There's no denying that succeeding in your first business, or even your first product iteration, is every entrepreneur's hope. But if you were to survey a room full of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, you could probably count on one hand the number that hit it out of the park with their first venture. No matter how much planning and preparation you undertake, how deep your knowledge of your industry is, or how broad your network is, there are always unknowns, and those unknowns can do a lot of damage to an otherwise great business idea. So, how do we account for these unknowns, and better prepare for them? The good news is that with the right MVP, you don't have to.
I've worked with several founders and CEOs over the course of my career that have grand, big-picture ideas about their business ventures, and can visualize exactly the straight-line path their product will take to ultimate success and a profitable business. However, the real path of their product's evolution is much more likely to have bumps, roadblocks and forks in the road that will transform their business into something significantly different than anticipated, or stop it in its tracks entirely. More pragmatic and objective CEOs understand the value of starting small, learning as quickly as possible, then adjusting course whenever necessary, no matter how far off the original path that may take you.
Technical co-founders often face a similar challenge - you want to start off on the right foot by building something clean, secure, scalable and well-structured from day 1, not a monolithic patchwork platform that will require a refactor in 3-6 months. But in the spirit of failing fast, how much care and effort is too much for an MVP? Too much time, effort and money spent on an MVP can burn through your startup's initial capital, leaving little left for a pivot or new critical feature build if needed. But a poorly-built MVP will put your startup in a difficult situation if you do find early traction and need to scale fast.
Here are a few things to consider as when planning out your platform's architecture in your product's early stages:
Your MVP should include only your product's most absolutely important features.
Startup founders that have done their customer development homework likely have a good idea of the most pressing pain points their products are hoping to solve. To that end, you should be singularly focused on ensuring your MVP does these things exactly right - everything else can be tackled in a future iteration. For tech co-founders, this means making decisions on where those future features fit in if and when the time comes where they become the next high-priority item in the product roadmap. Modularity is key here - envisioning where these new features and functionality will fit into your MVP's existing architecture. Perhaps your MVP data structures and classes can be easily extended with these new features, or perhaps they'd be best served as a separate service or application. But what you'll want to avoid is structuring your code to bake in that future feature that may never see the light of day.
Beautifully clean code is useless if no one uses your product.
Startups usually have very limited capital to make an impact with, so ensuring your engineering budget stretches just far enough to help you nail down your product-market fit is critical. That means making some tough decisions on architecture and code structure for the sake of efficiency and speed. Will a microservices architecture really do a better job of validating your MVP than a monolith? Does your insistence on building payment processing capabilities from scratch instead of using an off-the-shelf solution really move the needle in terms of your product's UX experience? It's important to know when to pick your battles, balancing speed and time to market with potential technical debt repayment costs down the line. Take advantage of third-party services, open source plugins and SaaS platforms that can cover those lower-priority capabilities, and plan for how they can be replaced with a custom-built solution when the time is right.
MVP != spaghetti code and poor coding practices
Rapidly building an MVP should not be an invitation to skimp on software best practices. Code that is modular, clean and easy to read can be achieved just as easily with a tight budget and 1-2 full-stack developers as it is with a large, cross-functional team. For startup engineering teams of 2 or more people, ensure that code review and documentation are baked into your development practices from day 1. For solo engineers, enlist the help of a mentor to review your code and architecture and give you some pointers. These are considerations that are often first to be put aside in a fast-paced startup build, but can make the transition from MVP to your next iteration significantly easier.
Whether your initial MVP is a success from day 1 or is just the first of many pivots, right-sizing your MVP build and carefully planning your initial architecture will ensure your startup's precious initial capital is put to the best use possible.