My Estimations Were Wrong (Again)

As I’m building my startup, the lesson I have to keep re-learning is that everything you build will be harder and take longer than you ever thought.

This is one reason I took 3 months to ship an MVP I thought would take 1 month.

I wish I had scoped down my MVP significantly so that the core of the app was prioritized.

I added tons of small features because I thought they were nice to have, but they added weeks to development time.

Especially when you’re not working full time on your project, being conscious of how long something will take to implement fully and the positive impact it will have is crucial.

I’ve been working on a page builder within Creator Kiwi to quickly create landing pages.

I initially thought I could have a simple version of this done in a few days.

I’ve been working on it for 2 weeks and it feels like there’s more to do every day..

A lot of this is scope creep, wanting it to feel ‘polished’ and adding nice-to-haves all over.

But mostly it’s underestimating how difficult the interface would be and the complexity of managing changing page state.

If you’re working on your MVP now, expect it to take 3x longer (at least) to finish, and adjust your scope to fit in the timeline you want.

If I were starting over, I would want to get my first version done and in the hands of users in less than 30 days.

Worrying about polish before you know if anyone cares to fix the problem you’re trying to solve is a waste of time.

For Creator Kiwi, I should’ve JUST had an interface to create a link and track its conversions.

Instead, I built out workspaces, complex settings, a CRM-like system, and so on..

While I’m happy with how the product works today, none of that needed to be there.

It’s not helping me onboard the first users and understand their problems.

Your MVP should be painfully simple.

It shouldn’t feel like a product. Because it isn’t.

It’s an experiment.

Your MVP is meant to test whether a problem is worth solving (or even exists).

It’s meant to validate your assumptions, most of which will be wrong.

You should ship it far sooner than you think it’s ready.

If I didn’t give myself a hard deadline I’d still be waiting to launch Creator Kiwi.

I should have done it 2 months sooner.

The moment you can use the product yourself, no matter how janky or hacky it is, it’s ready.

Your MVP should require manual effort on your part.

You can save weeks of development by not creating UI for things you could easily do by hand.

Your #1 goal should be to ship something as soon as possible.

You should strip any extra scope that you can.