The time when you could launch “lean MVP” in a week and get it out to a few customers to try out is…

The time when you could launch “lean MVP” in a week and get it out to a few customers to try out is long gone. Sure, we keep hearing that it is easier to build products today than any other time in history.

And while this is true we forget to mention that customer expectations are at all time high.

If you think you can build something of value over the week or two and convince customers to test it i would recommend trying it with enterprise SaaS product.

I have tried to sell MVP and it’s incredibly tough thing to do when your initial product doesn’t look or doesn’t perform as customer expects.

Successful products that i have seen were incubated with a small group of beta customers over some period of time, usually a couple months at least.

Lean startup still provides great reference on how to structure early product development but market has changed, expectations changed, so (in my opinion) building product from scratch in a week or two isn’t realistic any more.

P.S. i don’t advocate to spend years in development without customers either.