I’ve been part of more MVP builds than I can count. Some shipped well and became real products. Others launched to silence, burned through runway, and quietly died.

The difference almost never came down to technical execution. It came down to how the MVP was defined in the first place.

Here are the three mistakes I see most often.

1. Building the product instead of the learning

The word “minimum” in MVP is doing a lot of work that people ignore.

A minimum viable product is not a small version of your product. It’s the smallest thing you can build to test your most important assumption.

The question you should be asking at every planning session: What are we trying to learn, and what’s the cheapest way to learn it?

I’ve seen teams spend four months building a feature set they thought users wanted, only to discover that the core value prop — the reason users would actually pay — could have been tested with a landing page and five customer interviews in week two.

2. Optimizing for the demo instead of the job

There’s a specific kind of MVP that looks great in a pitch deck and dies in production. I call it the demo-first MVP.

Features get prioritized based on what impresses investors or looks polished in screenshots. The rough edges that actually reveal how users think about the problem get smoothed over or hidden.

The result: you raise money, launch, and discover that nobody uses the thing the way you built it.

Build for the job the user is actually hiring your product to do. Make that job frictionless. Everything else is distraction.

3. Confusing “simple” with “incomplete”

This one is subtle.

A good MVP is simple — but it’s not broken. Users will forgive a product that does one thing and does it well. They won’t forgive a product that does five things poorly.

The cut you need to make is horizontal, not vertical. Don’t half-build everything. Fully build the single most important flow and remove everything else.

“A half-built house is not an MVP. A fully-built studio apartment is.”

If you’re in MVP planning right now and want a second opinion on scope, I’m available for a session.