function-over-form alternatives. Fair chance that if you bucked that trend that you'd end up with happy users and a higher retention for the longer term even if in the shorter term your conversion rates may be a bit lower.

Similar to how the quality tools rarely look as snazzy as the wanna-be's, and are sold to a more professional audience at a higher price but lower volume. They also typically need much less advertising and marketing, they are sold by reputation and word of mouth.

Maybe, but I will admit that I trust a SaaS product more that has a better design with slick front end components. When I see a rudimentary but functional product, I shy away

Would you still shy away if the product was uniquely solving an important problem for you? I am in the same boat as you but I think as though I would only shy away if the product was marginally useful to me and I probably would have stopped using them eventually anyways

It's peacock feathers. You demonstrate company/product health by burning cash keeping your design "modern", even if a simpler but less-expensive-looking design would have been better for UX.

This is true, but as a signal it still does work. If the front end is flashy, they definitely put some money and resources into it, which means they have those to begin with

This is a good point and ties into the whole funding trap. I imagine some founders find it difficult to show a shitty looking MVP when you have investors looking