How to Build An MVP with Michael Seibel | Startup School

**Michael Seibel** (0:09)
All right, today, I'd like to talk to you about how to build an MVP, or a minimum viable product. So if you haven't seen this before, this is a meme that we love to talk about when trying to help founders with their MVP. It's called the Midwit Meme. The person who is the Jedi, the super intelligent, the founder who's doing all the best things and knows all the best things. And the idiot, the first time founder, the founder who has no idea what's going on. Many times, these two founders will actually come to the right decision before the founder who is really smart and is trying to work really hard and do everything right. And so in this situation with the MVP, the best advice is to actually launch something quickly and iterate. Get a product into the hands of your customers and then learn whether it helps them or doesn't and then iterate it and prove it over time. The wrong answer is to do 100 surveys and 600 user interviews and contact every single one of the competitors and spend a year fundraising and hire 100 people and all these other things that you can distract yourself with that it might appear like other smart things.
But in reality, they really don't highlight the most important point about an MVP, which is you'd only really start learning about your user when you put a product in front of them. That doesn't mean that the thing you build in an MVP is going to work, right? It's probably not going to work. It's just the best way to start the conversation with the user and how you can solve their problems. So to summarize that point, the goal that you should have as an early stage founder is you should be getting a product out into the world quickly, minimum viable product. Second, you should be talking to some initial customers and trying to figure out what you can do to make that product useful for them. You should care about how to help them accomplish their goals, and you should try to figure out, how can I change and iterate my product so that it actually helps them accomplish those goals? And then rinse and repeat. Talk to more users, iterate your product, talk to more users, iterate your product. More often than not, after three, four, five, six iterations, your VP is going to be very different. You have learned so much. But by having that conversation with users and by letting them see your product evolve, you can actually make them more excited, more likely to use your product, more likely to pay for your product. And you can learn 10 times more than just talking to your co-founders or thinking about in your head. So the challenge today is that a lot of people are knocking MVPs. A lot of people are talking about minimum lovable products or minimum useful products. And honestly, a lot of founders actually just want to build god level products, the Steve Jobs level, make the iPhone and change the world. There's this misconception that starting with something small that might not work very well is a bad idea. There are a lot of people who worry that if you start with something small and you give it to a customer and the customer doesn't like the product, you'll never be able to talk to them again. What I will tell you is this, in most cases, the people who are interested in talking to a startup are early adopters. They're used to using products that don't work very well.
And the reason why they're talking to you is not because they think your product's gonna work great, it's because they have a real problem and they're open to using new software.
So you don't have to worry about losing these people. These are the kinds of people who try new products all the time. These are the kinds of people, if you tell them, hey, look, I can't promise it's gonna work perfectly from day one, but if you keep working with me, we'll make it better, we'll make it better, and I'll make sure it works for you over time. These are the kinds of people who respond to that pitch. It turns out the people who will run away after seeing your product break and never use you again, they're never gonna try your product in the first place. They're not early adopters. They don't use new software, so you don't have to worry about losing those people because you never had them. You're not gonna get them to get started. Now, one of the things we have to work on at YC a lot is fear. And this is the biggest fear that founders have. It's a nonspecific fear of, oh my God, if I give people my product and they don't like it, boom, my company dies. And it's always like hilarious because when we think about this, it's like, well, your company doesn't actually die, right? Like it doesn't die tomorrow. It's not like game over. You haven't run out of money. All your co-founders aren't gonna quit. Whenever we encounter these fear scenarios, we like to dig in and kind of ask like, well, what would actually happen? Like imagine the worst case scenario. You do talk to a customer. You do demo your product. It doesn't work. They don't wanna use it.