Founders, ignore advice from mentors pushing you to build an MVP

Eric Ries popularised the term “Minimum Viable Product (MVP)” in his book The Lean Startup. The concept refers to creating a basic version of a product with the minimum features, just enough to satisfy early customers and gather feedback for future development.

Prioritising speed and cost allows companies to validate their assumptions, test hypotheses, and refine their product based on real-world data and user insights as soon as possible. It also allows startups and product developers to test their ideas quickly, enabling them to learn from real user interactions and iterate based on that feedback.

As such, the MVP approach has become an important principle in modern product development and entrepreneurship.

That sounds like the logical thing to do, right? But here lies the issue.

We had the good fortune to be accepted into multiple incubators. Making an effort to receive as much help as possible for our journey, I also made the effort to connect and to know as many mentors as I could on Linkedin. However, I quickly realised that many of them did not even understand the concept of MVP. 

An MVP should be minimal. But it should also be viable. Many mentors or so-called experts focus on the word minimum but forget about viable. 

Take, for example, what is considered alive. A dog, a cat or a bird are obvious examples. Even children can do high-level definitions. But when it comes to viruses, you will realise that there is a lot of debate among microbiologists. Only if you understand the concept well, your space, and your competition can you decide what your MVP should constitute.

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The US Air Force in 1996 estimated the F-22 programme could overrun its budget by US$15 billion. Many engineering projects go over budget because it is impossible to forecast exactly how long it takes to build something.

A different understanding of how a simple website function works between frontend and backend developers alone could have a cascading effect on how other functions are interpreted and, therefore, the time needed.

We did not have enough for the project, and when asking for help to raise funds to complete it, the word build an MVP was thrown around far too often. Nailing everything down to a high degree will, by itself, ironically require months of effort and, thus, cost. 

Reid Hoffman said, “I believe starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down — your willingness to jump is your most valuable asset as an entrepreneur.”

And sometimes that is what exactly we need to do.

We were building a loan marketplace, and in Singapore alone, we were at least the fifth claiming to be one. When the product was just ready enough to demonstrate the underlying concept to onboard the lenders, we got a rude shock that many lenders were so sick of hearing about yet another marketplace that many of them did not even want to hear us out.

With much effort and gathering the testimonials of earlier onboarded lenders, we were able to show that to subsequent lenders we were trying to onboard, and it helped so much more.

We have begun onboarding lenders even before the MVP was fully built to overlap things and go to market faster. We rehearsed the presentation and demonstrated the capabilities of the platform by carefully navigating the website to show pages that demonstrate what borrowers and lenders can do while avoiding the pages with bugs or not built out. As a result, we were able to attract a good number of lenders while trying to complete the MVP, allowing us to overlap things by a good 6-9 months.

All these would not be possible if we had not stubbornly insisted on what should be constituted as our MVP instead of listening to them. Many tried to guide us by asking us to remove this and that. The reason why lenders were so sick of hearing about other loan marketplaces was because most of them were just tech-enabled brokers but still brokers.

If we had removed many of the functions that allowed a borrower to apply with multiple lenders at once, allowing for back and forth all with a middleman, we would have been just another tech-enabled broker or broker and never be able to onboard the lenders.

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Only if you understand the concept well, your space, and your competition can you decide what your MVP should constitute. It should be differentiated and viable while trying to strike a balance between cost and time to market.

I suspect the issue lies with how incubators recruit mentors. With the boom of the tech scene, many incubators, etc., began to pop up, and next thing, it became a fight to showcase the most exciting names in a bid to draw startups in. Senior directors from banks, insurance companies, marketing gurus, you name it, they got it.

While leaders have their own rights and many things we can learn from them, they don’t necessarily understand startup principles or the particular space you are in, or worse, don’t want to. 

A friend who is the community manager of a large chamber with thousands of members lamented to me about decreasing engagement rates when they started splitting it into chapters run by chapter leaders. I asked how the chapter leaders were nominated. Do they have the know-how, interest or incentive to create activities, engage the chapter’s members and be a bridge to agencies? 

Just like many founders start a company for the wrong reasons, and there are many articles and conversations about it — I believe that is not enough conversation (someone should write another article!) on what it means to be a mentor and how to be one. If teachers have to go through years of training to teach, the least incubators need to do is to ensure the mentors have the correct motivations and not joining just to elevate their branding. 

As the saying goes, no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. So, founders, stop listening to mentors who tell you to build an MVP until they bother to listen to you first.

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