What to cut from your MVP
Eight weeks and fifteen thousand dollars is enough to ship a real product — but only if you are ruthless about the V. Here's our cut list.
The "minimum" in minimum viable product is doing the work. Most founders treat it as a polite word for "smaller," then scope a smaller version of everything. That is not an MVP. That is a full product with the quality turned down.
The question is not "what can we build"
In eight weeks, you can build almost anything you can name. The constraint is not engineering capacity — it is learning. An MVP exists to answer one question: will the people you think have this problem actually use the thing you built for it? Every feature that does not help answer that question is weight.
So the cut list is not about difficulty. It is about relevance to the question.
What goes, almost every time
- Settings pages. You do not need user-configurable anything yet. Pick sensible defaults.
- Admin dashboards. You are the admin. A database client is your dashboard for eight weeks.
- Onboarding flows. Walk your first ten users through it yourself. You will learn more than any wizard would teach you.
- Edge-case handling for scale you do not have. Build for a hundred users, not a million.
- The second platform. Web or mobile. Not both. Not yet.
What never gets cut
The core loop. The single path from "user arrives with the problem" to "user gets the thing they came for." That path has to be real, production-grade, and complete — not a prototype, not a demo. Everything else is negotiable.
An MVP is not a smaller product. It is a sharper question.
If you cannot describe your core loop in one sentence, you are not ready to build it yet — and that is the most useful thing the scoping week can tell you.