Unfortunately, this misses the point of the MVP concept, and falls exactly into the trap that Lean Startup is trying to get you to avoid.<p>An MVP isn't a crappy product, it's an answer to a question: should I go to the next step?<p>Sometimes the next MVP step can be just a button that does nothing. Sometimes it's a concierge service. Sometimes it's a small bit of functionality and measurement.<p>The entire point of this concept is to avoid doing unnecessary work. Building a product that can eat, shit, fuck and die "out of the gate" is the very definition of waste - the exact kind of waste that Eric Aries rightly advises against.<p>None of those four activities are inherently necessary to serve the purpose of an MVP, which is not to make money, not to have solid support services, not to please the user and not (emphatically not) to have a sensible end-of-life plan for a product that may never even be built! The purpose of an MVP is to answer a simple question: is it worth going to the next step?
> <i>Ultimately, building a product that can ESFD out of the gate seems like a much more sound goal and a better goalpost—and, importantly, one that doesn’t create an argument over what “viable” really means.</i><p>It's certainly clear that this (a) isn't minimal, and (b) aims to be viable. So really it's one classic approach to building a product, discarding the advice of the Lean Startup movement.