Your MVP doesn’t need to be perfect; it just needs to exist. Progress starts the moment you let it out into the world.
There’s a lot of bravado in the startup world. People love to toss around phrases like “Just ship it!” usually with the smugness of someone who’s never actually had to. But when you’re building something with the audacity to challenge an entire industry guarded by multinationals who’ve spent decades cementing their empires,“just ship it” feels dangerously simplistic. My MVP isn’t some scrappy, throwaway prototype. It is a calculated move, a Trojan horse designed to disrupt, unsettle, and, yes, upset the big players.
And yet, even with all that intent, I found myself trapped. What started as a focused mission to solve a core problem turned into something unrecognisable. Slowly, features crept in “just one more integration,” “a little dashboard wouldn’t hurt,” “oh, AI’s the future, we’ll need that too” until my lean, disruptive MVP began to resemble a bloated, over-complicated maze. Somewhere along the way, I’d lost sight of the minimum in “minimum viable product.”
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Entry 10
Fear Masquerading as Progress
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