Your Customers HATE MVPs.Should you use an SLC instead?
Hey Hackers,
In a past life, during my tenure as a corporate software engineer, I learned countless valuable lessons about the craft of making great software:
- Perfection is a myth 😇
- Plans are nothing, planning is everything (who knew Dwight D. Eisenhower was so wise about software development?) 🇺🇸
- Uncontrolled complexity is the root of all bugs 😈
But perhaps the most valuable lesson that I learned about crafting amazing software is one that I picked up from a wise old product manager:
- Make something simple that your customers will love to use 💙
I first got this advice back in 2019, but I was recently reminded of it when @federalfarmer shared a fantastic comment on an Indie Hackers post. They linked to an article that gave a name to the concept of building a Simple, Lovable, and Complete prototype: The "SLC".
To quickly summarize the article, author Jason Cohen makes the case that MVPs are often a horrible experience for customers at the expense of product teams trying to quickly validate and get feedback about their concept. He argues that you should ditch the MVP, and make a SLC instead. He goes on to say an SLC is a version of the product that is Simple in its functionality, a product that customers Love to use, and a product that offers a Complete experience.
This sounds great! Our beta testers and customers will be thrilled that we are no longer shipping 💩 MVPs for them to try out. Huzzah! It's now time for all of us to all ditch our MVPs and adopt SLCs instead... right? 🤔
As I've made the pivot into full-time solopreneurship, this advice to build SLC's rings more true now that ever before. But, I can't shake the feeling that the humble MVP still serves a very useful purpose as we develop new software. My suggestion?
Still build a MVP. ⭐️
Build it fast.
Make it in a weekend.
Cobble your solution together with duct tape and hard-coded values.
Don't worry about how janky it is.
Just get it done.
Then, use that MVP to test your concept with your friends, family, and peers, but not with real customers. If they're good friends, their feedback will harsh but necessary. This early feedback will either force you to adjust your MVP, pivot to a different MVP, or get validation for your concept. After you get validation, then you can go on to build a beautiful SLC that solves one gnarly problem in a simple & lovable way.
What are the most important principals to follow as you build out the first version of your software?
Are you on team MVP, team SLC, or both?
Let me know in the comments below!
TLDR: don't want to read? Check out my latest vlog about this topic instead!
Thanks for taking the time to read this if you've made it this far. 🤗
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I am using this same method. Released an MVP to validate our idea and am now working on the SLC which I’m putting a hard 11 week deadline on. So far this process has awarded the product 10x organic growth - literally week over week for the new waitlist.
https://nurl.website
Very cool! I'm glad you're seeing traction with Nurl, and I can't wait for you to launch your SLC version. 💙
🙌🙌🙌
I don't understand when people say "MVP is dead", and then invent another acronym for the same thing. It's supposed to be a minimum viable product, not just a "minimum product". If you're building for the pumpkin latte generation, viable would include an iPhone-grade design. If you're making the lives of accountants 10x better, you can get away with the default Bootstrap design.
In any case, it's not "first MVP, then SLC, then XYZ". It's "build something, get feedback, improve, get feedback, improve, get feedback" etc until you get "where do I pay for it?". Yes, your first version will be a horrible experience (or just a sketch), but you need to show it to your potential customer in order to understand how to improve it. Depending on the severity of the problem you solve, your customer might actually buy it to start using it ASAP rather than wait till you improve it.
By "show" and "get feedback" I mean talking to an actual person. Of course, if you put out an unusable product and hope to get some feedback via a chat widget, you won't get any. You'll be improving it for years, adding this and that feature to make it lovable, but it will be wandering in the dark until you have a call with someone and show them what you have built.
Also, I must say that it's a bad idea to show it to your friends and family unless they are potential customers. But that's another topic, and "The Mom's Test" covers it brilliantly.
I think thats a very fair criticism of the MVP vs SLC concepts. The two concepts are very similar, and as you point out, for many, an SLC is just what an MVP should be. For me, they key difference is the emphasis that an SLC puts on the (L)ovable part. It can be really easy to skip over this and built something that is functional but not lovable, and then see sub-standard adoption metrics.
You also make a great point about how some things don't have to be lovable, so long as the result that they produce is better than the existing alternative (10x). For some products that's enough!
Ultimately you're right, the feedback loop that we use to build products shouldn't be limited to two separate milestones, and should be a continuous ever evolving cycle. However, I think that the MVP and SLC milestones can still be helpful during the early stages of the building process to help founders move quickly towards a vision, while still constantly iterating.
This is a very clever way of thinking about the proper place of MVPs! Almost as a "closed alpha" or a mockup built with code. MVPs still seem like a better validation model than, say, an email launch list alone.
Give your audience something to play with, if not something to buy (yet).
Thanks for the mention, btw 🤗
Thats funny, I was also toying around with calling it an Alpha MVP! Then the SLC would be akin to a Beta version... great minds!
You're the man Fed!