The MVP Trap: Why "Fail Fast" is Terrible Advice for Some Products

Let’s look at the five most common mistakes and how to avoid them. The issue is rarely the algorithm itself—it’s how the technology is framed, introduced, and measured.

1. The "Trust Battery" Test

This is the first question I ask any founder: How dangerous is it if this fails?

If you are building a playlist generator and it suggests a bad song, the risk is zero. The user laughs. They refresh. You can ship that as a jagged, buggy MVP on a Tuesday afternoon.

But if you are building a fintech app that handles payroll, or a healthcare tool that tracks medication? You cannot "move fast and break things." When you break trust in high-stakes industries, you don't get a Version 2. You get a churn rate of 100%. If the core value of your product is security or reliability, "Minimum Viable" needs to look a lot more like "Maximum Polish." You aren't just selling a feature; you are selling peace of mind.

2. Are You Entering a Crowded Room?

If you are inventing a category that has never existed—let's say, teleportation—your UI can be a command line terminal. Nobody cares. The value of the technology is so high that users will crawl over broken glass to use it. That is the "Novelty Privilege."

But most of us aren't inventing teleportation. We are building another project management tool. Or another CRM.

If you are entering a crowded market, an MVP won't cut it. Your competitors have had ten years to refine their UX. If you launch a "stripped-down" version to compete with their mature version, users won't see "potential." They will just see "worse." In a red ocean, the baseline quality is the entry fee. You have to build a Full Product just to get a seat at the table.

3. The "Viable" Definition Has Changed

Ten years ago, "Viable" meant "It functions without crashing." Today, "Viable" means "It delights me enough that I don't switch back to Excel."

The bar has raised. Consumer expectations have been warped by the smoothness of Uber, Spotify, and Airbnb. We don't have patience for clunky interfaces anymore. I see teams treating the MVP phase as an excuse to ship lazy design. They say, "We'll fix the spacing later." But you won't. And users will feel that lack of care. A product that works but feels cheap is often more damaging than a product that doesn't launch at all.

4. Learning vs. Earning

This is the strategic distinction. Are you building to learn if a problem exists? Or are you building to capture revenue?

If you are testing a hypothesis ("Do people want to rent luxury watches?"), do not build a full app. Build a landing page. Build a Typeform. Hack it together with Zapier. That is a true MVP. It’s disposable.

But if you know the problem exists and you are trying to capture the market, you are in "Earning" mode. Earning requires stability. It requires a design system. It requires onboarding flows that don't dead-end. Don't confuse a prototype used for research with a product used for business.

5. The Zombie User Problem

There is a hidden cost to MVPs that nobody puts in the pitch deck: The Zombie User.

These are people who sign up for your shaky MVP, have a terrible experience, and leave. You might think, "I'll win them back when we launch Version 2.0." No, you won't. They are gone. They have mentally tagged your brand as "that broken app I tried once."

When you launch an undercooked product to a limited market, you are burning through your Total Addressable Market (TAM). You are setting money on fire. Sometimes, waiting three extra months to polish the onboarding flow isn't perfectionism; it's asset protection. You only get one chance to be new.