from Hacker News

Build a Minimum Loveable Product

by grwthckrmstr on 11/22/20, 5:40 AM with 26 comments

• by joepour on 11/22/20, 8:19 AM

  I am pretty sure this is copied from a blog post i wrote a long time ago[0].

  I know this because he's used the illustrations my brother drew for me by hand...

  @author: you've also missed the point of my article and why I think an MLP is worth considering.

  0. https://tinytracker.co/blog/minimum-viable-product-vs-minimu...

• by JamesBarney on 11/22/20, 8:09 AM

  I completely disagree, it's like the author misinterprets the point of MVPs from lean startups, and then argues against the misinterpretation.

  MVP is a mindset. It's recognizing that the biggest risk most startups face is no one will want what they built.

  An MVP is the smallest product you can build to test if anyone will want it.

  If your product is "a podcast app with better ux" than you don't need to test whether there is a market for podcast apps. You already know there is. You're testing whether UX is enough of a market differentiator that people will use your product over other options. And to do this you need to build a "podcast that has a better UX than current podcasts".

  If your product is "a crm with better reporting insights for companies that cold call" then maybe UX isn't as important as validating that these insights are valuable enough to some customers they will use product despite its lack of features and polish.

• by ALittleLight on 11/22/20, 7:38 AM

  At work we had to start calling things "minimum lovable product" a while back. Seems like corporate newspeak to me. It's the same idea as MVP - build just what you need to work, with a little better branding.

  I think the author's first illustration shows this pretty well. They show an MVP as constructing the whole semi part by part and the MLP as using a wheel barrow, then a truck, then a van, then the semi. Only, that second illustration is obviously what MVP means. Use the fastest thing you can build that does the job. That's the wheel barrow until your load is too big. MVP and MLP actually mean the same thing - just people feel like "lovable" sounds better, when in reality it just obscures the meaning.

  The author is right about one thing though. It matters what you're doing. If you're building a podcast app you've got to do a lot better than existing podcast apps to make anybody switch. You'll need to be much more polished. If you're making new you can be a lot rougher because people have no alternative. This isn't really an argument against the MVP idea though, it's more like the observation that UX has different importance for different products.

  I would still suggest someone making a podcast app start with the MVP though and build that up until it was good enough to win users.

• by Kinrany on 11/22/20, 6:45 AM

  I think the author strawmans MVP: clearly a single tire or a burnt pizza is not viable for hauling stuff or eating.

• by madrox on 11/22/20, 8:18 AM

  Over the years, I've noticed lingo different disciplines use to get their way without having to make rational arguments. For example, designers I've work with tend to abuse the idea of antipatterns. I personally noticed "minimum lovable product" make its way into this list last year as a way for product managers to avoid cutting features they want without having more rigorous justification.

• by that_guy_iain on 11/22/20, 8:34 AM

  The image to show the difference between the MVP and the MLP just show the difference between a non viable product and the MVP. The MLP is the MVP. To be viable it needs to be usable, reliable, etc. This idea seems to be trying to redfine an well known idea just because people are implementing the idea poorly.

• by kody on 11/22/20, 6:59 AM

  If I could change one phrase in the developer vernacular it’s MVP to <Justifiably/Actually> Useful Product. MVP so often manifests as “a product that we need to deploy NOW, definitely won’t scale, but it exists and therefore is superior to nonexistent solutions”.

• by baxtr on 11/22/20, 7:31 AM

  I like Marty Kagan’s approach. The problem with an MVP is the the P. An MVP should be called prototype instead, which is used to test hypotheses. It needs not necessarily translates into a product and can have a very technical basis later.

• by drewcoo on 11/22/20, 9:02 AM

  If we combine straw manning and yak shaving, do we get straw yakking? Because that may be the real value of this article.

• by dataisfun on 11/22/20, 7:30 AM

  Couldn’t this be simplified to 3-4 sentences? Why so much ink spilled?

• by mettamage on 11/22/20, 8:49 AM

  When I am seeing the title, it reminded me of that I want to build products that I fall in love with (and hopefully other users as well, but if not, then at least there’s me :) )