Minimum Viable Products are harder than they look.

If you’re developing a website or an app you will probably come across the term minimum viable product.

Put simply, this just means that you should get your app or site into the market as early as possible – so you can get Consumer and customer feedback. Rather than waiting until it is finished and perfect before you release it.

It sounds straightforward in theory but the practice is far more difficult than that. My experience with recently developing a new fitness platform is that human nature tends to get in the way of the MVP.  It just doesn’t feel right to put a product into the market that is missing some things. And there are always new features that can be added to a site, or existing features that can be honed, that end up being discussed and implemented.

My experience so far is that you need to move outside your comfort zone and push a raw version of your product into the market to get feedback as early as you possibly can. But all the time your mind will be saying to you “let’s just get another 5% finished before we do that”. So you need to find ways to bite the bullet and move forward.

I think human pride comes into it as well – in that most people feel uncomfortable putting something out there that is only partly by baked.