We've seen a lot of broken MVPs

After working with over 50 founders, we've noticed the same mistakes appearing again and again. The good news: they're all avoidable. Here are the five that kill most MVPs before they launch.

1. Building the full vision instead of the core loop

The MVP is supposed to validate one core assumption. Instead, founders build the full product — every feature, every edge case, every nice-to-have. By the time they launch, they've spent 6 months and $80k testing nothing.

Fix: Write down the one question your MVP needs to answer. Build only what's required to answer it.

2. Skipping real user sessions before writing a line of code

Five 20-minute conversations with your target user before you start building will save you months of rework. We've seen founders spend weeks building a feature their users don't want — and wouldn't use even if it worked perfectly.

Fix: Talk to 5 real people first. Not friends. Not family. Actual potential customers.

3. Choosing the wrong tech stack

Founders often pick the technology they know or the one that sounds impressive. But the right stack for an MVP is the one that lets you move fastest and iterate cheapest. That's almost always a modern full-stack JavaScript framework with a managed backend.

Fix: Unless you have a specific technical constraint, use Next.js + Supabase. It's battle-tested, widely supported, and ships fast.

4. Treating design as decoration

A rough MVP is fine. An MVP that looks untrustworthy kills conversion. Users judge quality by appearance within 50ms. If your product looks like it was designed in 2008, users won't trust it with their data or their credit card.

Fix: Invest 2–3 days in a clean, consistent UI. Use a component library. Follow spacing conventions. It doesn't need to be beautiful — just not broken-looking.

5. Not shipping until it's perfect

Perfectionism is how MVPs become vaporware. The point of an MVP is to learn — and you can only learn from real users. Waiting for zero bugs or full feature parity means you're optimizing for a version of the product that may be completely wrong.

Fix: Set a hard launch date. Tell people about it. Ship on that date regardless.