I'll be honest—I stepped on the same rake again. Three months ago I had what seemed like a brilliant idea (to me, at least), and I jumped right in. Instead of testing the hypothesis with minimal effort, I went straight to building a full-fledged MVP.
Now that MVP is gathering dust on my hard drive as I wistfully think about all the time I could have saved. My list of mistakes:
- Got too caught up in prototype design
- Skipped proper customer development—just surveyed three friends
- Thought "it's obvious" instead of "let's validate this"
Now I'm sitting here with a glass of wine (it is Friday after all) wondering—how many more MVP corpses do I have stockpiled? Maybe it's time to open a museum of failed startups?
By the way—do you have any "dead" MVPs of your own? How do you decide when an idea isn't worth pursuing?