Group Partner, Michael Seibel, explains how to build a minimum viable product (MVP) for your startup idea.

JavaScript, HTML, CSS, React, Angular, Vue, Node.js, Express, Bootstrap, jQuery, Webpack, Babel, Redux, Gulp, Sass

So, let's say I've convinced you that now you actually want to build an MVP. How do you make sure you do it quickly? Here's some tricks. One, give yourself a very specific deadline. It's a lot easier to make sure that you're building something that's the minimum viable product if you give yourself two weeks or a month or a month and a half to complete if you don't give yourself a deadline. Second, write down your spec. If you think that there are five or 10 features required in order to launch an MVP, write them all down. Don't put yourself in the position where you're constantly trying to figure out, should we have that feature? Should we not have that feature? I don't remember the feature we talked about the other day. How should it look? How should it work? If you write it down, then you can just focus on building instead of continuously debating what should be built. Number three, cut that spec. After you write all that stuff down, go through each one of those items and ask yourself, does a truly desperate customer need that feature to start? You're probably surprised at how many features you can leave off for the second, third or fourth version of your product and just get the basic stuff out first. And then number most important, don't fall in love with your MVP. It's going to change. You're going to iterate it. It's going to get very, very, very different over time. You want to do it fast and you don't want to fall in love with it. You want to fall in love with your customer, with your user, not in love with the crappy initial product that you're building to start learning from that user. Alright, so hopefully you don't need any more convincing. You understand that the simplest and easiest path and the smartest and most Jedi path is to build and launch your product and then iterate it. And so I wish you all a lot of good luck. And while you're building, remember one thing, it's far better to have a hundred people love your product than a hundred thousand who kind of like it. So when you're releasing that MVP, it's totally okay to do things that don't scale and recruit those initial customers one at a time. If you care about those customers, I promise you they will talk to you that you can work with them and you can help them figure out how to solve their problems. And as a result, help figure out how to build a great product for them.