Your MVP Has Too Many Features

An MVP, minimum viable product, only exists to answer one question: does the market actually want this? Most founders agree with that going in, it's their objective. Then the designs come back, or the first build lands on their phone, and even though that was the plan, they can't help but want to add more features.

The moment it stops being minimal

Ask a founder in discovery if they want a lean first version, and the answer is always yes. We all agree with that. When you're first building an app, you're testing whether there's product market fit. You're not trying to make the “complete” version straight away. You want to know there's real demand for what you're building, and you want to hear firsthand what your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) has to say about it.

Even with that shared starting point, the rubber meets the road in two places: when they see the designs and think of an extra feature, and when they're using the app for the first few times.

Wanting to add more at that point is natural. You see a real design or a real build, and the vision gets clearer, the v2 features, the next steps you're probably going to need eventually. That's not a bad instinct. It's actually important. Our own team does the same thing: we see it, get excited, write it down. The problem isn't having the idea. The problem is trying to squeeze it into the MVP and losing focus on the one thing you're actually supposed to be testing.

Burbn had everything. Instagram had one thing.

Instagram wasn't the first version of Instagram. It started as Burbn, a check in app with plans, points for hanging out with friends, and photo sharing thrown in almost as an afterthought. The founders looked at what people actually used, and almost nobody touched the check  ins or the points. They wanted the photos.

So Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger stripped Burbn down to the photo sharing, the filters, the comments, threw out everything else they'd built, and relaunched it as Instagram.

That's basically the whole argument for staying thin. It's the only way you actually get a real read on product market fit. Retention doesn't move because you bolted on five plausible features. It moves because one core feature is actually validated, and you don't find that out by adding four more before your ICP has even used the first one.

Not every addition is the problem

To be fair here: if testing turns up a real problem with the core feature, fix it. That's the MVP doing its job, not scope creep. And if your category has a real table-stakes requirement, a specific workout type, a way to convert a file, you need it in v1 or the test isn't fair.

What doesn't belong is everything else that shows up at the same time. A second user role. A dashboard, because founders love dashboards. Each one adds design time, build time, and QA time, and ultimately cost, to a version that was only supposed to answer one question, fast. Add four of them at two weeks each and your eight-week build just turned into a four-month one, and you still don't know if anyone wants the thing.

So write the idea down for phase two. Keep building phase one. Once you launch, you'll have dozens of ideas that came up throughout the development process, and your ICP will let you know which of those should be your focus.