MVPs are Officially Dead: Here's How to Launch and Find Market Fit in 2024 w/ Sachin Rekhi

MVPs are Officially Dead: Here's How to Launch and Find Market Fit in 2024 w/ Sachin Rekhi

Welcome back to "Unsolicited Feedback," where Product-Market Fit (PMF) expert, Sachin Rekhi, joins Fareed Mosavat to discuss the evolving thinking on Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and their impact on achieving PMF in competitive markets. We discuss Linear, Dropbox, and Airbnb, and reflect on this post by Linear co-founder, Tuomas Artman.

🔍 MVPs Are Dead: Quality Matters, Particularly In Established Markets

Sachin has long believed "MVPs are dead," and he’s excited to see popular opinion on this topic shift over, with recent thought pieces by Patrick Campbell and Tuomas Artman.

An MVP does make sense when creating a market, like Airbnb trying to find out if people would even be willing to stay on a stranger's couch for a few nights.

But the reality is, most of us are building in established markets, particularly in today's climate, where competitors crowd nearly every sector, the traditional MVP model—launch fast with the basics—is no longer sufficient.

Why? Because if it doesn’t stick, you won’t know if it’s because you had a bad idea or just because you didn’t have enough features to be table stakes.

This means your initial offering must not only meet the market's needs but must also delight and impress from the very first interaction.

🎯 Focus on a Narrow Market

Narrowing your target market is crucial for aligning your product with your audience's specific needs. This approach allows for a more tailored product launch, significantly improving its relevance and the quality of user feedback, thereby increasing the product's chances of success in its niche.

✨ Find Your Magic Moment - A Case Study

“What was interesting is the whole philosophy was: you're in YC, you have three months, and you need to build a product, launch it publicly, and try to get some traction going in terms of users so that when you go to demo day, you can be like, here's a product, and here's our user growth numbers, right?

A really tall order for three months, but that was the challenge we all put in front of us. So we get close to demo day, and nearly all the teams have launched their product.

Now, there was one startup I remember very specifically that didn't launch. The founder—we'd all seen his demo. His demo was fantastic. And we were sort of like, ah, he didn't launch. Maybe this guy is too perfectionist, polishing the thing. So he ended up showing a demo during demo day, but he had no user numbers to speak of. And, honestly, we all felt a little bad for him that the guy didn't get his product launched. And guess who that was? This was Drew Houston and Dropbox.

The one and only company that still exists today that at its height got to decacorn status, right? It was a really interesting lesson for me.

The way he thought about it at the time was Dropbox was effectively competing in the cloud storage market.

There were existing cloud storage tools, but his big differentiator was seamless desktop integration. It's a folder that syncs. That simple. And he really felt it had to be magical, so people wouldn't put them in the bucket of any other cloud storage tool but would instead be like, this is magically different.

That's why he felt like he had a little bit more work to do. So they did that. And then obviously, when they launched, it was magical. It was literally that folder that syncs.

So now when I think about MVPs, I rarely rush to market in the same way of just getting it out there to get feedback. Even though that adds value, the idea of really getting to a minimum delightful product is really important.” - Sachin

With Linear, the co-founders had three very clear objectives.

• It should be as fast as possible, with offline access.

• It should be modern with keyboard shortcuts, command menus, etc.

• It should be multiplayer, with real-time sync.

That's a really strong opinion about what an issue tracker should be. And it tells you where you need to spend your time and energy.

✅ Validate Based on Riskiest Assumptions

Identify the most significant assumption that could derail your product, and tailor your validation approach to test this assumption specifically. For instance, with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, the team used pre-sales efforts to validate whether customers would be willing to pay their proposed price.

🔒 Refine Through Closed Betas

Use closed beta periods strategically to refine the product with detailed feedback from a select group of users. This focused approach allows for deeper iterations based on rich, qualitative insights rather than broad, quantitative data that might not be as actionable.

⌛ Leverage Waitlists to Match Product and Market

Instead of just generating initial hype, use waitlists to carefully align your product with an audience whose needs match your offering. This careful curation ensures that the first users are those most likely to benefit from and appreciate the product, setting the stage for more relevant feedback and stronger initial advocacy.

What are your strategies for evolving from MVPs to more refined product launches? Let us know!