Stop wasting money on MVP, build to get customers instead.

Many startup founders wonder whether to acquire customers or build a product first. The question is whether it's better to build a product that no one uses or have a customer ready to buy, even if you're not yet ready with the product.

It's important to start with an acquisition strategy. Don’t build a product until you know how to reach your potential customers. If you can't get your first 10-100 leads, having a product ready won't change that.

Some people take shortcuts and start with an MVP because they've heard it's how to minimize risk and spend less while validating their idea. However, in reality, this is only half true. The execution of an MVP often turns out to be terrible, as instead of building a Minimum Viable Product, founders tend to build a product lacking only a few "nice-to-have" features. They end up investing dozens of dollars into building software that does not bring their idea any closer to creating a running business.

You must stop considering your MVP as working software that solves the problem. Start thinking about your MVP as the quickest way to get out to your target group and learn as much as you can as fast as you can about their behavior in correlation with the problem you're trying to solve. The MVP is supposed to provide you with information about the problem, solution, and your customers, ideally on those three elements. You can't learn that without having real people using it. So instead of spending 2-3 months building a product, be smart. Find a way to get your idea out within a week and spend the rest of the time iterating it repeatedly.

Nowadays, there are dozens of low-code, no-code, or out-of-the-box solutions to get that learning started. Here are some examples:

• Build a landing page to experiment with communication, see how people behave on your website, and use A/B tests to see what converts better.
• Use tools like Google Analytics or Posthog to learn more about behaviors, demographics, and test pricing.
• Create social media channels or blog posts to attract your target group by serving them valuable content, interacting with your followers, and learning what would make them a customer.
• Skip the automation part and run the complete flow manually.
• Use no-code tools to let people interact with your product, but keep the main flow manual. It can act as a substitute for an MVP.

If you fail to learn before wrapping up the full development team, you will not only burn your runway for development but also waste time on development while you start learning about your customers.

So what's the way I would choose? In the early stages, I would rather hire a part-time partner with development skills who can get our idea to daylight within days or weeks. Later, we can study the results and iterate on them on a daily basis until we get confident enough about what we need to build.

That approach not only saves your investment in early stage, but also helps you to validate plenty of assumptions you are making around your startup, including if you are the right person to solve the problem.

Why I am sharing this?

As a former developer and entrepreneur-wannabe, I learned that having good ideas and coding skills is not enough to build a successful startup. Investing in code caused me a lot of stress in the past, even though it wasn't a financial burden. However, I eventually learned that there are other ways to go about it.

In the past 10 years, I have observed a similar approach from technical and non-technical individuals. While it may have different nuances, it is crucial to prioritize learning about the customer before developing the product.