Last week, a founder showed me wireframes for an app they’ve been “perfecting” for eight months. Real-time chat, push notifications, advanced analytics, user roles, payment tiers — the works. When I asked when they’re launching, they said “soon, just need to add social login and maybe some gamification.”
Here’s the thing: I’ve built 200+ products over 18 years. I’ve seen startups die because they ran out of money, couldn’t find customers, or got beaten by faster competitors. I’ve never seen one fail because their MVP was too simple.
Your Users Don’t Need Everything on Day One
We built an inventory management system for a Miami restaurant group. The owner wanted forecasting, supplier integration, waste tracking, and mobile notifications. We launched with three features: add items, track quantities, get low-stock alerts.
Six months later, they’re processing $2M in inventory annually. They never asked for those fancy features. Why? Because the core problem — knowing what they have in stock — was solved.
Your first users aren’t looking for feature parity with established players. They’re looking for someone who actually solves their specific pain point better than their current terrible solution (which is usually a spreadsheet).
Every Month You Wait, Someone Else Ships
While you’re adding “just one more feature,” three things are happening:
Your competitor is talking to real users and learning what actually matters. Your assumptions are getting staler. Your runway is getting shorter.
I watched two teams build similar project management tools. Team A spent 14 months building the “complete” solution. Team B shipped a basic task tracker in six weeks, got 200 users, and iterated based on feedback. Guess who has paying customers?
AI makes this even more critical now. We can build and iterate faster than ever — so your window to establish a foothold is shrinking. Use AI to ship your basic version in weeks, not months, then enhance based on real usage data.
What Actually Belongs in Version One
Start with this question: What’s the one thing users absolutely cannot do without your product?
For Uber: Get from point A to point B. Not surge pricing, not driver ratings, not multiple car types.
For Instagram: Share a photo. Not stories, not reels, not shopping.
Your MVP should do that one thing really well, plus the absolute minimum to make it usable: user accounts, basic search if needed, payment processing if it’s transactional.
Everything else — push notifications, advanced analytics, integrations, social features — can wait. Here’s what I tell clients: if removing a feature wouldn’t prevent someone from solving their core problem, it doesn’t belong in version one.
We use AI to help prioritize features now. Feed user interviews and feedback into GPT, ask it to identify the true core need versus nice-to-haves. It’s surprisingly good at cutting through feature creep.
Ship, Learn, Repeat
The goal isn’t to build the perfect product. It’s to build something good enough that people will pay for it, then make it better based on how they actually use it.
We’ve had clients launch with features they thought were essential, only to discover users ignored them completely. We’ve also had “temporary” features become the most-loved parts of the product.
You can’t predict this stuff. You can only ship and find out.
The restaurant group I mentioned? They eventually asked for supplier integration — but not the way we originally spec’d it. They wanted something much simpler that worked with their existing supplier relationships. If we’d built the “complete” version first, we would have gotten it wrong.
What’s your MVP looking like? Are you solving one problem really well, or trying to solve ten problems okay? At Simple Solutions, we help founders figure out what actually belongs in version one — and ship it in weeks, not months. What’s holding you back from launching?
